Communicator's Conference

About the keynote speakers:

David Veneski, Digital Campaigns Manager, Intel

A veteran in the digital space long before it became trendy, David Veneski spearheads Intel’s digital marketing and social media initiatives in the U.S. During his 10-year Intel tenure, David has filled a variety of digital marketing roles including Internet Marketing Strategy, Global Digital and Partner Marketing, and most recently as Intel America’s Marketing Digital Campaigns Manager.

David will kick off the 2009 Communicators Conference with his keynote talk on “Dispelling Myths and Harnessing the Magic of Digital Communication for Your Business.” David will share his experience from his national vantage point, working for one of the biggest and most successful brands in the world – a brand that is also a pioneer in digital and social communication campaigns.

Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy in Washington, D.C., a group focused on developing social media and word-of-mouth marketing strategy and campaigns for clients including Intel, Unilever, Lenovo, Ford, CDC, the Lance Armstrong Foundation and many others. For four years he has published the Influential Marketing blog, which is currently ranked among the top 50 marketing blogs in the world and was called “intellectual and educational” by the Wall Street Journal.

He is widely recognized for inventing the concept of Social Media Optimization (SMO) on his blog, and has been featured as an expert in global media in BusinessWeek, MarketingChina, PR Week UK, Fast Company, BusinessWorld, Le Figaro and many other publications. Rohit is a frequent industry speaker at events around the world with recent keynote appearances in Singapore, London, Kiev, Toronto, Paris and more than a dozen cities across the U.S. in the past year.

Welcome/Keynote 1

David Veneski, Marketing Digital Campaigns Manager, Intel America

Dispelling Myths, Harnessing the Magic of Digital Communication for Your Business

Digital and social media are undoubtedly the hottest topics of the day – and in the frenzy, companies are throwing resources and budgets at an increasingly cluttered and fast-moving target.

Setting the stage for an action-packed day of learning and discovery, Veneski will touch upon the top myths and best practices he has seen from his national vantage point. He’ll offer his insights into what communications professionals and companies of any size need to consider for launching effective digital communications campaigns – and ways of avoiding the pitfalls.

Track 1: Internal Communications

Engaging Employees to Become Brand Champions

Josh Bancroft, Intel

People don’t trust companies – they trust people they know. Studies have proven it, and it makes sense. It used to be that you could use “the media” to get your brand and your message into the hearts and minds of your customers. But now, people participate in the media they way they want to, not the way you want them to. Josh Bancroft believes that getting your own human resources – your employees – out there and talking with people on their own turf is a great way to continue to build your brand. So let’s talk about how to become the “people they know.”

Internal Communications and Social Media

Portland Development Commission team: John Cardenas, Lisa Norwood, Julie Rawls, Shawn Uhlman

In this case study session, the PDC’s award-winning communications team will share the insights gained and lessons learned from their successful experimentation in using new media – from intranets and blogs to video and e-newsletters – to effectively communicate with employees. The PDC’s creative efforts have been recognized regionally (the PRSA Portland Metro Chapter’s Spotlight Awards) and beyond (the Hermes Creative Awards, an international competition for creative professionals in traditional and emerging media).

Creating Two-Way Dialogue through Internal Blogging

Caron Kushner, Hewlett-Packard

Caron Kushner will share the secrets of HP’s successful Ambassador Program including how to launch and managed two-way communications elements including blogging, podcasts and surveys; why every company needs an unfiltered, two-way internal communications vehicle; how to create your own Ambassador Program; and insights from the program manager’s perspective.

Track 2: Career Development

Using Acting Skills for Powerful Communication

Barbara Kite, Acting Coach

People are surprised that acting skills can propel them into the company of dynamic speakers. But think about the actors you admire – they come from a deep place of authenticity to portray the qualities you identify with. That is why speaking should be approached as a performance. It is different than everyday communication, requiring authenticity, heightened energy, and great storytelling skills. All of this is attained using acting skills.

In this session you will learn how to communicate with authenticity (what the “old” ideas of public speaking are and how they harm you; overcoming the fear of being inauthentic and foolish; and how authenticity is connected to your product, service, idea), heightened energy (how to prepare yourself for the passion needed to inspire others; why it is important to identify what stands in your way), and great storytelling skills (how to get people to remember your message; how to use acting skills to make your message unforgettable).

Career Skills for Today’s Communications Climate

Erin Holland, Edelman

The field of communications is rapidly evolving, and so too are the skill sets needed by communications professionals. We are currently in the era of mass personalization, meaning consumers are expecting a high degree of participation in their favorite brands and companies. They seek news and information when and how they want it, and are increasingly skeptical and distrusting of those in positions of authority. Consumers are very selective of who and what they believe and with unprecedented access to information it’s easy for them to spin their own webs of trust. It is therefore imperative today to build relationships with multiple stakeholders through dialogue, credible sources of information and relevant experiences. Communications professionals need to deeply understand their audience and know how to reach them effectively, wherever they may be engaging.

Uncovering Your Personal Brand: Lessons from the elevator

Betsy Henning, AHA!

How do you get your story across to those who matter most to your success? We all know the value of the 30-second elevator pitch. But what has changed since those days when your best opportunity for a breakthrough message might be in a short elevator ride? Everything and nothing. In the digital, Web 2.0 world, there are countless ways to connect with people who could advance your cause – or your career. And in that rising din of messages, we increasingly demand authenticity and transparency. We no longer tolerate being “pitched” or “sold” a product. Instead, we want human dialogue regardless of the communication medium we use. Today’s landscape may be totally new, and everyone’s all atwitter, but the secret to engaging your audience still resides inside the elevator. For business communicators, human connection and believability are more important now than ever.

