Let's stop labeling the next generation with words like Millennial and instead focus and think of them as people; by coaching to develop their non-cognitive skills (aka soft skills.)\n\nHow much would your team/company be impacted if you hired graduates with strong interpersonal skills? Could we do a better job preparing students for the soft skills gap of working in the real world? I argue we can and should. The next generation doesn't want to be taught or told -> Could they be guided and coached towards their professional development? What if your new hire understood how to give and receive behaviour based feedback? What if your new hire was self aware of their conflict resolution style and could quickly and easily navigate thru various conflict resolution models? Then why not bring executive coaches into post secondary schools? My Key Take Aways would include\n\nHow executive coaching has been successfully used to develop non-cognitive skills with post secondary students The specific techniques covered in the 15 minute one-on-one sessions the executive coach has with the college students How everyday leaders can leverage these executive coaching techniques to help develop the next tech generation Here is a link to a short 8 minute TEDxTalk I did on this concept at Furman University in South Carolina earlier this year https://youtu.be/ZjZHVBGLs00

The world is on Facebook, if you aren't, or your customer's aren't, you can leverage DNN in ways that make it easy to attract and market to the masses. Utilize Facebook leads to add leads/users/members into your DNN website to grow your audience!

Exciting! You've landed a new client and built them an awesome website using the DNN platform. You've talked about how the website is a living entity and needs to be constantly maintained with new and fresh content. That's what DNN is all about, right? You've convinced the customer and they understand the benefits, but they don't have the time, skills, desire, (insert whatever objection reason here) to do that work and they want you to continue to help them. Ok great, now what? Some customers are in product business that almost create content on their own. They are relevant, timely, interesting, and desirable. For example, think of an ice cream shop. You could talk about flavors, combinations of flavors, toppings, add-ons, dietary choices, events, holidays, etc. All while having gorgeous and tantalizing product photos without ever breaking a sweat as if the content almost created itself. What about service business like, insurance, taxes, automotive, construction, etc. Those types of organizations are much harder to come up with good content ideas, let alone develop some meaningful and interesting content. We tell these types of customers three basic things. One, you need to be top of mind when a potential customer had a need for your services.Two, you need to be perceived as the expert in your field. Three, you need to be doing something above and beyond what your competition is doing in order to stand out and be noticed. In this talk, learn the secrets of creating relevant and engaging content for business in tough industries. Find out how you can be the engine that powers your customers' online marketing strategy. Best of all, learn how this can become a new source of reoccurring revenue for your organization.

Lead Generation is a must have in today's competitive digital landscape. The "Rule of Seven" still applies. In order to maximize your digital ad spend, you must capture email addresses to begin your seven steps to success. We will review email capture best practices and walk through lead generation configuration and campaign development. It is critical user data is associated to email addresses in order to segment your email lists and send targeted drip campaigns. As part of the "Rule of Seven," we will briefly touch on re-marketing and other recommendation tools leveraged to enhance brand awareness.

Content is King, But Sometimes the King Sucks Websites exist for one purpose only to deliver content. There are tons of articles online that are filled with advice and tips on creating content. We have learned to fill our websites, apps, and social media feeds with active verbs and calls to action. We have A/B tested layout and UX design and dumped our Google Analytics into Big Data sets. But up until now very few people are talking about how to make the content we create more persuasive. ## What Is PERSUASIVE Content? Persuasive content nudges the reader over the line from doubt into relative confidence and agreement a kind of belief. If you create content persuasively, the user is more likely to AGREE with you when you're done. They do not feel pressured or concerned about their decision because they not only believe, they WANT to believe, and that belief feels natural to them. Simply stated, persuasive content performs better, is longer lasting, and is more likely to generate customer satisfaction. **Done well, persuasive writing is like a branding and marketing super-power.** Persuasion eliminates friction, giving your content the best chance to succeed. It puts your meaning and messages behind the wheel of a Ferrari racing to the center of a user's head. ## The Elements of Persuasion Persuasion starts inside you. If you are not persuaded, then you have little hope of persuading others. Whether you are trying to create a blog, social media post, eCommerce product descriptions, your About Us page, a white paper, or anything else, you have to start with honesty, empathy, and enthusiasm. We'll talk about what these mean and why it matters. But once you have honesty, empathy, and enthusiasm, all that's left is removing the obstacles and learning the tactics to deliver your message effectively and FAST. ### Removing Obstacles Removing obstacles means dealing with the realities of creating content in 2018 and unlearning some of the lessons that have been drummed into your head over the years. Things like embracing that we must satisfy the Google Search Engine masters AND the needs of the real-live human you want to reach. And learning that no matter how nice your grade school English teacher was no one was EVER convinced of ANYTHING by a perfectly-written five-paragraph theme. Humans just don't work that way and they never did. ### It's Elementary Now that you have honesty, empathy, and enthusiasm and you are no longer chained to any rules or regulations that don't enhance persuasion, all that's left is learning the tactics. This is the easiest part. It includes things like word choice, length (don't get me started), and the intersection of style and tone. Once you have practiced these simple tactics, your content is free to persuade.

