8:00 a.m.
Registration & Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m.
Chairperson’s Welcome & Speed Networking

Become acquainted with your fellow conference attendees in this fun and fast-paced forum!

Stacy Wilson, ABC, President
ELOQUOR CONSULTING, INC.
Conference Chairperson

9:00 a.m.

How To Create An Intranet That Empowers And Engages Your Employees, And Builds A Stronger Corporate Culture

*** LIVE DEMO ***

The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority’s intranet has been a dumping ground for the past several years. When someone wanted something posted, it was dumped onto the home page and left for weeks, months, and yes, even a year. After interviewing employees in 26 departments across the organization, San Diego County Regional Airport Authority decided to make some drastic changes to their intranet, not only to refresh the content and design, but to further engage employees and help to build a stronger corporate culture.

Their new intranet incorporated a storytelling platform based on human-interest perspectives. They sought out to redesign their intranet around stories that make an impact on the daily lives, not just of their employees, but their customers, and how the day-in and day-out tasks make a difference to the entire region.

You will leave this session with ideas and implementation techniques to advance your company’s intranet, including how to:

• Keep employees engaged in the content through the use of newer technology such as jquery photo sliders, videos, and surveys
• Introduce an employee recognition program integrated into weekly/monthly updates, driving more of the human-interest element
• Provide your employees with real indicators of the organization’s fiscal and operational performance, and how their jobs relate to the bottom line
• Use top requested content data, for quick searches and better efficiency
• Incorporate all of your social media channels for further employee education and engagement

Jon Graves, Webmaster
SAN DIEGO COUNTY REGIONAL AIRPORT AUTHORITY

9:30 a.m.

How To Create A Branded, Employee-Driven Intranet
*** Intranet Screenshots Provided ***

Teen retailer, American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), had a need to overhaul its intranet to be as casual and cool as its fashion and customers. This session will explore the challenges of taking an IT-centric intranet and giving it to the employees and People Department of AEO to produce a branded, employee-driven, intranet for the company’s thousands of office and field associates.

This session will provide you with the most effective techniques to draw your employees to the intranet and have them build it, including:

• Tips for recruiting Intranet Ambassadors
• What’s an Intranet to do with merged companies or brands?
• Creating a content-rich, social media-based intranet
• Measurement Metrics: from good to great
• Five essential elements to have your intranet always be current & fresh

Richard Borden, Director – Internal Communications
AMERICAN EAGLE OUTFITTERS, INC.

10:00 a.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

10:20 a.m.

Digest Session: Understanding The Current State Of Your Intranet

You are here this week to learn how to maximize the value of your Intranet. Discuss with your fellow attendees your current Intranet situation. Who has ownership? Do employees communicate horizontally or vertically? Is the information on your Intranet fresh and informative? Are you considering, or have you recently, revamped your Intranet?

10:50 a.m.

How To Customize The Interface And User Experience Of Your SharePoint Based Intranet

In the middle 2010, DLA Piper LLP, a global law firm, embarked on a total redesign of their corporate intranet. A team comprised of members from their IT and Marketing departments was formed to design and implement an intranet that fostered better communication and customized the user experience.

With the combination of external technologies and built-in SharePoint functionality, they were able to create a custom intranet solution that achieved their primary design goals and incorporated feedback from the user community.

This session will provide you with the techniques needed to customize your interface to ensure a better user experience on a SharePoint-based intranet, including how to:

• Create a thorough design process that in turn will produce a much better product
• Work with, and around, SharePoint to implement your design
• Utilize other technologies to work with SharePoint

Omar Ibrahim, Manager, Intranet & Web Development
DLA Piper LLP

11:20 a.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

11:30 a.m.

Morning Refreshment & Networking Break

11:30 a.m.

How To Share Your Story And Engage Audiences In Order To Achieve Success
Intranets are becoming more participatory and social; they are delivering value in many different ways.

