Interactive Workshops

• Live stream your way to effective communication


• Developing a social media communications strategy


• Managing the networked workforce

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Pre-Conference Workshops

Tuesday, 29th June, 2010

Melcrum conference participants say our workshops are one of the true highlights of their conference experience. These workshops provide interactive settings with seasoned professionals. Get ready, roll up your sleeves and delve into your favourite subjects.

Workshop One: 9:30am - 12:30pm

Live stream your way to effective communication!

Sam Mutimer & Ben Acott, Think Tank Media

Successful communications today require breaking through the noise, gaining the attention of a targeted audience and delivering messages with ongoing value.

With your messages needing to be delivered to a variety of audiences - they can become diluted and at worst not relevant. Increasingly communications teams are discovering the power of streaming live content and how it's effective use can transform the way audiences receive vital information.

This workshop will give you a basic understanding of this burgeoning tool and will seek to answer the following questions:

• What is streaming live and how can it be used to engage your target market and employees


• Why stream live? How will it better benefit your organisation in your social media communication strategy


• How to use live stream to deliver clear messages whilst interacting and engaging real time with your employees / community


• Case studies of how organisations have utilised live stream in their events / internal and external communication.

Workshop Three: 1:30 - 5pm

Managing The Networked Workforce

Euan Semple, Social Media Consultant

Most of us grew up in command and control cultures where it was assumed that communication passed vertically up and down the organisation and the role of a middle manager was in large part to manage that process. With the connectivity afforded by the web, staff are able to connect with each other horizontally, finding out information faster than official systems can keep up and increasingly expect to not only work in loose distributed teams but also be able to maintain connections with others outside the organisation. This shift in capability and expectations will be a significant challenge for many managers.

This workshop aims to give you the context and the information to make better judgements about what to do, when to do it and how to do it in ways that make the most of this exciting opportunity.

This workshop will include:

• The web generation
  A brief look at what is being called the web generation though in fact it may not be as precisely defined by age as many suggest. What characterises confident web users and what are their expectations of the workplace?


• Networked working
  This section will look at how online tools affect the way information flows around organisations and how this changes the roles of managers and others charged with communication. We will also look at the exciting potential for getting more things done for less using these tools and look at the very practical ways in which they can make a difference.


• Control to influence
  Many managers fear loss of control with the widespread ease of communication now possible. In this session we will argue that in fact managers have traditionally had less control than might have appeared to be the case and that if done well, communication using these tools can in fact increase your ability to influence what happens in your organisation to a degree never before possible.


• When things go wrong
  While there is a general misapprehension about the degree of risk involved in opening up communication in the ways being discussed here, it is important to deal with the issue of what you do when things go wrong. You will be given the means to decide what "wrong" is in the first place and ways of dealing with events if they have taken a turn for the worse.


• Recruitment
  This section will explore recruitment in the future and the sorts of things that will affect new employees' willingness to sign up for your organisation. We will explore how to find potential employees and how to connect with them, how to develop online Alumni and how to foster connections between those already inside your business and potential new recruits.


• Your staff on the web
  The line between work and non-work is becoming more blurred by the day and this is nowhere more true than online. Your staff will be engaging in all sorts of online conversations and some of these will be about work. This section will explore how to help your staff understand what their responsibilities are online, when they represent the company and when not, and how to enlist their support as advocates for your work.


• Policy
  Many of your existing policies will be applicable to online, networked working. This section will explore how they might be applied and how to go about writing new policies if appropriate. We will look at policies created by other organisations and define the key characteristics of effective and workable policies.