NCC's Quarterly Members Conference

Event Information

Companies such as Virgin, Dell, Amazon, and the BBC, to mention just a few are all known as successes in harnessing the power of social media for business. However, they all sell – or deliver – directly to consumers. How about businesses that sell or deliver services to other businesses? What if you’re a company that builds financial or logistics software or runs data centres or if you’re a public sector organisation? Is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, or a company blog going to be any value?

In fact, the answers may surprise you. Increasingly business-to-business companies are utilising the social web – to identify new customers, to build their reputations, and to win business. There’s a great deal that social media offers to the non-consumer business.

The event will provide an insight into the cornerstones of how to use social media in your enterprise:

• How to build a corporate reputation of expertise - and how to protect and manage your corporate reputation via social media. Remember social media builds reputations but it can damage them too.
• Research your customers - Know what your customers are saying and know what your customers’ customers are saying…. your customers don’t care about you – they care about their customers and their bottom line. And track industry trends: what defines your industry; track it, so you know what’s changing.
• Developing the Network - you should always be networking, because you never know when a contact can become your advocate or even the decision-maker. They key, though, is that you have to reach out.
• The benefits of learning from others - If you and your business have a strong social presence, it’s simply easier for potential partners, customers, employers, and businesses to find you.

The success of social networking has shown companies that enterprise-wide collaboration can be a pivotal growth driver. Many are now adopting new communications channels, designed specifically for business, to reduce communication barriers and improve workforce productivity.

Enterprise social networking is taking off globally as businesses of all sizes witness how it promotes employee collaboration and communication across departments, geographies and areas of expertise. Instead of using email, employees have discovered that profiles, status updates, real-time feeds, filters and groups offer a better way to consume, share and manage information. In fact, social media is now competing directly with email.

The paradigms pioneered by social networking can transfer well to the workplace: enabling you to follow people on your team, the activity in your top customer accounts, initiate new marketing campaigns, time-sensitive projects, and critical business documents. And because these new social tools are web-based, they can accessed them from anywhere, from whatever device.

And of course the good thing about social networking is that everyone already knows how to do it. Enterprise social networking can revolutionise the way you work. It offers the same benefits that come from large-scale collaboration on sites like Facebook and Twitter, but with the advantage of adding business context and enterprise security. Enterprise social media creates a collaborative environment that can enable us to engage, innovate, and strengthen our workplace.

See the video trailer

Venue: The Trades Union Congress, London

Congress House, Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3LS

Enter your postcode for directions to The Trades Union Congress

Agenda

09.30	Registration
10.00	Introduction
	Ian Jones, NCC
10.10	The ROI of Social Media
	Bob Pike, COO, SiteForum An insight from the most recent research from Gallup on how social tools have made it easier for employees to communicate with others to build and maintain business relationships - be it customer facing or internally, demonstrate a real ROI and ultimately improve workflows, sales processes, and organisational decision-making.
10.40	Demystifying social media – it’s just relationship marketing!
	Richard Brenkley, Founder & Director, Coast Digital Social media is not about technology, it’s about relationships…. It’s a great statement and it’s been the corner stone of our advice to clients on social media since it hit the scene a few years ago; you have to change your mindset away from the typical virtues of digital marketing and get back to the principles of building and maintaining business relationships.
11.15	BREAK
11.30	Social Media Masterclass
	Paul Sutton, Head of Digital Marketing Practice, BottlePR The growth of social media has impacted hugely on the way that we interact with brands and organisations. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and numerous other platforms have enabled companies to have ‘personal’ relationships with their customers, making it possible to generate word-of-mouth through brand advocates like never before. With this in mind, the old mantra that ‘people do business with people’ applies now more than ever. The impact of social media is on human behaviour; attitudes, opinions and beliefs. And the true value of social communications is in building online communities, and engaging with and influencing customers effectively throughout the decision-making process.
12.10	Viral Marketing – Its Catching!!
	Marcus Dacombe, COO Verridian Marcus will share his thoughts on Web 2.0 in the enterprise – where, how and why this works. He will demonstrate how Volkswagen, Microsoft, Burger King and Old Spice amongst many others have successfully extended their marketing to the web.
12.40	Making Social Media Secure – The Security Risks you Need to Manage
	James Hanlon, Symantec Social media is a force for change. Whether that is displayed on a national level or within the enterprise, social media offers great advantages in terms of real time collaboration, productivity, awareness and promotion. However, social media introduces new considerations for security, particularly in an enterprise environment. In this session, James Hanlon from Symantec will outline both the advantages for the enterprise and some straightforward strategies to mitigate the security risks you will encounter.
13.10	Panel discussion
13.30	LUNCH
14.15	How to reach more people, when and where it counts
	Richard Wyatt-Haines, Just90.tv Are we all beginning to tune out from traditional content delivery….? Video has become an attractive alternative to reach the customer. Video appeals because of its, high impact, low cost and organic nature – individuals can share the message, rather than being pushed by the brand. NCC video content effectively cuts through the clutter and fits well with the other NCC content mix. Our aim is to integrate video into our overall communications strategy, and use it to generate buzz, increase awareness and endorsement of key issues and key product and services.
14.30	UK Strategy & Spending Benchmark 2011
	Cliff Mills, NCC Research Manager The IT department has not been immune to the economic uncertainties that have faced organisations in the past few years, whether in the private or public sector. IT has a pivotal role to play in aiding the streamlining of business processes, introducing operational efficiencies, and above all being innovative in the delivery of solutions. However, IT is also expected to deliver more and better services for less, and extract the maximum value both from the existing and future investment in technology. NCC’s Benchmark of IT Spending & Strategy 2011 highlights these challenges. With IT budgets still under severe strain, companies have been turning to a range of emerging technologies to enable a new computing paradigm.
15.00	Keeping SharePoint on Track
	Ian Woodgate , MD Point Beyond, NCC Associate Consultant SharePoint seems to be everywhere these days, but how are organisations using it successfully and how can SharePoint projects get derailed? In this session Dr Ian Woodgate, who has over 10 years’ enterprise SharePoint implementation experience, will be taking a look at how organisations use SharePoint, the business drivers, the benefits, and the challenges. Ian will outline an approach to SharePoint strategy and implementation, and discuss how best to manage the significant cultural change that can be associated with the rollout of SharePoint.
15.40	Enabling Workforce Agility – Bringing People Together through Technology
	Collaboration tools – the session will comprise a number of user organisations who will share their experiences in integrating collaborative technologies – the people, process and cultural issues… what they’ve used, how they’ve used it and where the main challenges and benefits… Short 5 minute presentations will be followed by a Q&A session. Panel Peter Kent, Head of ICT Services, JANET(UK) Dr Ian Woodgate, Managing Director, Point Beyond Paul Oliver, Business Systems Manager, Care Quality Commission
16.30	Drinks Reception and Networking
17.00	Close

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