During this whistle-stop tour we'll see 21 great social intranets in action. This session will also provide you with observations from the Intranet Benchmarking Forum about how social intranets have evolved and the sort of interventions which make them effective that you too can integrate into your intranet upon return to the office.

Angela Pohl, Managing Director
INTRANET BENCHMARKING FORUM

11:50 a.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

12:00 p.m.
Networking Lunch

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

1:30 p.m.

How To Successfully Move Toward A Social Intranet: Gaining IT Buy-In, Becoming User-Centric And Integrating With Mobile

Wireless provider Sprint needs all of its nearly 40,000 employees nationwide engaged in order to serve customers and deliver results in a fast-paced turnaround environment. While its intranet has high usage and the company was an early adopter of social technologies, Sprint's intranet team saw an opportunity to leapfrog its capabilities.

At this forward-thinking session, you will learn how you can turn your current intranet into a social intranet where your employees will not only gather information, but stay engaged, including how to:

• Navigate diverse priorities to gain support from your IT and business management
• Create a user-centric approach that will improve site usability and blend social and static elements of your site
• Publish to desktop, tablet and smartphone in a single execution

Terry Pulliam, Director, Communications
SPRINT

2:20 p.m.

Brainstorm Session: Taking Advantage Of Multi-Dimensional Communication Opportunities

Thinking back to the presentations you’ve heard, and your personal experience’s, discuss with your fellow attendee’s and speakers an example of the most successful integration of new media into your intranet that you’ve experienced. What tools did you use? How did you integrate them into your intranet successfully? Provide any tips and tricks you found along the way.

3:00 p.m.

How To Increase Collaboration And Networking On Your Social Intranet Through The Use Of Video And Blogging

The potential to deliver transparent, just-in-time networked-communications makes today’s intranets a strategic asset for businesses rather than a tactical information repository. A social intranet–

• Helps align your employees with your organization’s strategies and goals
• Improves employee engagement
• Delivers information faster, more authentically and powerfully

Quintiles, a global pharmaceutical services company with 25,000 employees, is using networked-communications via its intranet to connect executives, influencers and line managers to employees; and employees to these leaders and each other. Within six months of launching its social intranet, iQ, informal, department-produced videos were being posted to help “tell the story.” Blogging moved from a way to communicate with “followers” to a home page widget called “Newest Blogs.” Subsequently, blog views increased five-fold in one quarter. At nine months into the intranet’s life cycle, individuals have organically started producing and posting video blogs.

This tool-savvy session will provide you with insight into how you can turn your intranet into an interactive social collaboration forum, including how to:

• Deliver a social experience that unfolds at every level within your organization
• Provide tools and training to your expanding population of networked communicators to enhance social adoption and improve communication effectiveness
• Develop a governance platform the encourages employee-generated content and helps mitigate legal and regulatory risks

Laura A. Grover, Senior Digital Strategy Director
QUINTILES

3:25 p.m.

Afternoon Refreshment & Networking Break

3:35 p.m.

How To Turn Your Intranet Into A Key Collaboration Platform That Drives Your Business Initiatives

Founded in 1946, Instron manufactures and services materials testing equipment. Its products are used to evaluate the mechanical properties of materials and components. Instron provides its customers with a wide- range of services related to those products. Headquartered in Norwood, MA, Instron has a geographically distributed workforce with many locations throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

In this session, you will discover how to evolve your intranet into a key collaboration platform in support of your corporate strategies and business initiatives, including:

• Balancing you intranet and company culture
• The governance vs. adoption trade-off
• What makes some initiatives fail while others succeed?
• Discovering if your intranet can grow organically
• Understanding how important management buy-in really is

Joerg Meissner, Director IT
INSTRON

4:10 p.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

4:20 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 intranet initiatives to get feedback and ideas for improvement.

Stacy Wilson, ABC, President
ELOQUOR CONSULTING, 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 Washington, DC’s fine dining while you continue to network with your colleagues.

8:00 a.m.
Continental Breakfast & Networking

8:30 a.m.

