8:00 a.m.
Registration & Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m.

Chairperson’s Welcome & Speed Networking

This fun and fast-paced forum is designed to provide you with a unique and fun opportunity
to share your goals for this conference while getting to know your fellow conference attendees and their most pressing concerns.

Denise McKee, COO
ABOUTFACE MEDIA INC.
Conference Chairperson
@AboutFaceMedia

9:00 a.m.

Ensuring Success With A Social Intranet: How To Connect With Employees, Foster Discussions & Harness The Power Of The Hub

Leaders and communicators are effectively sparking conversation and connecting employees with each other, management and the information they need to work more effectively. These conversations include, but aren’t limited to, executive blogging, fostering discussions, voicing concerns, and addressing business issues.

This session will provide you with specific examples about how your communicators and leaders alike can be successful on a social intranet, including:

• How executive blogging will allow you to connect with your employees in a more personal way and to lay out your vision for the future of the business
• Fostering discussions so your employees can make their opinions heard and have an exchange on how the issues impacts your business
• Connecting employees with each other to share ideas and foster solutions
• Harnessing the power of The Hub to solve business problems by using community and crowdsourcing methods to extend live events, and expose more people to great content

9:30 a.m.

Learn How Simplified Language Will Increase Your Employee Engagement Through Improved Readability And Collaboration

Cisco Systems, an IT company with over 60,000 employees, has asked employees to simplify their language and speak in a voice that is distinctively “one” as a company. Within four months of starting this monumental effort, 200 people were trained and actively using the new language guidelines to create content. Leading executives were speaking in more simple and relevant terms at conferences, in email and at internal events. And the momentum continues. 

The Brand Language Program was initiated as a result of feedback from employees. They were confused. We realized corporate speak is everywhere, and it isn’t harmless. It was alienating our employees and affecting our company culture.  

To avoid common pitfalls of corporate speak, Cisco Systems made the decision to change their language. They focused on creating simpler content with a voice uniquely the company’s own. During this though provoking session you will learn how, you, too can simplify the language in your content strategy to better collaborate with and engage your employees, including how to: 

• Increase employee engagement both online and offline
• Double your internal communications readability
• Deliver on your core brand promise
• Communicate your unique value to your reader
• Enable clearer understanding and more effective collaboration 
• Sharpen content for SEO and SEM
• Provide writing guidelines for all of your content creators
• Validate your position with customers and partners, globally

Michael Lenz, Director, Brand Experience Design
CISCO SYSTEMS

10:00 a.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

10:20 a.m.

Group Round-Table Discussion:
Content Decision-Making And Analytics

The key to building a successful internal content strategy is delivering the right content, in the right format, to the right place, at the right time. With the amount of content you’re developing and delivering and the number of channels you’re delivering it through, how can one ever know if they’re succeeding?

During this time discuss with your fellow attendees and pick the brains of your conference speakers to decide what content measurement methods and tools should you be applying in order measure the performance of your content.

10:50 a.m.

How To Create, Manage, And Enforce A User-Friendly Governance Plan That Doesn’t Overwhelm

An effective governance plan in place will be a key to success in building your internal content strategy; Who updates what; When are updates made; Under what conditions are updates made; What limits exist in updated content; Is there a Content Management System in place; and so on.

This panel of experts with over 30 years of experience in governance is prepared to answer your most pressing questions, provide you with tips & techniques to apply, and help you create a governance plan that will take your internal content strategy to the next level.

Moderator:
Stacy Wilson, ABC, President
ELOQUOR CONSULTING, INC.
@stacylwilson

Panelists:
Terri Morgan, President & CEO
WUDANG RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

Angie Jensen, Technical Communications Specialist
OLMSTED MEDICAL CENTER

11:40 a.m.

Document Management Boot Camp: Best Practices For Governance, Organization, Searchability, And Security

Even with the remarkable technology available today, organizations large and small across industries struggle with Document Management. Olmsted Medical Center (OMC) has been recognized with two Web Health Awards and one eHeatlhcare Leadership Award for their intranet, OMC Connect. OMC's system includes 160 clinicians and over 1,100 staff who provide healthcare services at 17 locations including clinics and a Level IV trauma hospital in and around Rochester, MN. OMC has been able to develop a robust internal governance and sponsorship for it's intranet including an internal Core Optimization Team with numerous workgroup representing specific departments and initiatives.