Selling a service online isn't difficult. In this talk, we take a deep dive on selling with social the intangible products. You will learn how to utilize emerging technologies and social media, secrets to nurture relationships, easy hacks to break through the noise and find the right customers, and sell more. Austin Luliano is a social media influencer who live streams to over 1,000,000 followers weekly. He is also an award winning keynote speaker, and social media consultant. Austin has worked with top brands like Snapchat, Periscope, Meerkat, Katch, Fox, Samsung and much more. He has helped his clients generate over $2,000,000 in revenue.

Shipping software. There's the pressure to go fast. There's the battle for quality and craftsmanship. The struggle is real. At LeanKit, we strive to continuously improve our processes across the entire company. Along the way, we developed FSGD, which we affectionately pronounce "fizz good.\" FSGD is our thinking tool for shipping Frequent, Small, Good, and Decoupled value. In this talk, I'll share with you the challenges we faced as we scaled, how we struggled, what we learned, and how we're evolving. The goal is for you to walk away with tools and practical processes that will impact your team's success.

Ever struggle getting the other team to understand you? Do you speak techie' while they speak business? Stop the language clash and frustrating misunderstandings with one simple technique. Discover how to communicate with ease, get what you want, and be more productive when working in Technology. The key is to find common ground with the other person that enables rapport and eliminates confusion. Any lack of understanding stalls progress, leads to re-work, and costs valuable time and money. During this inspiring and interactive session, Nancy will show you step-by-step how to: Increase your effectiveness by using a proven communication style that is universal Accelerate the process for obtaining agreement so you can develop faster Improve your cross functional relationships so it's actually fun to work together This is a hands-on talk where you take action DURING the session. You will have takeaways that you can implement immediately in your company. When you discover how easy it is to work effectively with other departments in your organization, you'll wish you learned this sooner.

## Tips, Tricks, and Don't Be Fooled Social Media has been around long enough for us to get some real data. But, like in most things, raw data does not tell the whole story. Social Media is about getting attention, and social media 'experts' like to measure things like: * Number of Followers * Number of 'Shares' or 'ReTweets' etc. * Number of 'Likes' These metrics and more fall under the nebulous marketing term, 'engagement.' We all want engagement, but the problem is that each metric can be faked or manipulated. And even when they are not fake, they can have zero value to your brand or your bottom line. ### Followers: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly We will analyze the elements that make a real 'follower' that adds value and how to determine when a follower is real and when you are just spinning your wheels. ### How Much Is Too Much? How many times should you post? What time of day should you post? Which Social Media platforms should you post on? Like with all social things, *it depends*. But there are real, data-driven ways to answer these questions. ### The Devil's In The Details '_ And The Data We'll look at the data, but only the data we can verify, to suggest Social Media KPIs that really matter to your traffic, your brand, and your revenue (*there's a difference*). We'll also peek under the hood to discuss the impact of influencers and social media advertising and what you can expect to get from them in the real world.

Many businesses fail to leverage Google’s entire product suite and miss out on the best digital marketing opportunities available. PPC is much more than Google Search. Video, aka YouTube, is one of the most underutilized medias available to marketers. Often video ad views are $.02 -.05$ per view. Did you know you can use Google to send custom Gmail emails to audiences based on websites they have visited, demographics or affinity lists? Don’t forget the power of remarketing? What is remarketing, you say? Your not alone. Most businesses have no idea this amazing tool is available. In this session, we will cover Google PPC opportunities, best practices and industry trends. And for some icing on the cake: We will discuss landing page optimization to ensure you maximize your ROI by increasing conversions.

Your beautiful DNN website is worthless if nobody sees it and worth every penny once they do. So after you have it built, you ask your web developer to increase traffic to your site, but traffic generation is a very different skill set from web development. Social Media is the preferred medium to use to increase traffic, but only when done right. Surfers need a compelling reason to click on your post, and there better be payoff when they get to the linked content. Surprisingly, ten plus years into modern social media and companies - even web developers - are still using it ineffectively. So as we start 2018, how can we tell our client's story properly through Social Media so we turn surfers into visitors and visitors into customers? Sprocket has been a website integrator in the DNN Community for years and its principals have been building websites since the early '90's. Five years ago we reluctantly took on social media management but now we fully embrace it and it's become over half our business. Since the web developer may be the only interface many clients have to Internet Marketing, it's important that they learn how to leverage their web-building skills and grow past websites into telling engaging stories anywhere on the Internet. There are principles that govern Social Media engagement, and we'll be sharing them with you in this session. If you are a web developer who hasn't increased your portfolio by providing Social Media, you can learn to get it right in the first place. If you are a business owner looking to improve your overall Internet Marketing through a combination of DNN website and Social Media, you can learn the principles yourself so you know your web developer is on the right path.

You know it when you see it: a great blog post. What makes a blog post great, and how can you write great posts yourself? Dennis Shiao is somewhat obsessed with blogs. He's published close to 1,000 posts and has read far more than that. While not all of his posts have been great, Dennis understands the elements and methodology behind creating great posts. In this presentation, Dennis will cover: - Identifying the business goals for your blog posts - The writing process, including why great writing comes from a lot of reading - How to apply investigative journalism principles to your writing - Blogging mechanics: internal linking, use of images, calls-to-action and more - Distribution: how to promote your posts and syndicate them for broader reach