Simon Mainwaring

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's 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:

- How your brand defines its purpose, core values, and vision.
- How your brand frames that story to build a self-sustaining customer community.
- How your brand engages those customers across multiple social media channels to generate awareness, profits, and word of mouth advertising.
- How your brand maintains its competitive advantage in the face of fast-changing social technology.

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:

- What social business means for leadership, organizational structure, and customer service.
- What social technologies mean for corporate marketing and how to best position your brand for bottom-line success.
- The most effective tools, tactics, and strategies to build a customer community based on best practices, case studies, and ROI.
- Emerging social technology trends that will ensure your brand retains and grows its customer community and profits.

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 the 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 offer 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:

- The latest global business imperatives that necessitate a fresh practice of capitalism.
- The three-step plan through which the private sector massively scales contribution to help solve multiple global crises.
- The architecture and dynamics of a new relationship between brands and their customers that build profit and positive social impact.
- Actionable steps that brands can take to participate based on real-world examples and best practices of the world's biggest brands.

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 empower 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:

- How the smartest marketers in the world are defining their brands to position themselves for global leadership.
- Case studies of the most effective internal and external storytelling that builds a corporate culture and customer communities.
- Strategies and tactics for how to bring the humanity of your brand to life for all key stakeholders.
- How a brand transcends marketing to become a mainstay of popular culture.

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 the 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:

- How the smartest marketers in the world define, frame and share their brand stories to build self-sustaining customer communities.
- How to rationalize strategic storytelling and social marketing to generate reputation and sales benefits.
- How to build and maintain your customer community and industry leadership in the face of growing customer expectations and a fast-changing social business marketplace.

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:

- How the world’s top brands are deconstructing their hierarchical organizational structures and positioning themselves for future growth.
- How the smartest marketers are defining and sharing their brand stories in ways that integrate sustainability, cause marketing, and Foundation efforts.
- Strategies and tactics for how to engage customers around a seamless brand story in ways that drive engagement and sales.
- How to position your brand for industry leadership through marketing that leverages the new dynamics of the social business marketplace.