September 9-10, 2021
Opening Reception on Sept. 8Swan & Dolphin Resort
Disney World, Florida
Trends and takeaways to capture attention, power engagement and strengthen your brand across major social media platforms and apps
Have you ever looked at a brand’s viral post, tweet, photo or video post and wondered how it created so much conversation?
While there’s no quick strategy to “go viral,” learning how you can powerfully engage with your audience by offering them content that earns followers and creates customers is the best way to ensure you get there sooner rather than later.
At this conference, you’ll learn secrets for creating and effectively telling the stories that drive clicks, takeaways for leading and being part of inclusive, timely conversations across your social media channels and best practices for implementing the most innovative, forward-thinking strategies to engage audiences in new ways.
#RaganDisney
Attend information-packed sessions and inspirational keynotes on the magical grounds of Disney World.
September 8: Opening reception, 6:30-8 p.m.
September 9-10:
- Track 1: Social Media Strategies for Improving Sales, Revenue, Privacy and more
- Track 2: Social Media Strategies for the Future of Communications and Marketing
Networking opportunities include:
- Interactive contest across social platforms using our #RaganDisney hashtag
- Brainstorming activities and roundtable discussions to uncover ideas and overcome challenges
- Marked name badges to find and speak with peers within your industry
- Dine-around dinners on Sept. 8 to network with speakers, sponsors and attendees
- Networking lunches and breaks to brainstorm and discuss what you've learned
- Cocktail party hosted by Disney Parks
- And more!
Registration is now open for the 2021 Disney Social Media Conference. We have put together a “hybrid” event with both in-person and virtual streaming options to attend.
The Ragan team is working in partnership with the Swan & Dolphin Hotel in Disney World to ensure a valuable and safe experience for all attendees.
We know it might be hard to make a commitment to a live event right now. To reflect the uncertain times, we have made all our tickets transferable. If you cannot or choose not to attend, the value of your ticket can be applied to other Ragan conferences, services, or products six months from the September 8th date of the event; or you may transfer your ticket to a colleague.
TOP TAKEAWAYS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM:
- Secrets for finding and partnering with influencers and content-creators to reach new audiences
- Ways to tailor and repurpose your content across social media platforms
- How consumer purchasing behaviors have changed—and ways you can take advantage with paid social ads and targeting
- Top trends and must-follow strategies—along with social media missteps to avoid
- Ways to drive your organization's brand through emotional storytelling and digital content
- How to reach dispersed workforces to engage and connect with employees during times of uncertainty and beyond
- Ways to attract attention and extend the reach of your content, press releases and more through social media best practices
- The latest strategies and changes for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and more
- Ideas for encouraging dynamic online employee communities that boost trust, strengthen corporate culture and increase collaboration
- How to power your social media strategies with data, insights and analytics
- The tools you must have to create and publish videos and podcasts
In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn best practices for writing more inclusive messaging, considerations for audiences across cultures, experiences and challenges. You’ll walk away armed with ideas to make DE&I efforts part of a holistic communications strategy, including knowing when it is appropriate for your brand to speak up and when it’s best to use your channels to amplify the work of partners. Well discuss strategies for avoiding “call-out culture” and using social media as a connector and motivator to helping your brand better emotionally resonate and earn trust. You’ll see examples of companies doing this well, and examples of what not to do.
In this opening session, Ragan Communications Chairman Mark Ragan and CEO Diane Schwartz, will catch up with the audience as we get to know each other to kick off a magical couple of days and the Institute of Public Relations will share the results of their 2021 social media study.
In this session, we will set the stage by sharing some fresh findings extracted from new research by Ragan and The Institute of Public Relations, along with other social media insights and trends you need to know.
In these times of heated bipartisanship and weaponized language, it’s crucial that your brand voice be clear, succinct and direct enough to come through in every post. In this session, we’ll look at ways to arm your social team with guidelines for brand style and voice that echo larger company values and themes using language that your audiences will respond to. Get the insights and ideas to protect your brand from stakeholder revolt or litigation.
