Create a Compelling Visual Identity on Facebook for Your Brand

Content is king, and these days visual content is the way to go to attract and engage your audience. Step up your game with your images, graphics and videos and watch your follower numbers skyrocket.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to leverage the psychology of images to draw people in to your content
• When it’s appropriate to use images, graphics or videos and how to determine which is best for specific messages
• How to generate visual content that captivates your audience

How to Measure Your Customers’ Engagement Using Facebook Analytics

Native analytics on Facebook can provide you with a whole host of data about who is engaging with your content, but it can be a challenge to glean actionable insights from the numbers. That’s where we come in.

What You’ll Learn:

• What metrics to pay attention to based on different objectives
• What Facebook tells its partners, like IBM, about optimizing content
• How to tell why content isn’t resonating using analytics, and what adjustments are needed
•  How to use data to move away from “spray-and-pray” tactics and toward meaningful engagements with audiences

How to Protect Your Brand on Facebook Amid Concerns of Data Breaches, Fake News and Regulation

While the Facebook has had its fair share of issues over the past year, research shows it is still the most popular social media site among U.S. adults. We’ll show you how to maintain the safety of your brand amid changes and customer trust issues while getting the most out of the platform.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to connect with customers who may be worried about data security
• What to do if you’re inadvertently targeted by fake news on Facebook
• Regulations that are in the pipeline and how to determine the ramifications for your brand

Using Facebook Live to Connect With Your Audience

Facebook Live can be a great way for even a small company to engage with customers and attract new audiences. With just a smart phone and some on-screen talent, it’s a cost-effective way to communicate your message in an authentic way. In this session, you’ll learn how to get the most out of your livestreams.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to determine which ideas belong on live or pre-recorded video
• Best practices for answering audience questions during the course of the live stream
• How to incorporate influencers into your livestreams in a way that feels authentic and interesting

How to Get Your CEO to Sign Up, Speak Up and Succeed in Media Interviews

Prepping the C-Suite for a Quotable Interview

It can be tough to get busy executives to make time to speak with the press, but the payoffs can be huge. From selling the interview to your CEO to making media coaching quick, easy and effective, this session will give you everything you need to position your leader as an authority in her field, keep control of messaging and sail through even the most difficult moments with journalists.

What you’ll learn:

• How to sell press interviews to busy C-suite executives
• What to expect from journalists and how to stay a step ahead
• Tips for executives who don’t have much time for coaching
• Tips for having the right tone, staying on brand and appearing as an expert
• How to keep control during an interview and what to say if you don’t have an answer

Measuring Your Media Efforts

roving ROI is key to getting cooperation from the C-suite when it comes to time-intensive media interviews. But it can be difficult to show the value of an article, TV appearance or radio broadcast. This session will help you understand how to measure media efforts, demonstrate to stakeholders their value, and turn media interviews into sales.

What you’ll learn:

• Tips for measuring your efforts and proving their effectiveness
• Ways to make the most out of your earned media coverage
• Using Google Analytics to showcase the value of media relations
• How to create sales from scheduling media interviews

Thought Leadership in the Age of Social Media

Executives can’t afford not to be on social media, but neither can they afford to make a mistake. Social media is the best—and most dangerous—tool for interacting with the media and positioning your executives as thought leaders and experts in their fields. This session will arm you with the skills to find the right channels for your message, leverage social media to become an expert source, and avoid pitfalls.

What you’ll learn:

• Ways to improve your executives’ presence and engagement on social media
• How to determine which platform or platforms are best for your message
• How to leverage a breaking story to present executives as experts
• The Dos and Don’ts of using social media to promote thought leadership

Media Training for Crisis Management

To speak or not to speak? Today, journalists and consumers expect a response when a brand is in crisis. Proper media training can make the difference between helping and hurting your brand. This session will guide you in determining what the message should be, how it should be delivered, and how to make the most of a difficult situation.

What you’ll learn:

• What to do when your CEO is at the center of a controversy
• When to respond and when not to respond
• How to make sure your response does not become the story
• How to turn organizational bad news into good PR

We’ve learned in the past year that no brand’s bottom line is immune from the damage a crisis can inflict on it. Even a brand that seems to hold a monopoly in its market will inevitably see its quarterly earnings falter if it manages its crises poorly. We’ll share recent research in how brands’ bottom lines have been hurt by crises—data you can bring back to your organization that will inspire a newfound belief in the power of expert crisis preparedness.

We'll share:

• Data connecting recent brand crises to subsequent financial performance and market value
• Market research showing how public perception changes during and after a crisis
• Research showing how brand reputation influences consumer actions

Risk communication is the proverbial ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure—it enables organizations that are vulnerable to crises to make informed decisions to protect themselves, their employees and their customers. We’ll shine a light on the differences between risk and crisis communications, and how the former can minimize the need to do the latter.

