During the planning of the upcoming Pivot Conference, I’ve been asked many questions about what it is, what it isn’t, and why the need for another conference. Most importantly, I’ve been asked more often than not, “What is our story?” I think that’s a great question. So, I took a moment to write the story for the Pivot Conference and while I was sharing it with the team, I thought that I would also share it with you here. Why? First, for those considering the event, it may help answer your questions. Second, as your business continues to explore new media, this story arc could serve as an outline for internal planning and development. Hopefully some of the free research we published will also help you.
Report 1: Brands Pursue the Social Consumer
Report 2: The Rise of Social Advertising
The Pivot Story Arc
The Pivot Conference is not a conference about social media. Nor is it a conference about advertising or marketing technologies. The Pivot Conference is an exploration of the social consumer and the role the social consumer plays in the future of marketing and business. It’s a journey that travels the paths social consumers use to make decisions and how they establish relationships with friends, like-minded people, and the companies that capture their attention.
The conference agenda is rich with unique content and provocative thought leadership, structured to foster deep learning, engagement, and creative thinking. No panels. No hour-long keynotes. No on-stage commercials. Only evocative experiences, advice, and insights. The rapid-fire two-day format will help attendees develop the meaningful and effective engagement strategies they need to connect with social customers. And, the experts assembled on stage in October will reveal how to define and support effective social experiences pre-, mid, and post-commerce, today and over time.
The program is based on my research for where things are and where they’re headed and supported by the pain points shared by years of work with leading brands and agencies. The conference is designed with a story arc told with a beginning, middle and end. Pivot is divided into chapters ranging from the deep human roots of social consumer behavior through disruption in audience, technology and transactions to explorations of what lies ahead for branding, commerce and culture. Each hour is action-packed with discussions and dramatic presentations based on the needs and challenges of connected consumers, businesses and the service providers in between. Every aspect of the conference is designed to inspire new ideas and drive action.
Subjects include:
– The new consumer perspective as revealed by social consumers
– The transformed decision making journey of social consumers
– Gathering insight and putting intelligence to work in a social world
– Designing campaigns by interests and psychographics
– Identifying and recruiting the new influencers
– Transmedia storytelling
– The new creative frontier and how to beat banner blindness
– Building ROI frameworks for social
– The gamification of marketing
– How to unlock effective mobile advertising
Attendees will hear from social’s leading thinkers, revered brands, and the creative professionals who are changing the rules of the game. Beyond the main stage, the Pivot Conference will also feature a second “studio” stage where additional content will be presented in an unplugged format. This more casual venue offers a special opportunity to freely interact with experts, ask detailed questions and connect with others to solve problems.
Pivot is a unique experience. All in all, it’s designed to help those ready to learn bring new ideas, processes, and metrics back into the work place. More importantly, the greatest beneficiaries of Pivot are the customers of those businesses that employ more meaningful and valuable programs and services.
I would love your feedback. What are some of the issues you’re dealing with and what answers could you use to be more successful in your endeavors? Please share in the comments and I will take your recommendations back to the team.
About Pivot
The Pivot Conference is designed for brands and their agencies and will take place October 17th and 18th in New York. This year’s theme focuses on an important shift in marketing as brands respond to “The Rise of the Social Consumer.”
If you’d like to join us, you can register here. Please use SOLISVIP for a special 20% discount.
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This sounds like an amazing conference. I wish I could make it because it would be extremely beneficial.
We wish you could be there too…
Everyone, including you Brian, is asking the question..”What is the role of the social consumer in the future of marketing and business.”
The answer is simple and in hindsight will seem painfully obvious. The answer is “The social consumer will totally own and control how all marketing is done and businesses and marketers will therefore have to let go of that control.”
The big winner in this simple but fundamental change will be the company that is first to put total control of marketing in the hands of the social consumer. Call it “Consumer Self-Targeting”, as a counterpoint to intrusive and surreptitious “behavioral targeting”.
Old school Marketers and PR are scared of this. They are used to having control in their hands. The thing they don’t realize is when they finally “let go” of control it “…shall make (them) more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”
It’s really very simple. But very few see it coming.
In other words; make sure you’ve a remarkable product?
Tell that to so many businesses who would debate over who determines what remarkable is or isn’t and whether or not that definition is affected by an outside-in perspective.