How To Evolve Your Intranet To Continuous Greatness And Ensure A Great User Experience Incorporating Four Critical Steps

Intranets are as varied as the organizations that create them. Each one uses different functionality, different brand approaches and different software. But, there are similarities in how organizations manage their intranets to greatness. As intranets go social, these similar characteristics become even more important.

In this session, you will learn four things organizations with great intranets do to evolve their intranets to continuous greatness regardless of the hot new technology – plus two more things you can do to ensure a great user experience. This session will involve looking back at the prior day's presentations to drive this interactive session. You will have the opportunity to share your challenges and successes and learn from each other.

In addition, you will learn from several specific client examples encompassing more than 16 years of intranets and portals experience. While every intranet is different, the great ones share some important characteristics that you too can incorporate into your organization’s intranet to drive success!

Stacy Wilson, ABC, President
ELOQUOR CONSULTING, INC.
Conference Chairperson

9:10 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 expose more people to great content

Edward Ford, Enterprise Community Manager
THOMSON REUTERS

9:40 a.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

9:50 a.m.

Morning Refreshment & Networking Break

10:00 a.m.

Brainstorm Session:
Are Your Intranet And SharePoint Strategies A Success?

Discuss ways that you have been able to successful measure your intranet & SharePoint strategy progress. What tools and analytics do you use? Do you measure whether people are viewing fewer pages while seeking specific information? Whether employees are using the intranet more? Are employees spending more time in the appropriate areas demonstrating the ease of information finding and increased engagement?

10:30 a.m.

Turning An Unsanctioned Employee Network Into An Official Employee Communications Channel

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) is the national service organization for more than 900 not-for-profit rural electric cooperative and public power districts providing retail electric service to more than 42 million consumers in 47 states. Founded in 1942, NRECA has grown to employ 730 employees in Virginia, Nebraska, and throughout the world.

In this session, you will learn how to harness the power and turn an unsanctioned Yammer employee network into an official communications channel for your organization, including how to:

• Determine if it’s worth your time and resources to integrate social tools into your existing intranet or use a third party service
• Empower a few employees to be catalysts to grow your enterprise social network
• Understand your culture to spot and avoid potential pitfalls and landmines early on
• Gain employee and management commitment for your network
  

Adam Parnes, Manager Employee Communications and Development
THE NATIONAL RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVE ASSOCIATION

11:00 a.m.

Morning Refreshment & Networking Break

11:05 a.m.

Improving Knowledge Management & Employee Communications Through A Social Intranet: Finding A Secure, Cost-Effective, User Friendly Application To Add Value And Increase Collaboration

Hicks Morley is a Human Resources Advocacy law firm which has taken an innovative approach with their social intranet which embeds features such as wikis, blogs, tagging, commenting and activity streams to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration within the firm. This session will walk you through the implementation of a Wiki-style Intranet followed by a Social Intranet, which gives your employees the ability to edit content and add pages, and comprises other Web 2.0 features such as RSS Feeds, tagging, blogs and discussion forums.

With the outline of practical tips on what worked and what lessons were learned, this session will highlight the coordinated effort between IT and Knowledge Management to find a secure, cost-effective, user-friendly application that would add value and help increase collaboration; including how to:

• Pilot the wiki concept and building success stories & champions
• Select a provider and cost effective platform that meet your needs
• Implement strategy & updating process
• Identify the benefits of a social intranet, best practices & what worked well

Heather Colman, Knowledge Management Specialist
HICKS MORLEY

11:45 a.m.

Intranet Platforms, Content Fragmentation, And Mobile: Understand The Tools Of The Trade And Learn How To Implement Them Into Your Intranet Strategy

Are you wondering what intranet platforms are out there and how to implement them? Is your organization risk averse or slow to implement new technologies or simply enhance the company intranet? This panel will answer your questions on how various intranet tools are used in the enterprise. Hear the stats on which intranet tools are presently being used (61% of enterprises have at least one intranet 2.0 tool, with blogs, discussion groups and instant messaging being the most popular), and find out what many companies continue to struggle with. Discussions will also cover the following hot trends in intranets including mobile and content framentation.

