Speaker biography coming soon.

Speaker biography coming soon.

Join Amy Sullivan, Vice President of Insight, and Randy Matheson, Director of Emerging Media and Trends of Delvinia for a state of the nation report on social media usage in Canada. Drawing on freshly minted data from the AskingCanadians research community, Amy and Randy will share the latest stats on consumer engagement with social platforms. Learn what Canadians are doing, why, and how often, and gain valuable insights into how social media is changing Canadians’ purchasing behaviour and their relationships with brands.

Recognized for two decades as one of the top business thinkers on customer issues, Dr. Martha Rogers brings to this session the research and thinking based on her new book written with Don Peppers, Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage. Catapulted into social networking and interconnectivity, your customers are fast ensuring that the world they live in with you in a transparent one, at least where you're concerned. Suddenly, your company doesn't get to control what's said about yourself; what others say about you matters far more than your branding and ad efforts. Now it's about customer experience, customer relationships, and the trust that makes those relationships measurably valuable to company and customer. In this presentation, Dr. Rogers will provide insight into how global executives think of social and business channels, implications for on-the- ground marketers and social media managers in Canada, and how you can start building trustability within your organization from the ground up.

Customers are engaged socially online, which has altered their expectations for interacting with brands they do business with. They want to be engaged, not simply managed. The practice of Customer Relationship Management is evolving as businesses increasingly tap into the power of social networks and real-time feedback. The days of simply providing better service are gone – today CRM is social, driven by personal interactions and by customers who expect control over their engagement with companies. This session will help companies learn to be more responsive, transparent, and personal in their dealings with customers by integrating social media with CRM.

Ujwal is a Digital Ethnographer and Strategist currently managing Sequentia's Community and Research Practice. Ujwal’s work involves leading and evolving Sequentia’s Community and Research Practice, as well as developing and executing digital strategies for clients who’re looking to build engaged, self-sustaining online communities. He has spent his past lives as an ethnographer and digital marketer in the technology, media and tourism industries. He currently blogs for the Huffington Post and also writes on http://marketingtoculture.com. Ujwal is also a musician and plays and writes music for a local Toronto band called “Do Mar”.

In an increasingly crowded online marketplace, the onus is on organizations to create compelling brand stories that appeal to audiences at a deeper, emotional level. These brand stories need to go beyond solving a tangible need (for a product/service), to fostering a sense of community and identity. Which means it is no longer sufficient to simply look at audiences' digital behaviour as something that can be completely understood through surveys or even metrics about past behaviour. The study of culture online is highly relevant and critical.

Culture - the not so secret weapon.

Understanding culture refers to understanding the lens through which an audience views this world - their beliefs, values and identities online, and how that influences and effects their behaviour. Studying culture provides a brand narratives about an audience, that can be used to create highly resonant brand stories.

In this session we'll discuss:

• Culture and its meaning for marketers in the digital age.
• Real world Client example of culture based insights, and their application in digital marketing (from campaigns to communities!).
• An introduction to the art of studying culture (digital ethnographic research).
• 5 things you can do to begin digging deeper into your audiences' online behaviour today!

The internet provides marketers an open platform to observe audiences in their natural state of interaction, providing incredibly rich, unbiased data. It's time we take the bait.

Paul has a passion for insight driven marketing and has an expertise in integrated communications. He began his career in the agency world, honing his traditional advertising, sponsorship consulting and digital skills on clients in the telecom, broadcast and internet industries. Recently, Paul led the Marketing-Communications efforts at Rogers Wireless, winning several media innovation awards while driving business results through the organization's explosive growth. Over the past three years at Syncapse, Paul established the Measurement Practice, creating the social performance measurement standards for clients like Research In Motion, AB InBev and Diageo, and is now the VP, Global Business Director overseeing several client's global social deployments.

Richard joined Diageo Canada in October 2010 as a consumer planning manager across the vodka, rum, beer and ready-to-drink portfolios. His key role is to lead Diageo marketing plans, ensuring each brand’s marketing activities are on strategy while delivering a high ROI. He is involved in all consumer touch points from TV advertising, in-store activation and online activity. Richard became the lead planner for digital marketing immediately after joining Diageo. He has been instrumental in the fan acquisition strategy for Smirnoff and Captain Morgan and now continues to be more influential as the challenge moves to keep this fan based engaged. He has also brought Diageo into the mobile age as they begin to talk with consumers at the point of purchase. Prior to joining Diageo, Richard spent five years with Millward Brown on the communications research side, which included working with their digital partner Dynamic Logic on a variety of cross media and ad index studies.

Brad leads all sales and business development for the firm. Hip Digital is the leading provider of Premium Digital Content Promotions to Tier 1 brands. We execute turnkey, ROI driven programs for brands that deliver sales lift, social engagement, and consumer loyalty. Our licensed catalog of digital content includes Music, Movies, Mobile Apps, eBooks and Virtual Currencies. Customers include Coca Cola, Aeroplan, Wrigley's, Diageo, L'Oreal, and General Mills.

Prior to joining Hip, Brad led an experiential marketing firm, Diamond Dog. Concurrently, Brad co- founded Transmission, an exclusive digital media think tank and conference held annually in Canada.

