Sessions at Content Marketing World 2012 on Thursday 6th September

Put your seat belts on ladies and gentlemen as Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion will take you on a content marketing ride full of learning and laughter in this keynote you won’t soon forget. Bursting with innovative ideas that you’ll be able to immediately apply to your business, this session will surely be a highlight of your Content Marketing World experience.

Content and Social Media Marketing hold so many similarities to traditional publishing, but most companies don’t know how to think, act or consistently deliver like a publisher. This session will help attendees learn how to integrate their content and social media strategies, break down internal barriers of communication and provide a solid framework for building their own internal publishing departments – from processes and workflow to team structure. We’ll also discuss some of the content and social publishing tools that help companies adopt and build a sustainable publishing engine. Attendees will leave with a new org chart and a documented process for their new content and social media publishing department.

Technology companies are known for being on the cutting edge and driving innovation. However, much of their marketing content reads like a dry technical manual and does little to distinguish them from their competition. This problem can worsen if the marketing department and the technical team don’t understand each other – the marketers know they need to educate their audience and focus on the business benefits, but the technical experts want to show all the features to appeal to the end user. Companies may end up with content that explains the features but does little to engage a potential customer and get them to take the next step in the sales cycle. This session will show B2B technology marketers how to use content marketing strategies to become ‘customer-centric’, rather than ‘feature-centric’. In doing so, they will convert more leads and shorten their sales cycles.

In this how-to session, you will learn:

• How to create content for multiple audiences (e.g. the C-suite who need to see the business benefits * vs. the end users who need to know all the features).
• Why technology content should tell two stories – their customer’s story and their company’s story.
• How even traditionally sales-focused content, such as product descriptions, can employ content marketing strategies to convert more leads.
• The most important content marketing trends for technology companies.
• How technology companies are seeing ROI from content marketing (case studies or examples).

Where do you go to discover your brand’s stories? Who can tell them? What kind of outreach efforts should you initiate, and how do you ensure that you get the opportunity to tell the stories you need to tell and not just the ones the chairman wants to sell? And how can you sell a bad story by disguising it as something interesting and entertaining?

In this session, you’ll learn how some of the best brands in the world find and communicate the right stories for their brand, and how to create processes that work in your organization tomorrow.

We live in a multiplatform world. Meaning your customers live in a multiplatform world. And they expect information 24/7 – but they aren’t glued to one device. Content lives in many places. Engagement is contextual. And digital isn’t everything. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all. Heresy? No. Just smart content marketing.

Many organizations are stymied by “new” marketing ideas — they view them with skepticism, to be polite. You may know that content marketing is the right move for your organization — but pitching the idea to your boss or the budget committee might be the exact wrong way to make it happen.

If your organization historically views new ideas skeptically, be strategic about how you operate. Don’t be dishonest — but think about how to couch your content marketing efforts in traditional, comfortable marketing language.

This session will help attendees figure out the best way to begin content marketing at their organizations — working within existing structures, politics and budgets — to demonstrate success and lay the groundwork for bigger projects in the future.

Key takeaways:

• See how other organizations are getting content marketing off the ground
• Create a plan for content marketing in your organization
• Learn how to build small successes to fuel a later win

Looking to ramp up your content marketing engine? It takes an entire crew to help you reach full throttle. In this session, you will learn the secret to the famous OpenView case study, and learn to:

• Actively engage employees to participate in your company’s content strategy (even if they aren’t writers)
• Build and operate a successful content factory
• Execute a strategy that promotes your content, drives traffic, and builds your brand

You understand the importance of content and the significant role it plays in your organization, but how do you keep it all straight? With multiple social media channels and traditional marketing tools, it’s hard for a team, much less one chief content officer, to keep it organized. This session is designed to bring down the anxiety level when it comes to content marketing and provide you with tools and strategies for organizing your own content. Learn ways to keep it together and take home tools you can modify to meet your own content strategy/production needs. Melissa will provide sample templates, tips on how to produce consistent content and her take on what project management has to do with your content marketing plan.

There is no doubt that mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are changing the way that people consume information. The speed at which people are purchasing those items and making them part of their daily routines is happening faster than most marketers are prepared for! In this presentation, John Foley, CEO of interlinkONE and Grow Socially, will provide an overview of what needs to be done to prepare, deliver, and measure content that is tailored for the mobile audience.

John will cover items such as:

• How to develop a strategy to reach your mobile audience
• Options for building mobile websites, landing pages, blogs, and more
• Best practices for integrating mobile with other distribution channels, such as print and email
• Considerations regarding building a mobile App vs. a mobile website
• And more!