You’ll learn:
- How to create a sound social media style guide that emphasizes brand voice
- How to consult audience data while settling on your voice and tone
- When to insert your brand into a national conversation and when to make space for others
- Tips for responding to negative posts and detractors with on-brand language
Amid the whirlwind changes of a 24/7 news cycle awash in post-pandemic health guidelines, vaccine regulations, civil unrest and more, your social team must agree on a consistent, tiered crisis monitoring strategy that starts with listening and escalates responses as needed. In this session, we’ll explore how social teams can respond to unique brand and industry crises, along with national crisis, in order to calm audiences and deepen trust. You’ll learn:
- Tips for crafting social holding statements in anticipation of likely crises
- Do’s and Don’ts on social media when a crisis hits
- How to design and deploy a social listening strategy on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and beyond
- Ways to deploy your social media channels with time-sensitive messaging around cyber attacks
- Tactics for measuring your social monitoring efforts as part of a larger crisis plan
With each new monetization feature on social media, another tribe of influencers is born. As you are encouraged to find fresh revenue streams in each platform update, your strategy for onboarding and deploying your influencers must change, too. In this panel, we’ll discuss platform-tested influencer marketing strategies that are proven to boost engagement, drive revenue and activate your influencer’s pre-existing networks to create new customers and brand advocates.
You’ll learn:
- Best practices to strengthen influencer contracts with performance expectations that align with larger marketing goals
- How to identify the right influencers and create a mutually beneficial partnership
- Ways to manage influencer expectations around style and branding while allowing them to communicate with their authentic voice.
- Tips for incentivizing and rewarding your influencers when they meet projected ROI
- Strategies for launching influencer campaigns that tailor the most attractive elements of your brand to the tastes of an influencer’s core following
Does data still sound like a four-letter word to you? With countless powerful tools to provide meaningful metrics and intelligent insights, social listening has evolved beyond a surface look at clicks or likes to analyze patterns of engagement and predictive behaviors of audiences. In this session, we’ll look at the best data-driven strategies for growing your follower numbers that don’t require you to be an analytics wiz and explore how some simple tweaks can optimize your content to reach your social media goals.
You’ll learn:
- Why data is important to the success of your social media program
- How to build a data-driven social media strategy
- How to determine the metrics worth measuring on social media that align with larger campaign and company-wide growth goals
- How to gain buy-in from stakeholders and establish yourself as a trusted business partner
A savvy social media team requires collaboration between marketing, communications and content people working together to reach audiences in the moment of greatest impact. In this session, our experts will share how they built a social team to reach their audience in innovative, helpful ways over the past year - and make sure all team members were equipped with the resources they needed to work together.
You’ll learn:
- Strategies for determining where your brand’s social media strategy lives in your organization with respect to company-wide goals and KPIS
- How to compose an effective mix of team skills sets to satisfy the behaviors of your target audiences
- Collaborative ways to integrate scheduling and project management tools that keep your social team from stepping on each other’s toes
- Distinct team configurations to satisfy the content production needs across various platforms.
Sometimes telling your brand story requires inserting yourself into social media conversations and narratives that are already happening. As organic reach on social diminishes, a strategically-targeted paid social campaign can reach the prospects and customers who are most likely to respond to your ad. In this session, we’ll review some paid social best practices on Twitter and LinkedIn that drive clicks that lead to purchases and purchases that lead to loyal customers.
You’ll learn:
- Simple starter tactics on paid social like boosting posts
- How to use make the most of in-platform targeting tools while respecting user privacy
- Tips for defining your budget, target audience and campaign length
- Best practices for composing platform-tested ad copy and visuals that drive conversions
In this interactive workshop, you’ll glean tricks and tools for designing social media images, videos and other visual assets in a bold brand style that doesn’t require you to hire a graphic designer or spend thousands of dollars on expensive software. You’ll walk away with practical knowledge about what image subjects, dimensions, styles and video lengths perform best across social channels, strategies for determining brand fonts and style, and tips for mindful image selection that highlights your company values and culture without pandering or tokenizing diverse audiences.
In an age when it seems like every news cycle brings about a new culture war, social media can often become the frontlines for battle. This requires marketers and communicators alike to craft intentional messaging strategies that make space for meaningful conversations while emphasizing your brand’s values and purpose-driven work. In this session, we’ll look at some best practices for inclusive social media strategies that will boost your relevance and strengthen your brand reputation among changing audiences.
You’ll learn:
- Examples of inclusive language that avoids cultural assumptions or stereotypes
- How to showcase diverse lived experiences of your team on social without tokenizing anyone
- Ways to sensitively consult your internal teams before deciding which issues to comment on
- Tips for being an ally on social to partner companies and organizations that share your values
- Examples of brands living up to their words
Clubhouse may have been the first live social audio platform to capitalize on audience’s deepening need for unfiltered conversation while stuck at home, but with Twitter launching Spaces and LinkedIn testing a social audio feature soon the social audio revolution will not be televised (though it will be livestreamed). In this session, we’ll explore the myriad of new marketing and communications opportunities that social audio creates for your brand, and why those opportunities will need to prioritize conversation over content.
