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How Brands Use Social Media to Build their Business, Profits and Positive Impact.
Today’s marketplace is being transformed by the impact of social technology and media that are reinventing business models, profit centers and customer service. Yet this same challenge represents an incredible opportunity to build profits and positive impact. To do this brands must clearly define their purpose, core values and story in a community-facing way that will resonate on an emotional level with their customers and inspire them to share that story using social media channels.
Simon explains exactly how companies achieve this and what tools, tactics, and strategies best enable them to architect a customer community that will build their business with them. He reveals step-by-step how brands build on the best practices and case studies of the world smartest marketers to create and maintain a competitive advantage using emerging social technology. It is through this powerful marriage of purposeful brand storytelling and social media fluency that brands not only connect with today's customers, but also inspire them to use social media to raise brand awareness, profits and have a positive impact in our world.
What You Will Learn:
The Future of Social Business, Branding and Consumer Engagement.
Social technologies are reinventing the way brands market, engage their customers and build brand awareness. Simon reveals the key economic drivers, consumer insights and social technologies that will determine the business leaders of our future. Simon demystifies how brands use multi-channel social marketing to become effective storytellers, community architects and profitable agents of change. He explains how companies re-organize leadership, employees and customer service to best position themselves for success ahead of their competitors. The topic is not just critical to brands seeking to profit from the social business marketplace but also seeking to retain their advantage over the long-term.
What You Will Learn:
How the Private Sector Uses Social Technology to Scale Social Change
In the face of a tough economy, fast-changing social media and multiple global social crises, Simon provides a vision for a re-purposed private sector that makes sustainable and scalable social change possible. He lays out a roadmap for how the private sector serves as a third pillar of social change to aid government and philanthropy.
This vision has three key components that include a partnership between brands and consumers aligned around shared values and connected by social media, the exercise of contributory consumption across retail, mobile, online, credit card and virtual goods transactions, and the establishment of a federation of brands called the Global Brand Initiative that brings the best of the private sector to bear on the social change space. In doing so, Simon explains how companies create a better world and offers practical and actionable steps that allow brands to play a meaningful role in customers’ lives so they reward them with loyalty, goodwill and profits.
What You Will Learn:
Does Advertising Have a Future and What Does it Look Like?
If the advertising industry does not change sufficiently, it will become yet another causality of the impact of digital and social technologies. Old business models no longer work, profit centers have shifted, more tech-savvy, nimble and adaptive competitors are emerging. This speech explains how agencies leverage their hard won communication expertise while also re-purposing themselves for a digital and social future. It outlines exactly how to reframe their think, roles, and service offering to clients so that they stay relevant within a marketplace in which consumers are now talking directly to brands threatening their traditional intermediary role.
Strategic Storytelling and the Humanity of Your Brand
As marketers find themselves communicating within an intimately connected and mutually dependent global community, they are quickly rising to the new challenge of becoming more meaningful and relevant to the lives of media-savvy customers. As a result, we are witnessing a global "brand grab" for ownership of the fundamental properties of being human. Whether it's Coke and 'Happiness', Starbucks and 'Shared' or IBM and 'Smarter', such strategic positioning and storytelling empowers companies to be both local and global, to scale intimacy and to leverage social and mobile tools in ways that allow them to keep in contact with their customers. The challenge is how you define, frame and share your brand story to establish a competitive advantage and inspire employees and customers to build your business with you at a local and global level.
What You Will Learn:
The Art and Architecture of Customer Community Building
While many companies and their marketers are very familiar with the tactics and tools of social marketing, few understand the architecture of effective community building that drives long and short-term profits. It's this architecture that ensures companies enjoy reputation and tactical benefits and inspires consumers to promote a company with them. It's this architecture that will determine which brands survive and thrive in an increasingly connected, real-time and consumer activist marketplace.
What You Will Learn:
Integration of Sustainability, Cause Marketing and Foundation Efforts
As a function of the hierarchical structure of many corporations, their purposeful efforts are fractured across different divisions and marketing roles. This robs the companies of reputation benefits and splinters the brand messaging making the marketing spend less effective and diluting consumer loyalty and goodwill. Properly aligned, these disparate efforts can reinforce the brand's for-profit narrative and be seamlessly integrated to reflect the core values of the brand. This process is critical for companies seeking to build brand affinity and get bottom line benefits for their social impact work.
What You Will Learn:
Simon Mainwaring is the founder of We First, a leading brand consultancy that provides purpose-driven strategy, content, and training that empowers companies to lead business, shape culture, and better our world. We First consulting shows companies how to define, frame and share the story of their good work in ways that build their brand reputation, customer community, and social impact. We First training includes keynote speeches, corporate workshops, and an annual Brand Leadership Summit that shows how companies combine purposeful storytelling and social technologies to inspire their employees and customers to build their business and positive impact with them.
Simon is a member of the Executive Committee of Sustainable Brands, the Steering Committee of the Business Alliance for the Future, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London and the World Business Academy in the U.S. He contributes to The Guardian, Forbes, and Huffington Post on branding and social technology.
Simon’s book, We First: How brands and consumers use social media to build a better world is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon bestseller. It was named an Amazon Top Ten Business Book, 800CEORead Top Five Marketing Book, and strategy+business named it the Best Business Marketing Book of the Year. It has been translated into Russian, Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean.
Simon was included in Trust Across America’s, ‘Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior for 2012,’ #4 on The Guardian’s, ‘Twitter List: The 30 Most Influential Sustainability Voices in America for 2013’ and #15 on SustMeme’s CSR Top 500 Influencers for 2013, GlobalCEO’s Top CSR Leaders for 2014, YPO’s Real Leaders, ‘100 Visionary Leaders’ for 2015, and Statsocial’s 2015 Top 100 Social Media Power Influencers.
Simon is a sought after international speaker with engagements including the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Royal Society of Arts, SXSW, TEDxSF, Promaxbda, Conscious Capitalism, Sustainable Brands, National Speakers Association, and National Press Club, as well as brands such as Google, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Samsung, Gucci, VW Group, NHL, and Patagonia. He was voted a Top 5 Marketing Speaker by speaking.com and featured on the cover of the National Speaker’s Magazine in 2014.
Prior to starting We First, Simon spent 18 years as an award-winning writer, Creative Director, and Worldwide Creative Director at many of the world’s top creative advertising agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Wieden & Kennedy, and Ogilvy working on brands such a Nike, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Motorola, as well as consulting on dozens of F500 brands for leading advertising, production, and digital companies. He was the writer on the U.S. launch of the first three generations of the Toyota Prius, the largest national service campaign for the Entertainment Industry Foundation that brought together all four major TV networks for the first time in U.S. television history, and numerous award-winning campaigns for Nike. He has received over 60 awards at major advertising festivals including the Cannes Advertising Festival (Europe), the One Show (U.S.), the Clio’s (U.S.), the Kelly Awards (U.S), British Design & Art Direction Awards (U.K.), and AWARD (Australia), among others.
Simon studied Law and Fine Arts (1st Class Honors) at St. Paul’s College, Sydney University, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters.
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