Jump-start your training experience by attending these interactive and practical workshops. These information-packed sessions are a great opportunity to network with fellow attendees while taking a hands-on, common sense approach to mastering social media strategies that will enhance your understanding of the informative, case study presentations throughout the entire training.

*** Choose A or B or BOTH for Maximum Value and Learning ***

How To Communicate With Citizens Clearly, Transparently And Effectively Using Social Media -- While Driving Mission Performance

With the call for more transparent, participatory and collaborative approaches to government, agencies have faced the challenge of becoming more citizen-centric in their approach, employing social media tools to help accomplish this task.

With few exceptions, agencies have not been able to uniformly demonstrate an ability to clearly, transparently, and effectively communicate to the
average citizen.

During this interactive workshop, you will learn how government agencies can approach large, complex business transformation/process reengineering projects using social strategy, the short term and long term value it provides, and how to make the process sustainable, etc. You will view social media in government as an internal productivity tool, something imbedded in business process.

You will leave this session with a new understanding of how to integrate social media into all levels of your organization, including:

• Key successes and studies in missed opportunities for being transparent
• How to effectively communicate organizational performance information using social media
• How to drive evidence-based accountability measures at every level
• How to extend performance measures beyond programmatic boundaries
• How you can integrate social media into your overall communications strategy around performance

It’s not just “social media”…it’s the application of a powerful tool to communicate an agency mission in an open way to generate positive mission outcomes, communicate performance objectives, and achieve them.

WORKSHOP LEADER: Giovanni Leusch-Carnaroli, Director, Global Public Sector at Grant Thornton LLP.   Giovanni recently joined Grant Thornton.  For the past three years, he was the associate Chief Information Officer for Business-Technology Alignment and Governance and Senior Accountable Official for Open Government at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Afternoon break/lunch on your own.

12:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
PRE-TRAINING AFTERNOON WORKSHOP B
Refreshments will be provided during this session.

Google Analytics 101 – How To Make Smarter Decisions About Your Website, Social Media, And Email Efforts

You don’t have to be a techie to really understand how your website, social media, and email programs are performing, and how to improve them.  Google Analytics is a free tool that tells you how visitors are using your website, interacting with your email and sharing your social media content: what they find useful and what they ignore.

This session will demonstrate how this can be done, including:

• Setting up your account to track goals, email and social media
• Using dashboards, segments, and custom reports
• Metrics to watch (and metrics you can safely ignore)
• Identifying and focusing on your highest visitors (in order to get more of them)

Ideally you will have Google Analytics installed on your website at least a few days before the start of this session.  Workshop resources include checklists, places to learn more, and quick things you can do to make the most of these tools.

WORKSHOP LEADER: Eric Squair is a consultant with Data Habits. His focus is helping clients make smarter decisions about their online work.  One of his favorite ways to do this is by teaching people how to use the free online website measurement tool Google Analytics.  He has over a decade of experience as a non-profit staffer and independent consultant with organizations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and several federal and provincial political campaigns.

2:45 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.
PRE-TRAINING AFTERNOON WORKSHOP C
Refreshments will be provided during this session.

How to Determine Your Social Media Goals and Measure What Matters: Using the Latest Tools Including Hootsuite, Twitter & Video

From a government agency's standpoint, social media is just white noise if it does not help you meet your mission, goals and objectives.

Your organization's goals and objectives will translate into your goals for social media.

This session will help you meet your social media goals and how to measure the ROI in social media. As assortment of tools and strategies will be demonstrated -- this session will be hands-on and interactive - walking you through various keep tools.

You will also learn how to measure what matters -- and why impressions,
analytics and even clicks can be just numbers and often do not relate to ROI.

Some of the Tools and Social Media networks to be covered include:

1. Hootsuite – A great social media tool which has measurements in it
2. Bit.ly – Another great tool to be used to measure numbers on social media
3. Google +
4. Facebook – How to measure likes
5. Twitter – How to measure numbers and are they everything
6. YouTube
7. Blogging – Yes blogging is social media and can help meet goals
8. The use of video and pictures. How to measure and ensure a return on your efforts

Once you learn how to monitor your social media initiatives and manage a variety of social media platforms effectively, you'll also learn strategies for:

• Proving the value of your social media programs
• Tying your social media goals to your organization's mission, goals and objectives

WORKSHOP LEADER: Rob Cairns is a self-employed consultant.  He is an entrepreneur who is currently a WordPress Designer, Social Media Consultant and Internet Security Expert.  Rob is extremely social media driven and works with clients and community groups from all types of industries, including both public and private sectors.  For more information about Rob go to www.robertbcairns.com

INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP
This workshop is designed to take your seminar experience to the next level and provide you with the opportunity to to take the information you gained from the general sessions, and help you focus on developing your own plans and strategies when you return to the office. Make the most out of this seminar by attending this highly interactive, hands-on sessions. Space is limited to ensure interactivity!

1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
POST-TRAINING AFTERNOON WORKSHOP D

How To Measure, Monitor And Analyze The Effectiveness Of Your Traditional And Social Media Strategies

The borders between traditional media (radio, TV, newspapers, magazines) and social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are becoming increasingly blurry. We’re socially sharing and commenting on mainstream news stories, and journalists are bringing stories that emerge on Twitter to the 5 o’clock news.

As government communicators, you not only need to understand how to operate in this integrated new media world, but also how to properly measure your impact within it.

By attending this workshop, you’ll learn how:

• You can use analysis to set strategy, create content, and measure results
• To effectively leverage social media channels to reach journalists and disseminate key messages
• Social media influences traditional media and vice versa
• Monitoring, measurement and analysis of social and traditional media requires an integrated approach

WORKSHOP LEADER: To be announced.