You’ll learn:
- How to get your brand onto Clubhouse and other social audio platforms
- Tips on moderating a branded conversation that offers value to listeners without coming off as too salesy or opportunistic
- Strategies for designing a balanced panel of speakers who will create a report with each other that keeps audiences listening
- Tips for repurposing key insights and takeaways from your conversations into podcasts and other thought leadership content
Industry trends show that almost all commerce became e-commerce over the past year, as shuttered storefronts and folded brick and mortar retail pushed more customers to do the bulk of their shopping online. While ecommerce sales continue to grow, looming privacy regulations that limit the collection of third-party data will require social media platforms and marketers alike to reevaluate their social selling strategies with user permissions. In this session, we’ll look at some of the biggest privacy changes that affect the way advertisers collect data and how your social selling strategies should adjust accordingly.
You’ll learn:
- The difference between first-part and third-party data, and what it means for your social selling strategies moving forward
- Lessons from brands with successful privacy-first approaches to ecommerce
- What California privacy regulations like CCPA and CPRA mean for marketers outside of the golden state, and how they are influencing the way advertisers collect data
- How Google’s sunsetting of third-party cookies and Apple’s Identity-based tracking tools will affect e-commerce
- Messaging strategies to customers for permission when collecting their data to target them.
A year of remote communication has also brought a year worth of dynamic innovation (or more) to Facebook and Instagram as each platform has leaned into changing user behaviors with new tools designed to provide strategic shortcuts that will enhance your ecommerce efforts, refine your live-streaming approach and allow you to maximize your efforts on each platform for targeted business growth. In this session, we’ll look at some of these new features with a focus on how they can help you build deeper relationships that stand out from the never-ending stream of digital communication to leave customers feeling refreshed.
You’ll learn:
- The latest in-platform tools for live broadcasting to your customers
- What new monetization and shoppable ad tools to integrate into your marketing plans
- Strategies for becoming an early adopter of new tools to scale your efforts as the features evolve
To wrap things up, our team will bring everyone together for a moderated, town-hall style unsession where we discuss the topics that are still on your mind and you share lessons learned from your brand’s social media milestones so far including hacks for growing your follower counts, integrating new tech and software into your social strategies and much more.
In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn how search engine optimization and search engine marketing play a pivotal role in your digital content and social media strategies. You’ll walk away with an SEO blueprint for your brand, with Google’s latest SEO updates in mind, and tricks marrying technical SEO to a larger multi-channel strategy. You will also discover how to create impactful social media ads and sponsored content that help your brand float to the top and target interested audiences in real time.
As countless headlines and scandals have told us over the past year, your brand reputation can live or die with its social media presence. In this session, we’ll look some of the major ways that your brand and industry’s reputation can be called into question on social media - and what you can do to keep that reputation sparkling.
You’ll learn:
- How to pick and choose what attacks are worth responding to based on share of voice and sentiment analysis
- Tips for crafting distinct responses to misinformation and disinformation that vary depending on the intention of those spreading the fake news.
- Strategies for leaning on brand advocates, influencers and industry partners to stand up for your brand
- Ways to direct audiences to larger landing pages, statements and pieces of content that evangelize your values
The old cliche that there’s no “one size fits all” approach to social media is no truer than when it comes to writing social copy, as the length and structure of your posts should vary from platform to platform based on what type of content performs best on each. In this session, we’ll review some certified best practices for writing social copy that drives conversation and echoes your brand voice with authority.
You’ll learn:
- How to write for the ideal length of social posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Tips for structuring posts with questions and CTAs that encourage comments and conversation
- Strategies for pulling a key phrase or quote out of a story to include your post
- Ways to mix up your social copy when crafting multiple posts about the same topic
The pivot to video never really went away. To the contrary, many brands have leaned even harder into sharable video over the past year on TikTok to more intimately and personally engage with audiences who were stuck at home, hungry for connection on social media. In this session, we’ll explore the myriad of ways that social videos on TikTok can provide value to your audience.
You’ll learn:
- Tips for creating content your audience finds valuable, be it educational or funny
- Ways to repurpose shorter videos as pieces in larger campaigns
- Examples of winning brand TikTok and YouTube strategies
- How to crowdsource content from your audience on TikTok and YouTube
- Strategies for a simple CTA or hashtag to ensure your TikToks and YouTube videos are shared
From the massive growth of Spotify’s podcasting division to an explosion of new podcasts from news media outlets and brands alike, the past year has cemented the medium’s status as a sustainable opportunity for long-form conversations and substantive thought leadership content. In this session, we’ll discuss how podcasts can help you effectively relay messages and your brand’s values to both employees and consumers through this compelling, anytime/anywhere, easily digestible format.