We hope that you will join us as you look for ways to reach the growing mobile audience!

It’s getting easier to find marketers and brands who have at least one solid case study on how Facebook has resulted in some type of uptick against their marketing KPI’s. Yet, in 2012, it seems that Twitter has been all but kicked to the back of the room as a tool we use to talk with our friends and share pictures of kittens.

Yet, in a recent study, Edison Research projects that while only 10% of Americans regularly interact with Twitter, some 89% of Americans ages 12 and up are at least familiar with the service. Another study conducted by Trendrr in March of this year found that Twitter dominates about 85% of all social media activity surrounding broadcast TV.

In this session, Nate Riggs will show you why as a social network and marketing tool — Twitter will win. He’ll demonstrate why this micro-blogging market place is worthy of the investment of your time and dollars, and share strategic tips, insights and tactical tools that will help you take advantage of the serendipity of Twitter.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why Twitter will eventually win as the dominant social network over the long term
• Learn what it takes to win and keep the attention of your Twitter following over the long term
• Crack the code on how top-of-funnel Twitter activity leads to real opportunities that generate real sales
• Discover 5 low cost and highly useful applications that will help you build an incredibly effective content marketing channel on Twitter

The oldest channel in the digital marketer’s toolbox is also the one with the highest ROI. Yes, email may not be flashy, but it’s amazingly productive—so much so that it’s a critical component of the reengagement strategies of the major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With everyone getting wise to email’s power, are there any secrets to success that you can leverage? Join ExactTarget’s Jeff Rohrs as he pulls back the curtain on the email channel to reveal ten things you may not know about the original @ medium.

In 2012, many brands are facing the realization that customers have become smarter than us. They are finding valuable information about our products from the web, from their peers but more importantly, not from us. Our outbound marketing tactics still make up a large majority of our marketing mix and they are rapidly becoming less effective. Our marketing employees are not equipped with the skills and experience to create marketing that doesn’t meets customer needs. In this session, Michael Brenner will describe how SAP is transforming its marketing organization into a more customer-focused function that is adding value across the entire business using content strategy and effective content marketing techniques.

Primary Audience: Corporate Marketers, Consultants and Agencies supporting Brands

Key Takeaways:

• How to help your organization see the need for change
• Create the business case for content marketing
• How to approach the organizational transformation required to support effective content marketing
• A case study on effective content marketing

Leadership Consultant, Blogger and former corporate executive Lisa Petrilli shares her story of how she turned a blog post series into an Amazon “Hot New Release” and kept it at the top of Amazon charts for months afterward.

She will share her:

1. eBook launch process
2. Secrets to Amazon success
3. Bonus: secret to business and career success, which propelled her eBook’s success

Don’t miss this very unique session!

Google Plus is being rolled out by the most popular search engine in the world, including a tight integration with YouTube (the #2 search engine in the world). You might not be active on Google+ today, but it is already a powerful social and content marketing force. So how does Google+ and Google search work together? How can this combination potentially impact your content marketing and search engine success? How do you set up and leverage Google+ for your organization?

In this session you will:

• Learn what Google+ is and how it can benefit your business.
• Learn how to create a Google+ Personal profile and a Business page.
• Learn posting and content strategies.
• Learn Google+ SEO Best Practices, including “Search Plus Your World”.
• See a review of some excellent Google+ business pages.
• Gain ideas for using the Hangout video feature.

What’s your career net worth? In the context of your career, content is your most valuable asset. There is nothing else more influential than content to determine your value to an employer or in your business. In the context of your career, net worth is not a monetary value…rather it is your content. The best path to creating career net worth is through the content you produce – your tangible and intangible content. In this breakout session, Bernie outlines three career content strategies to developing a high career net worth.

Read my lips! Print is not dead! Imagine your business partners, clients and prospects inviting you into their bedroom, actively spending at least 20 minutes with your brand! Every marketer’s dream, right? You can achieve great results with a great custom magazine. In this session, we’ll look at how you can integrate print into your content strategy with results. Whether you’re a multinational corporation or a small local business, it doesn’t matter. The session will include the most surprising examples from round the world.

• A local historical society with a lifestyle magazine for teenagers.
• A pharmaceutical multinational corporation communicating with physicians via a fun magazine that doesn’t mention their products at all.
• A real estate firm with a magazine that has become a brand of the year.

Crazy, right?