What you’ll learn:

• How to conceive of and launch an effective internal risk communication program
• How to benchmark and measure the impact of your risk communication program
• Use internal surveys to test stakeholders of their awareness of potential risks to your organization
• Determine the extent to which external stakeholders should be made aware of risks associated with your organization
• How companies in highly regulated industries can benefit from risk communication programs

Social media is a battleground where reputations can be made or ruined in the blink of an eye. Is your brand prepared to react just as quickly? In this crisis experts will teach you how to closely manage your brand’s online reputation, prepare digital assets ready to deploy at a moment’s notice and deftly tailor your response across all platforms, from Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and LinkedIn.

You’ll learn how to:

• Employ social media listening tactics that warn you of potential crises
• Create social posts and other digital assets in anticipation of a crisis
• Activate the latest tools, apps and services that have become essential to measuring and managing a crisis
• Protect against unwanted abuse from social media accounts during a crisis
• Employ preventative measures to secure your social media accounts from takeovers

And in measuring outcomes, you’ll learn how to:

• Measure social and traditional media channels to track the effectiveness of your work
• Measure the most influential people talking about a crisis on social media
• Use data to visually tell the story of the way your crisis was discussed on social media
• Build a foundation for measuring brand sentiment, in good times and in times of crisis
• Measure the success of your crisis management on social over the long term, rather than the short term

Hear a real-world case study in effective crisis communication from a B2B or from a consumer brand. We’ll take you behind the scenes with a communications department to show you how award-winning crisis management is done. 

• Case Study from a B2B: How We Did It
• Case Study from a Brand: How We Did It

For this keynote, we'll hear renowned crisis leader Mike Sitrick explain why thinking outside the box during a crisis has made the difference between success and failure—not only in terms of the PR campaign, but in achieving the clients’ overall objective— on such things as liquidations of businesses, the potential closing of a hospital because of wrongdoing by a staff member and even in protecting the life of a whistleblower.

Option 1: Your Cross-Department Crisis Team—and Why You Should Lead It

Serious crisis experts are serious about their crisis teams—and when we say “team” we’re referring to more than just communications professionals. A serious crisis team encompasses marketing, HR, sales, legal, IT and the C-suite. You’ll learn how the best crisis teams are formed, trained and kept on alert.

What you’ll learn:

• How to build a crisis team with corporate communications leader at the top of the org chart, branching down to group leaders (HR, legal, IT, marketing, sales), the corporate executive team and the communications team
• How to build a social media command structure
• How to create and conduct a crisis simulation exercise
• How to establish best practices from crisis simulation exercises

Option 2: Media Relations During a Crisis

Prepare for the challenging interview and control the narrative during a crisis. In this session you’ll hear from media relations experts and your peers how to effectively work with the media during and after a crisis. You’ll learn how to:

• Identify the influencers, from journalists to bloggers to analysts who will have an impact on your brand during a crisis
• Craft a core message that is communicated across all channels
• Engage with journalists on social media and adapt your messages to specific platforms
• Craft impactful press releases
• Measure your media relations efforts

When was the last time you revisited your crisis preparedness plan—assuming you have one? Now that you’ve learned more in one day than all year, it’s time to put your plan together. We’ll provide a broad methodology for creating a crisis preparedness plan that suits the needs of your organization. We’ll also share examples of crisis plans that you can take back to the office and use as models for your own plan.

You’ll learn how to:

• Get internal buy-in to devote resources to the development of a new crisis plan
• Work internally across departments to identify potential risks to your organization, as a starting point for your crisis preparedness plan
• Create a crisis communication process map—a physical document that can be shared internally
• Analyze your plan to see if it is flexible enough to address challenges such as changes to crisis command locations and availability of personnel and technology
• Establish written-out guidelines and responsibilities for social media messaging during a crisis
• Include in the plan guidelines for a content strategy to be used during a crisis

….And, what’s in your Tool Box?
We’ll have a frank discussion of the tools and services you need most before and during a brand crisis. Among the categories of free and paid tools we’ll look at:

• Media monitoring tools
• Social media listening tools
• Google’s internal communication tools
• Physical crisis go-kits that might include laptops, office supplies, portable printers, power supplies, printed contact lists, snacks, water and personal protective equipment

Social media conversations about a particular brand crisis ultimately subside. We’ll share case study examples and recommendations of when and how to return to normal social media operations after a crisis. No two crises are exactly alike but this session will put you in the best possible place to identify and prepare for that moment when it’s time to shift from crisis management to brand repair.

You’ll learn how to:

• Carry a message developed during a crisis into future messaging
• Keeps post-crisis messages bold, clear and transparent across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and on company sites.
• Determine the optimal time to reengage social media audiences with non-crisis-related content
• Conduct and share a post-crisis review of the effectiveness and efficiency of crisis communication activities
• Assess the sentiment of post-crisis earned media and its SEO impact

We’ll share the top 20 takeaways from the day’s presentations and discussions and every attendee will receive a special gift and a copy of the Crisis Management Guidebook.