Many brands launch social media programs and find challenges when they try to engage their audience in an ongoing and relevant way. Learn from industry leaders on how they are using unique digital incentives, promotions and blockbuster exclusive content to gain, retain and entertain consumers in social channels.

Jon Sinden will showcase how one organization's approach to social media has created a unique relationship with fans. Looking at examples of how the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors and Toronto FC connect with fans using social utilities, story-telling, crowd-sourcing and more.

As social media is now a key component of marketing strategies, brands are challenged to cut through the noise and reach the right consumers. LinkedIn – the world's largest professional network – is changing how brands can create targeted marketing campaigns for a business audience. Join Ashraf Kamel, Account Executive on the Marketing Solutions team at LinkedIn Canada as he explores how brands are using LinkedIn to reach an affluent, influential and highly educated audience in a business context while driving followers, creating communities and fostering engagement.

In this session, Graham Moysey, General Manager at AOL Canada will share a social engagement case study on Huffington Post Canada and review AOL best practices by providing examples of their success.

"Tell stories, take them places and get people talking." This approach has been pivotal to the overall success of the Huffington Post and by extension, AOL sites. In the first half of this session, Graham will take us through a case study on how social engagement is the crown jewel that drives the success of The Huffington Post and provide examples of how the brand uses social media to align content that best resonates with their audience in an authentic voice.

The second half of this session Graham will highlight AOL best practices and the success of their most work with an advertising partner using branded content, creating a national social-marketing campaign that leveraged AOL's content, showcased sponsor-generated blogs and slideshows, and AOL's signature ad format to help turn their messaging into compelling branded content.

In her presentation, Rogers communications’ Senior Community Manager, Mary Pretotto, shares how they turned their harshest critics into brand ambassadors. Mary will talk about how to combine real-life engagement with online engagement, how to find customers that are already passionate about your brand, and how to respond to negative feedback.

As small businesses and corporations embrace social media, the evolution and revolutionary natures of social media are often overlooked. Social media has been a factor in human communications for a long time though the Internet has enabled extraordinary growth in technology, accessibility, interaction and personal involvement. By failing to recognize social media's longevity and the rapid pace of change in communications technologies, modern social media adopters are implementing measurement methodologies that simply don't provide accurate or meaningful measurements. Alan will examine methods and modern tools for measuring the success of social media campaigns, specifically, what the tools measure and how can that be linked back to strategy and then actioned.

Alan K'necht is a founding partner at Toronto based Digital Always Media Inc. a search & social media marketing agency and training company. Alan is an online instructor for the University of San Francisco's on-line Internet marketing and analytics programs and the head of their Advanced Analytics course. In 2010 he published his 1st book, the award winning The Last Original Idea – A Cynic's View to Internet Marketing. He is also the host of the weekly Twitter Chat #SocialChat which regularly reaches a potential audience of over 500,000.

Over the years, K'necht has helped implement web analytic and Internet marketing solutions. Clients have included Canada's Federal Government, the US Navy, Inter-American Development Bank, Toyota Canada, various media organizations, several ecommerce companies and a wide array of other businesses. Through digital analytics, K'necht has always helped clients measure and maximize their Return on Investment (ROI) for their digital marketing initiatives. K'necht is an internationally published columnist, who has been interviewed by numerous publications and media outlets including: The Wall Street Journal, Globe & Mail, National Post, CBC radio, CanWest Global News and WebmasterRadio.FM.

As small businesses and corporations embrace social media, the evolution and revolutionary natures of social media are often overlooked. Social media has been a factor in human communications for a long time though the Internet has enabled extraordinary growth in technology, accessibility, interaction and personal involvement. By failing to recognize social media's longevity and the rapid pace of change in communications technologies, modern social media adopters are implementing measurement methodologies that simply don't provide accurate or meaningful measurements. K’necht will examine methods and modern tools for measuring the success of social media campaigns, specifically, what the tools measure and how can that be linked back to strategy and then actioned.

Measurement. Monitoring. Conversions. Metrics. Feedback. Dashboards. Social Analytics. Insight. ROI. Foresight. They are sexy and you know it.

Recognized as one of Canada’s top digital thinkers and practitioners, Sean Moffitt bridges the gap between business leadership, digital specialists and research purists to deliver a session that will spice up your left and right brain. With his broadminded and unconventional take, Sean will provide some more sex appeal to an oftentimes unglamorous, but important topic.

This session will be based on insights lifted from Sean’s book Wikibrands: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Connected Marketplace, a preview of trends from his 4th annual Buzz Report that explores attitudes and perception of tomorrow’s marketing, media and digital culture, his own in-market experience and interviews with leading research practitioners.

In this presentation, Sean Moffitt will provide insight into how social media measurement can be exciting, improve your strategy, build better results and be important to your stature in the organization. Sean will tie together some of the day’s key learnings while stripping away the shroud of measurement mystery. He’ll also establish the need to blaze your own measurement style, avoid paralysis-by-analysis and get your data appeal noticed and talked about by your CEO.

This closing session will be a be a way to learn from some of the best social measurement thinking in the world "out there" in a fun and entertaining manner.