Beyond Listening: The Future of Social Media Monitoring
Panel discussion
With leading brands now seeking to track online conversations and engage with customers in real-time, the future is never very far away. In this panel session we ask where social media monitoring will be two years from now. What are the growth areas? What new techniques are emerging? Will access to data become more open or closed? How will large corporates integrate listening into their processes? And, what will the wary consumer make of it?

Refined Social Data Changes Everything You Ever Thought About Marketing
Alan Moore, Author & Speaker
In the networked society we leave data trails; plumes of information - the personal exhaust from our digital interactions. These are the shadows and footprints of our daily lives. In the highly competitive world of marketing and commerce, this data is moving centre stage, with companies desperate to harvest, aggregate and refine it. Yet our destiny with data is complex. There are legitimate concerns about who actually owns this information and, when our identities can be pieced together via data flows, privacy becomes a key battleground. This requires companies to rethink how they create value. In the search economy, the old way of doing things just won’t do.

After Brand: Listening and Organisations
Antony Mayfield, VP, Head of Global Media, iCrossing
The social web is the edge of the massive, disruptive wave of innovation that is the Web. Brand is an excellent place for organisations to start from in surveying and understand the changing world they now live in, but there are significant challenges and opportunities for brands beyond marketing alone. This session will discuss how social media represents a strategic business challenge and how how active listening (measurement, monitoring and storytelling) by organisations will not only be the heart of communications but a key business process that touches finance, IT, customer service, product development and beyond.

The Business Case for Buzz
Ann Longley, Strategy Director at Mediaedge: CIA
Social media is creating new challenges and opportunities for brands including a bewildering array of new touch points and potential approaches. How should brands approach this media landscape? This session, based on real case studies, builds the business case for using buzz research as the ideal starting point for social media engagement and integrated planning.

Knowing Who Matters: Discovering and Analysing Influence
Marshall Manson, Director of Digital Strategy, Edelman EMEA
Marshall advises clients on digital strategy, online reputation management, crisis management, advocacy, engagement and viral marketing. A pioneer in the field of online strategy, communications and reputation managemen, his clients have included Shell, HP and English Heritage. He moved to the UK in 2008, having previously worked in Edelmans’ Washington DC office as Vice-President of Online Advocacy.

The Truth About Social Media Data
Giles Palmer, Founder and Managing Director, Brandwatch
With leading brands increasingly turning to social media for insight, feedback and guidance, social media data is under the spotlight. Questions about it’s origins, accuracy and scope have the potential to undermine the whole monitoring industry. In this session Giles Palmer, who has successfully led more than a hundred organisations through the murky world of social media data, explains where it comes from, who controls it, how it is filtered and categorised, its inherent flaws and limitations, and how to avoid misreading the information you are presented with.

The Power of Listening & Responding: Skype
Robin Grant, Managing Director, We Are Social
Robin will talk about how We Are Social helped Skype to set-up and run their own real-time social media listening and responding programme. He will provide insights into the tools and methodologies used and explain the impact social media monitoring had on Skype's business. He will also describe how it helped them to manage a major crisis.

Surviving in iPhone Territory: A Competitive Analysis of the Launch of the HTC G1
Chris Thomas, Head of Research, The Conversation Group (TCG)
Chris Thomas presents the findings of a TCG research project covering the launch of the HTC G1 - the first smartphone to use the Google Android operating system. The project showcases the contribution of social media research to competitive intelligence, brand positioning and strategic communications. Covering a three month period around launch, and including almost 100,000 unique items of discussion content. The presentation offers lessons for the effective blending of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, and evaluation of the relative contributions of a range of free and licensed monitoring and analysis tools.

Getting Started with Social Media: STA Travel case study
Celia Pronto, Marketing Director, STA Travel
Most brands know they should get involved in social media, but where should you start? Hear from STA Travel how they moved from traditional marketing to placing social media at the heart of their business, including: Getting internal buy-in, How they developed their strategy, What measures they use to define success.

Social Networking Data – The Vital Ingredient for 360 Customer Understanding
Paul Alexander, CEO, Beyond Analysis
Social networks have the potential to provide companies with instant, reliable and valuable feedback - to help them reduce their reliance on expensive market research. But how useful is this new data source? Can “buzz” ever match the quality of traditionally researched data? And how far can casual online interactions be used to map transactional or behavioural shifts? In this session Paul Alexander demonstrates how several leading brands are approaching these questions and found answers to them.

The Price of Knowledge: Free vs. Paid Monitoring Tools
Brad Little, Director, Industry Solutions Online, Nielsen
When choosing a social media monitoring tool, there are lots of questions to consider: why are there so many approaches and services? How are they different? What justifies the price variances? Can’t we get this for free? What is being measured? What resources should we invest? In this session Brad examines the differences between social media monitoring tools, how they work and what to consider when choosing a provider. He will aim to get beyond the sales hype and look under the bonnet to help you select the right solution for your company.

Exhibitors & Demos