Track 3: External Communications

The Changing Media Landscape and Its Effect on Communication

Jennifer Gehrt, Partner, Communiqué PR

Jennifer Gehrt will offer guidelines for effectively communicating with journalists in this changing media landscape and provide tips on how to pitch stories to both traditional and digital media outlets. She will also discuss the new role communications professionals play in this landscape, the future of traditional media, how to keep up with emerging trends, and how business leaders and communications professionals can leverage social media to communicate with their target audiences and gauge the public’s sentiment towards the company.

The Power of Virtual Word-of-Mouth

Darcie Meihoff, APR, CMD

As the only Oregon PR firm to win a Silver Anvil last year, CMD leveraged tremendous word-of-mouth via social media to generate results for a brand-building campaign. This informative session will focus on proven methods including engaging consumers so that they want to share your news, leveraging traditional and non-traditional channels to maximize exposure, best practices for buzz builders (hint: tap in to your audiences’ passions, not yours), and mapping word-of-mouth back to the brand.

Search Engine Marketing Tips and Trends

Hallie Janssen, Anvil Media

SEM PR is a holistic view of applying a variety of SEM and PR strategies and tactics to create and control messages to key stakeholders. In this session, you’ll learn how to set up your online newsroom, optimize a press release for search engine rankings, and how to mitigate negative search results. Online reputation management incorporates advanced search engine optimization techniques to push undesirable results out of the top ten.

Track 4: New Media

Ethics of Social Media

Janet Johnson, O’Johnson Partners

What are the ethical implications of social media? In this new landscape of communications and PR, how do we behave for ourselves, and for our clients? How do we conduct ourselves with high transparency and authenticity? Or does that matter any more? Where are the lines? How do we protect our clients, brands, employees and reputations online? Join Janet Johnson in an exploration of ethics in social media. Her company started an ethical debate in 2005…and it still rages today.

Social Media: How to Get Management Buy-In

Jeff Hardison, McClenahan Bruer Communications

If your target audiences use social media, the tools can be a cost-effective way to build community in support of your business. And there’s no shortage of people telling you so – on blogs, at marketing conferences and even in traditional publications once thought of as threatened by the new communications innovations. However, in a down economic climate, simple peer pressure won’t necessarily convince many company leaders to endure the perceived risks that come with social media’s rewards. Drawing on more than 10 years of experience counseling clients – from Fortune 500 companies to startups – on using social media pragmatically for success, Jeff Hardison will help you determine if you should embark on a social media campaign and how to convince stakeholders to go along.

Visualization for the Modern Communicator

Blair Cook, Nereus

As our ability to track massive amounts of information via the Internet has increased, it has become necessary to find new ways to interpret this data efficiently. This is especially true for communicators who must translate data into viable marketing programs, usually under extreme timelines. Qualitative data poses a particular challenge to professionals who must measure the health of their clients’ brands, deliver results and track the effectiveness of campaigns.

Visualization is a graphical method of interpreting data that would otherwise be difficult to quickly consume and summarize. Modern Web applications have become more powerful and allow communicators the ability to utilize tag clouds, word associations, semantic maps, word trees and other tools to analyze massive amounts of qualitative data.

Blair Cook will take professional communicators through the origins of visualization, provide visualization examples, and discuss applications in an agency environment.

Luncheon/Keynote 2

Rohit Bhargava, Blogger, author of Personality Not Included, SVP Ogilvy 360

Seeking Authenticity: A Non-Obvious Tour of Everything that Works (and Doesn’t Work) in Marketing Today

Despite what you may hear, the future of marketing is neither about the shiniest new tools online, nor the hottest trends packaged for you in the report you just downloaded. If you truly want to reinvent your marketing, you need to learn from the real stories of success and failure that come from marketers all around you.

Rohit Bhargava will take you inside a local and global collection of people, stories and ideas that will inspire you to rethink your approach to marketing. Weaving together stories from the death of Superman to how the banana industry got consumers to care about fruit, you’ll learn why authenticity is the new secret to effective marketing and how you can make your business more authentic today.

Afternoon Panels

Integrating Social Media into Existing Communications Plans

Sally Ridenour, ODOT; Lise Harwin, Red Cross; Jennie Day-Burget, Portland Water Bureau

Panelists share their experiences and answer questions about integrating blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and other social media forms into their organizations’ communications plans.

Do’s & Don’ts of Digital Communication

Carri Bugbee, Big Deal PR, Jack Hart, Writing Coach, Jake Ten Pas, Conkling Fiskum & McCormick, Sandra Fransen, Moderator (formerly Nike)

What’s the secret to success in the brave new world of social media? How do you establish a voice in an online community? Whether you’re Twittering or blogging, setting up a viral campaign or engaging employees, you need to understand the rules of the road to make these tools work for you. Our panelists – a writing expert, a Twitter expert and an online community manager – will share practical, real-world-tested tips that will help you devise your strategy and maximize your efforts. They’ll tell you how to put your company’s best foot forward in the digital world – and how to keep it out of your mouth. Expect a lively discussion and a lot of good ideas.