While some businesses take a tactical approach to social, plotting their next viral video or racing to get a million fans on Facebook, others take a more strategic approach. These companies are ahead of the curve, recognizing that social engagement is a journey that can transform their relationships with customers and drive long-lasting business results. The journey goes beyond the practice of building a “social media strategy.” Instead, the journey is a series of stages where the approach companies take when engaging with customers determines their social maturity. Highly engaged enterprises build impact by consistently driving business results through their customers. But a successful journey requires practitioner experience, pragmatism, and perseverance. In this session, you’ll learn how social engagement can be more than a bolt on. You will hear about the steps organizations can take to evolve into being a fully engaged enterprise that fosters deep customer relationships through connected experiences. But most importantly, you’ll receive tips and tricks from practitioners who have overcome the challenges of moving their companies along the journey.

TAKEAWAYS
  • The five steps of the social engagement journey and examples of how companies navigate each step
  • What the enterprise, customer, and employee experience looks and feels like at each stage of the social engagement journey

We live in a social world full of check-ins, tweets and status updates, which fuel an obsession with what those around us are doing. Whether it’s our coworker’s favorite Sunday coffee spot, a friend’s epic vacation in Thailand, we want to know about it.

How can search engines take all this (at times overwhelming amount of) information and create more accurate, personalized and relevant search results? What type of new user experience could that create?  Imagine you search for an Italian restaurant – the search engine recommends 10 nearby spots that folks from your social network recently visited, shows feedback from them on Yelp tailored to your social graph, pops up deals from FourSquare, lets you book a table through OpenTable directly within the search window, etc.

Stefan Weitz from Bing will share his vision for how search technology is evolving to this new social standard including:

·      How consumers’ decisions are influenced by their social networks
·      Gathering insight from your social accounts and using your interests to provide context to your search queries and deliver more tailored results
·      Incorporating the who, what, when, where and why of a person’s day-to-day Twitter and Facebook feed a smarter results pages
·      The insight engines can gather from user’s social signals
·      What’s the threshold of convenience and too personalized?

In today’s cloud computing and SaaS-centric world, expectations from consumers and investors are growing exponentially. When it once took two years and 2 million dollars to build a world-class online service (including your own data center), now the playing field - and the world - is flattened. With $100 to turn on a virtual platform and two man months of coding, the next Twitter can be born in a dorm room with zero capital. Now the challenge is innovating, and innovation is born from rich, functional, creative, differentiating user experiences. Without UX innovation, is business innovation possible? We’ll take a look at the connection between the two most important factors in building a successful business in the new world order.

The rise and increasing influence of startups has made the value of two things abundantly clear: that products can be designed and developed faster than we thought, and that good user experience makes them effective and desirable. Larger more established companies in the digital and communications space have taken notice, and are pursuing a range of strategies to realize these kinds of gains internally.

So what works? How does a large company get faster, smarter and more sensitive to the experience of the user? This panel will cover several approaches and the issues they raise, including:

  • Establishing smaller “skunkworks” teams with high levels of consumer focus.
  • Placing an emphasis on prototyping and rapid revision, both internally and with design consultancies.
  • Increasing the ratio of designers to developers, and seeking developers with greater design sensitivity.
  • Tightening the relationship with consultants, to help internalize rapid design and development processes and eliminate the waterfall effect.
  • Fostering cultural change within the corporation to raise the perceived value of design and good user experience at the executive level.

Calling customer service can be dreadful. Technologies have facilitated the standardization of endless hold times, frustrating phone trees, and repetitive prompts to “please stay on the line”—all of which can seem more mocking than helpful. Fear not! Technology *can* be used for an emotional good.

In fact, customers today never have to wait on hold again (really!) and, instead, a customer service rep can call them. Further, companies can learn how a customer feels /before a call even happens/ and immediately after it concludes.

Join Mary Jesse, a pioneer in the wireless industry, for her unique perspective on the history and future of wireless. In this discussion, Mary will provide a landscape overview of the industry, offering insight on why you should be tracking today’s wireless developments and evolutions and how they can advance your business potential.  Audience members will leave with a better understanding of what future areas have the most value potential by discussing the following:

What major factors have influenced the industry to date?
  • What is driving wireless today?
  • Why should you care?

Countless businesses have transformed themselves to keep pace with the social media revolution. But how does business go beyond adding Facebook Like buttons and Twitter chiclets to truly integrate social into the very core of their business strategies? Shayan Zadeh, co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk, the world’s most successful social dating community, has been at the center of the new generation of companies that have been built around social. By combining traditional online dating with the new design vocabulary of social media, Zoosk has successfully reached younger audiences than traditional dating ‘sites’ and offered a user experience that the new, social audience has come to expect from all their online activities. In this talk, Shayan explains the difference between ‘bolting-on’ social media to existing businesses and rethinking traditional models to target a new audience.

Online Display Advertising can be the natural progression from Search Advertising for Small and Medium Businesses looking to drive lead generation and direct customer conversion online.  But relatively high CPCs and low direct conversion rates can lead advertisers to the conclusion that Display Advertising “just doesn’t work” for them.  We explore how using principles that explore and optimize indirect pathways to conversion can result in different conclusions about Display Advertising.

The desire to share ideas is core to the human psyche.  New social-local-mobile services are taking this sharing to new heights, and are producing a dizzying array of photos, tweets, check-ins, and updates from every street corner.