Now that we all recognize that the key to successful Content Marketing is..ahem…”content”, the scramble is on. Many marketers are full of worry as to where they are going to find or generate enough quality content to be meaningful. This session will explore the concept of Internal Content Curation. Learn how to uncover the pockets of quality content being generated every day in your company. Find it, organize it, edit and deploy it.

With all the data you have on your target audience, it’s easy to personalize your story on an individual level, just right for the time of day, location, device, where they just came from, their buying habits, their friends’ preferences—and it can be downright creepy, too. Scary examples abound, in modern horror flicks and everyday Facebook tricks. So, how do you keep your story on target, and what content types, frequency and editorial style work, without going too far?

In this session, you’ll see examples from several brands that walk the line and hear how customers reacted when they’ve gone too far. Then, you’ll leave with ideas of how to enrich the customer experience with a positive association of anticipatory service, rather than an invasion of privacy.

You believe in content marketing, but how do you get the rest of your company on board? Learn step by step how Angel, a hosted IVR company, creates content marketing success through active employee participation in content creation, content distribution, and social media channels. We’ll open up the curtain and show the details, including processes and hard numbers to show the results of Angel’s diverse employee participation throughout corporate departments. Attendees will take away tangible steps and processes to implement these ideas within their own organization, as well as data on results.

Seven minutes for six thought leaders. Just like last year, speakers cannot go over seven minutes…or else

Believe it or not, one of the biggest objections and fears of content marketing isn’t about budget, success or even reaching goals. It’s quite simply: “how are we ever going to get people to create this stuff?” 40% of marketers in CMI’s 2012 study said that “producing engaging content” was their biggest challenge. So – what say we solve this once and for all? Let’s spend an hour and talk about best practices in getting our “choir” to sing. Is it Education? Carrots and Sticks? Outsourcing? What are the successful strategies to building an integrated content marketing process that successfully transforms our great people into a high performance media publishing company?

With the rise of “content marketing”, and an estimated average spend of $18 billion annual by marketers paying to reach people through search, everybody is in the pool –and companies need an edge to retain web traffic and mindshare with consumers.

To remain competitive, brands need to forecast consumer cycles, generate content and achieve good search/news engine placement.

In this presentation, Leslie and Tom will address:

• What IBM had done right to be accepted into the Google News program
• Why hiring expert writers is crucial to success – and how to find them
• The importance of SEO and social promotion for content performance
• How to provide real value to your consumers with the content you create
• How to do everything right to get picked up by Google News

Are you struggling with how to develop content strategies leveraging Facebook and LinkedIN that will work for your business? Fret no longer…this is the session for you.

In this dynamic presentation from Amy Porterfield, you will learn:

• How to use your content to supercharge your audience on LinkedIn and Facebook
• The 3 biggest social media mistakes most companies are making (and how to avoid them)
• Discover proven engagement strategies that will get your fans talking
• How to use custom apps to attract new fans, engage with potential customers and promote your business

Every day, thousands of content marketers try to figure out how to use social networks to generate business opportunities. Yet – shockingly – only 20% of them are using the one platform which many leading content marketers see as the most effective network of them all.

Hear from two of Slideshare’s most passionate users, as Joe and Todd share their blueprint to develop an outcome-focused Slideshare presence.

Don’t miss this hands-on session, which will include expert tips to leverage Slideshare across other networks, including LinkedIn.

It’s an editor’s job to find the right expert for each article, blog, webinar and byline. And in today’s B2B space, those pieces should come together to tell a story about the product and shape the consumer’s beliefs about the brand. But that task can be daunting when NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and restrictions from legal and the PR department – both yours and the expert’s – stand in your way. How can you overcome these obstacles to build a thriving B2B thought leadership community?

In this presentation you’ll learn the steps SAS’ External Communications has put in place to find and promote industry experts – practitioners from the field, analysts, professional speakers, consultants and in-house experts – to build a thought leadership platform that spans and supports all marketing editorial publications.

The power of the spoken word as a means to convey a story is also a powerful strategy when it comes to your content marketing plan. With so many content strategies to choose from, using audio is often overlooked and underrated. This session is designed to show you how audio can be a strong, effective content strategy that offers consistency, leverage and results! Go beyond the basic idea of what you think podcasting is and expand your knowledge of how audio and business can work together successfully.

Attendees will walk away with the following:

• Better understanding of the power of verbal processing
• Audio requires an audience commitment different from the written word or video
• How using traditional radio broadcasting techniques can provide your business with its own radio show/station
• Leveraging audio through multiple platforms provides efficiency
• It is a low cost alternative that may be perfect for your business
• Why putting the right person on the mic is key