Panelists:
Shannon Ryan, CEO
NON-LINEAR CREATIONS INC.

Jeff Willinger, Director of Collaboration, Social Computing and Intranets
RIGHTPOINT

More Panelists To Be Announced

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

1:55 p.m.

Brainstorm Session: Your Intranet's Future

Discuss with fellow attendees and speakers what you would do with your Intranet if there were no restrictions, no budgets, no privacy concerns.

2:25 p.m.

Afternoon Refreshment & Networking Break

2:30 p.m.

How To Create A Lively Intranet That Even Auditors And Lawyers Will Love
*** Intranet Screenshots Provided***

After the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen, Congress created a new, non-governmental regulator to oversee the auditors of publicly traded companies. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) opened its doors on January 6, 2003, and come April 2003, had a staff of 24.

Ten years later, the PCAOB staff is composed of almost 800 employees in 16 offices across the United States. The challenge for internal communications—whether messages from human resources, the ethics officer, the travel office or the five-member Board—is a corporate culture based on email and Blackberries. In July 2012, the organization’s first Intranet, myPCAOB, was launched in an effort to centralize important information for employees and highlight social activities that illustrate the presence of life beyond balance sheets and SEC regulations.

With a focus on content and graphics, this session will provide you with usable, scalable tips for producing a must-read Intranet for your colleagues, including your:

• Overenthusiastic IT Director: You tell him you want to do a special edition of an old newsletter to anniversary , he says, “No,” and instructs you to use the content to launch the Intranet, in just 10 days
• Enthusiastic Chairman: He tells you to redirect every employee’s access to the Internet by forcing them to go first to the Intranet but leaves it to you to explain the change to everyone who thought Google.com was a perfectly fine home page
• Skeptical but helpful General Counsel: He and his staff prepare appropriate disclaimers and remind you that anything that appears on the Intranet could also appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. You become obsessed with possible double-entendres in articles and subliminal messages in your photos
• Your co-workers: Some of them love it; some of them could not care less. Some of them treat their personal profiles like LinkedIn on steroids and try to substitute glamour shots for their official photos. Some offices submit so many articles on social events; you wonder when they get their work done. Some offices are so silent, you call the landlord to find out if their space is still occupied

Christi Harlan, Senior Writer
Ryan White, Senior Associate, Communications
PUBLIC COMPANY ACCOUNTING OVERSIGHT BOARD

3:00 p.m.

How To Make Sense Of A Multi-Channel Approach: Initiate The Conversation, Quantify The Challenge And Engage Your Audience To Uncover The Needs Of Your Organization

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is a regulated utility serving customers across 70,000 square miles of California. Reaching employees throughout the service territory is critical but challenging. The utility industry is evolving and embracing new technology in the office as well as in the field. Multiple communication channels are needed to reach a highly mobile workforce.

PG&E utilized available tools (i.e. Sharepoint 2007) combined with creative pilots (Yammer, Video Signage, Show N’Share) to assess the opportunities, challenges and impact of digital communications on a diverse, field based workforce.

• Build credibility and to establish governance that creates a balance between your social media advocates and the business process focus of your company
• Use a Yammer pilot to jumpstart your social media experience
• Impact your overall content strategy with multi-channel portfolios
• Begin to make technology simple while uncovering the highest priorities of employees and leaders alike

Laurel Castiglione, Senior Manager – Digital Communication Strategy
PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC COMPANY

3:30 p.m.

Idea Exchange: Questions, Feedback, Collaboration

3:40 p.m.
Chairperson's Recap: Key Takeaways And What To Do When You Get Back To The Office

We’ll recap the highlights of the past two days and ask you to share key insights and next steps with the group.

Stacy Wilson, ABC, President
ELOQUOR CONSULTING, INC.
Conference Chairperson

4:00 p.m.
Close of General Sessions