But can the revelers in this big local party help us the morning after…. when we need to find the perfect spot to relax, buy a birthday present or meet a colleague? In this session we’ll look at some big opportunities and tactical steps to make the Social-Local-Mobile web more useful and valuable, while still remaining incredibly fun.

Learn about building “Fandom” for your brand through social media, creative campaigns and viral marketing. Three Seattle sports brands will discuss some of the uniquely successful campaigns and tactics that have helped build their super fan communities in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.  They’ll also discuss how to help grow and foster fan bases through combinations of trust and engagement, both offline and online.

Hey, Alphabet Soup! Are you coming between me and my audience?
The companies that compose the online advertising ecosystem and the language they use to describe their technologies and measurement/cost methods, has created this chaotic and confusing “Alphabet Soup:” DMPs, ATPs, MTPs, DSPs, SSPs, RTBs, ad networks, exchanges, agency trading desks, yield optimizers…with more flavors entering the mix daily. Trying to figure out how to do business in such a broth has left many advertisers and publishers scratching their heads. What do we really need to reach our target audience?  Who should we be working with and how will it be measured? Learn from the leaders in audience-based marketing as they have an open discussion about best practices to drive successful marketing programs through finding, engaging, and understanding consumers for optimal ROI.

Each device platform has its own unique characteristics, and in this session we’ll explore the specifics surrounding applications built for Windows Phone powered by services in Windows Azure.

Stories have always been the heartbeat through which communities are bound and the footsteps by which organizations bridge their mission to the outside world. With the advent of digital media and social technology, an organization’s ability to create, disseminate, and thus challenge dominant modes of mass media has arrived. Community centric storytelling puts the role of the storyteller in the hands of the communities we serve and places active participants in the realm of social communities through the practice of transparency and authenticity. This presentation will explore specific digital storytelling examples that convene community and give it voice—as well as align with your organizational mission(s).

Engadget started as a small blog about gadgets, computers, and other things that plugged in.  It has since grown into a technology news powerhouse with massive influence, 20 million readers, and a profit margin that would make any publisher envious.  Joshua Fruhlinger, who has been with Engadget since its formative days in 2004, will trace Engadget’s history from tiny upstart to the AOL acquisition to its recent status as Official Online News Source for the Consumer Electronics Association.  He will discuss Engadget’s stringent editorial policies on sourcing, fact-checking, and editorial training. 
Engadget’s history isn’t without its lessons, however.  Joshua will discuss those events, what the team has learned from them, and how it has turned those lessons into the most integrity-driven editorial policies in online journalism.

As the social and mobile Webs have enabled new experiences of being together online in real time, television audiences have responded by gathering enthusiastically around the shows and personalities they care about.  So what do you do when you have thousands of people in one place who share similar interests? How do you augment their viewing experience in a new and meaningful way? Big Brother fans have been coming together through Real Networks’ SuperPass subscription service for the past 12 seasons, watching an average of 12 hours of live video a week from the house at CBS studios. It’s a highly social experience for the most passionate 1% of the audience that just can’t get enough. Real has extended their offering to include coverage of more reality shows, and they’ve enlisted popular contestants and knowledgeable fans as authors and video creators. These reality stars and bloggers have used their authentic engagement with the fans to drive awareness through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to acquire the target audience more effectively than broadcast television promotions.

What are Fortune 500 brands and enterprises like FedEx, Eli Lilly, and Proctor & Gamble doing to leverage the exploding ‘social business’ trend?  Isn’t it really just all about building a Facebook-like experience for your employees?  Hear how a little bit of technology and social networking can drive technology adoption, communication, and improved collaboration within corporate workforces, regardless of employee location; Get candid front-line perspectives on mistakes others have made, as well as tips and strategies that can drive social business success within all organizations. 

In this session, attendees will gain insights into the social customer; and learn how to move them from a fan/follower to an advocate. Also, particpants will learn how companies today are aligning themselves internally to serve the social customer more effectively externally.

The current trajectory of search is grim. Increasing noise, influx of spam, and don’t forget the Panda lurking around the corner! But is search as we know today even a fair approximation of what’s in store tomorrow? Perhaps not.  Increasingly, search, like the web, is said to be rapidly imitating the physical world by taking in a myriad of entities found around us—rich media, topical, social, and geo-spatial data—all so we can accomplish real world tasks.  Using these signals, experts say Search will become more tailored, more relevant, more actionable.  Throw in the crown jewel of search, natural language – the ability to not only recognize voice but spoken language like “what’s tomorrow’s weather?”—and our future is search peachy.  Or after all, is it destined to be a gated ecosystem where only those “opted in” reap the benefits of the collective wisdom?  Our panel of renowned experts will share their visions and how you can prepare for the impending search evolution.  Because no matter, it’s coming.

Each device platform has its own unique characteristics, and in this session we’ll explore the specifics surrounding applications built for iOS powered by services in Windows Azure.

In this session you will learn how to leverage the cloud to enhance your desktop, mobile, and web applications. We will discuss how the cloud can be used to save state, settings, and enable advanced communication between various devices.  Scenarios such as multiplayer gaming across devices, federated authentication, and cloud storage will also be covered. You will learn how we built the sample game, Tankster, to run on a variety of devices such as mobile phones and HTML5 compatible browsers. And you will leave this session with an understanding of how to build a game that gives your players a great experience no matter what type of device they use.