PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP

Reinvent your communications in the brand journalism and digital media age

Is your communication stuck in neutral—or worse, going in reverse? Is your writing stale and your video lifeless? Are you having trouble making the important stuff interesting? Are you bored out of your skull?

Sounds like you’re due for an upgrade. Come to our all-day pre-conference workshop with a guy who has been helping communicators like you refine, revise and redefine what it means to be a brand journalist in the new age of storytelling.

Join Jim Ylisela as he takes you through the latest indispensable tools and techniques for today’s communicator.

You’ll learn how to:

• Assess the state of your communications and refocus on what matters most
• Take an important but boring topic and turn it into comms gold
• Incorporate photos and video into your editorial mix using your smartphone
• Change your editorial process to inspire creative approaches to content
• Use brand journalism to take your storytelling to greater heights
• Draw a crowd by combining the power of video and social media

 

Our agenda

9-10:15 a.m.

Self-discovery

No navel gazing or meditation in this session, just an actual assessment of what’s not working, what needs to be fixed—and why. We’ll review the results of the survey you took before coming to the conference. We’ll give you our handy guide to conducting a comms audit and focus on why you’d bother to do one in the first place.

We’ll address these issues:

• What are the big questions from your employee audience that you really want to answer?
• The video audit: How do you assess your digital assets?
• What’s the business case for making big comms changes?

Assignment: Got a tired, boring story that needs a makeover, or a great idea that can’t get approval? Turn one in before you go to lunch. We’ll end the day with an editorial session to send you off with a creative approach to your best story.

 

10:15 a.m.

Break

 

10:30 a.m- noon

Time to get visual

Storytelling has gone visual. No more long, boring copy blocks with nary a subhead to let readers take a breath. Writers need to make every word count. No more “execution at dawn” photos. We need vivid images of a captivating moment in time. No more boring, talking-head videos. We need relevant videos with an emotional center. No more mind-numbing charts and columns of numbers. Give us infographics that tell stories using data, images and words.

In this session, we’ll discuss how to:

• Use a winning combo of headlines, teasers and images to get your audience to click
• Turn a “Photo of the Moment” into winning online content
• Transform captions into mini-stories that take readers to an accompanying story
• Use data, images and words to build a story with an infographic
• Shoot compelling photos and videos with your smartphone

Assignment: Identify a “Photo of the Moment” in your shop and a story that can be told best by an infographic.

 

Noon-1:15 p.m.

Lunch

 

1:15-1:45 p.m.

Go live on Facebook

Don’t worry; it’s relatively painless. We’ll show you the way.

 

1:45-2:45 p.m.

Your content makeover must-haves

Your best story ideas will fall short without a few vital elements. Let’s talk about:

• Humans. Find the best people to tell the story, and get them to say something worth quoting
• Beginnings. How you start a story may determine whether anyone finishes it
• Headlines and teasers. Give your content a fighting chance to be clicked

 

2:45 p.m.

Break

 

3-4:30 p.m.

Storyteller’s lightning round

We’ve picked a handful of your story ideas. It’s up to all of us to make those stories worthy of our audiences. Finish the day with this fast-paced brainstorming session. Our mission:

• Turn topics and ideas into great stories
• Find the best angle to tell the story
• Use words and multimedia to tell the story