You’ll learn:
- Key considerations before launching a podcast, such as content strategy, length, cadence, and production
- How to select, vet, and prep guests
- The art of hosting and interviewing to surface stories and insights that drive engagement
- How to measure podcast success
In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn the ins and outs of conceiving and creating a brand newsletter for various audiences that gets opened in their inbox. You'll get tangible tips on how to repurpose existing content into a newsletter format, how to promote newsletters across relevant social media channels to drive memberships and subscriptions, along with ways to act on the data from your newsletter engagement and make positive changes to your content and social media strategies. Attend this workshop to get the tactics on lead-gen, thought leadership and branding through newsletters.
The prospect of adding gamification to your social media strategy may sound daunting, but it can be as simple as offering your audiences a contest or poll to derive data and encourage the behavior that will turn prospects into customers. In this session, we’ll look at some of the new and innovative ways that brands have gamified their marketing approaches to keep audiences willing to play again and again
You’ll learn:
- Strategies for conducting polls on social media
- Ways to gamify live broadcasts with interactive contests and more
- How to design a contest around user-generated content that can be repurposed in future marketing campaigns
- Tools and tech that make gamification easy to implement
- How simple acts of gamification, like asking users a question, feed into larger promotional strategies
The mass production of technological hardware like virtual reality headsets and augmented reality software on smartphones has led to a democratization of future-forward storytelling that provides deeply moving, intimately engaging experiences to more audiences than ever before. In this session, we’ll look at some of the underutilized, cutting-edge mediums that marketers are finally catching on to, and how you can integrate these technologies mind-blowing marketing strategies.
You’ll learn:
- Tips for telling stories using AR, VR and mixed reality that engage customers to form more meaningful brand interactions
- How to incorporate extended reality engagement into your marketing plans
- What AI and machine learning can and can’t do for marketers
- The resources needed (tech and people) to leverage AR and VR
NETWORKING COCKTAIL PARTY
Hosted by Disney Parks
Mingle with industry peers, speakers and a few characters (it's Disney, after all!) at this magical networking cocktail party.
Grab your flip-flops and join your peers and conference speakers on the beach for a networking party sprinkled with Disney magic. Enjoy great conversations and superb food and drink. Bring your camera for photo ops with special guests.
If you are interested in submitting a speaker proposal, please contact Justin Joffe at JustinJ@ragan.com
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
If you work in:
Social media • Corporate communications • Public relations • Marketing • Agency communications • Digital communications • Media relations • Employee engagement • User experience (UX) • Data and research • Community management • Public affairs • HR • Executive communications • Branding • Global communications • Public affairs • Internal communications • Corporate affairs
LOCATION
Walt Disney World Swan Resort
| Conference pricing | All-Access Pass* | |
|---|---|---|
| Early bird rate (until 6/25/21) | $1449 | $2249 |
| VIP rate (until 8/20/21) | $1549 | $2349 |
| Regular rate | $1649 | $2449 |
*Attend a pre-conference workshop for an additional $349 each. Or purchase the All-Access Pass and attend the conference plus all pre-conference workshops—and save.
Nonprofit/government discounts: Nonprofit and government organizations receive an additional $200 off the current rate.
Ragan Insiders save more: Ragan Insiders receive an additional $250 off current rates. Not a Ragan Insider? You can become one during the registration process for this event!
Group rates: Discounted rates are available for teams of two or more. Bring your team and save $100 on each registration. (For group registrations, please contact our customer service team at 800-878-5331 or cservice@ragan.com.)
Phone registrations: Please call 800-878-5331.
SPONSORS
Join us as an event sponsor and meet your target audience, showcase your products, present thought leadership, generate leads and boost your brand.
Here are a few examples of opportunities we offer:
- Exhibitor booths
- Speaking sessions on our main agenda
- Lightning talks on our main agenda
- Pre-conference workshop sessions
- Bonus breakfast sessions
- Networking lunches
- Private networking dinners
- Cocktail receptions
- One-on-one meetings
- Networking passes
- Marketing collateral and on-site branding
- Ragan and PR Daily Awards sponsorship
For more information on opportunities available at this specific event, reach out to Hannah Lavelle, Sales & Client Relations Manager at HannahL@ragan.com or 312-960-4628.
Ragan events are educational, inspirational and fun!
Our sponsors are an important part of the success of each event.
For questions related to event registrations, please contact: Shallon Blackburn
Customer Service & Sales Manager
ShallonB@ragan.com
If you’re interested in sponsoring this event, please contact: Hannah Lavelle
Sales & Client Relations Manager
HannahL@ragan.com
For information on programming and speakers please contact: Justin Joffe
Manager of Strategic Programming
JustinJ@ragan.com