This session will share from the trenches techniques and pitfalls to avoid in crafting your organization’s Document Management strategy including complex options around governance and implementation will be discussed along with pros and cons of each approach. You will leave this session with real-world screenshots and key considerations to shape an approach that will match your organization’s requirements, including:

• Version management
• Review/Update notifications
• Security configuration
• Workflow considerations
• Accountability
• Reliability in our BYOD world

Angie Jensen, Technical Communications/Portal Administrator
OLMSTED MEDICAL CENTER
@OMCRochesterMN

Chris Heinl, Solutions Consultant and Director of Client Services
HOSPITALPORTAL.NET
@HospitalPortal

12:10 p.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

12:15 p.m.
Lunch On Your Own -- But Not Alone!

Join a group of your colleagues for a themed lunch with an informal discussion surrounding a hot topic! Take this opportunity to join others in a small, interactive group setting to network and brainstorm solutions to your most pressing content concerns.

1:45 p.m.

How To Foster Positive Employee Satisfaction And Improve Employee Morale Effectively Through Your Content

Employees are being asked to do more with less and to get it all done within their work shift – a real employee morale buster. As communicators, we face the challenge of capturing enough employee interest to break through the hectic schedules long enough for our messages to be read. How can we create employee engagement if we can’t gain our audience’s attention long enough to scan our morale boosting articles or event promotions? How do we get them to see break room posters if they are so busy they aren’t taking breaks?

At OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, a level 3 trauma center that employees a staff of 6,000, we approach internal communications with an inclusive attitude. By including employees within our communication campaigns, we’ve increased employee awareness (new initiatives or events), improved our employee satisfaction scores (communication focused questions on our employee opinion survey), and gained more timely compliance with policies (such as vaccinations).

Not only do we solicit employee input for organizational issues through intranet discussion boards, but we recruit staff to be the stars for the communication campaigns that promote the solutions.

This session will provide you with insight into how you can improve employee morale (and get staff buy-in) by incorporating employees into the internal campaign communications, including how to:

• Offer employees a showcase for their talents and correlate these into your organizational goals
• Build anticipation around campaign communications by including diversity of staff
• Use simple interactive intranet features to entertain staff while providing an educational message
• Provide a toolkit for your managers and staff to recognize individual and team achievements

Kristin Johnson, Internal Communications Specialist
OSF SAINT FRANCIS MEDICAL CENTER

2:15 p.m.

Internal Communications Case-Study Coming Soon

Bonita Brodt, APR, Director of Communications
NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

2:45 p.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

2:55 p.m.

Afternoon Refreshment & Networking Break

3:05 p.m.

Group Round-Table Discussion: Tips & Techniques To Plan, Organize, And Write Content For Today’s Sites And Apps

In today’s business environment where the majority of your employees have gone mobile and social media has become a major marketing channel -- your content now competes in a chaos of available sites and apps. This brainstorm session will give you an opportunity to discus with your conference peers tips and techniques to plan, organize, and write content that will succeed on big screens and small screens in limited characters.

3:35 p.m.

How To Harness Organizational Content To Maximize Your Communication Impact: Identify, Create, Plan, Manage, & Measure

It’s been estimated that the amount of information in the world is doubling every 2 years, and if you work in internal communications, you’ll probably feel like you’re producing most of it!

Market changes, organizational restructurings, mergers & acquisitions, business strategy and results: there’s never a shortage of something to talk about, write about or film, but there is a limit to our time. We often end up focusing solely on content, to the detriment of other value-added activities.

Luckily, in any organization, there are far more sources of content than we might think. By discovering who is already producing content for other purposes and leveraging it as part of a business-wide content strategy, you can transform your communications while freeing up time to invest in building relationships and fostering collaboration and engagement.

Elsevier, a global information solutions company with 7,000 employees, pulled together key stakeholders from across the business to create a content machine that is transforming the way they communicate internally and externally.

In this session, you will hear how to invest your time in creating value-added content that is not only effective, but can be used for multiple purposes, including how to:

• Identify your content champions
• Create a content strategy that is aligned to business drivers, and get buy-in from key stakeholders
• Plan and manage content to continually reinforce key messages, and measure the impact

Liz Smith, VP, Global Internal Communications
ELSEVIER

4:05 p.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

4:10 p.m.

More "How To's" To Help You Get The Work Done:
Day One Wrap Up

Need to dive deeper into specific topics? Want more details? Here’s your chance! Digest what you’ve learned and apply it to your own initiatives to get feedback and ideas for improvement and discuss what topics you want to hear covered tomorrow.

Denise McKee, COO
AboutFace Media Inc.
Conference Chairperson

4:30 p.m.

End Of Day One

4:45 p.m.

Networking Reception: Please Join Us!

We invite you to join us for a drink as you relax with your peers. All conference attendees and speakers are welcome to join us for this special opportunity to continue networking. Don't miss this chance to benchmark new ideas over complimentary drinks!

Sign up during the day for dinner with a group. Take advantage of Chicago's fine dining while you continue to network with your colleagues.