Move over SEM, there's a new acronym in town and it goes by the name of SAM: Social Advertising and Marketing. SAM may not be as big as SEM but it has the potential to become top dog. As more and more consumers use social networks to query friends and family for things they used to ask Jeeves (and the other search engines), opportunities abound for advertisers to position themselves as answers. In this session, digital marketing guru Aaron Goldman will show how you can leverage key tenants of SEM for SAM and incorporate unique aspects like rich profile data and social graph targeting.

Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and now Twitter are turning to auction based advertising. How should the industry classify this new media opportunity? Is it Search? Behavioral Targeting? Join us for a compelling discussion as several big consumer and B2B brands weigh in and give their perspective on this new form of media along with some best practices on how to creatively execute.

VC legend John Doerr recently coined the term SoLoMo, referring to the emergence and collision of social, local and mobile media. This has important undertones for social media optimization (SMO) as the field broadens to include things like mobile. Does that just mean Facebook on a smaller screen? Or, is it about engaging users with inherently different social tools based on portability and location (including the exploding area of online coupons and local daily-deals)? We'll hear from leaders of the SoLoMo revolution.

The social graph is often defined as a global mapping of everybody and how they're related. For brands, understanding their social graph is critical, as without it they cannot identify their influencers and most valuable customers, let alone reach them. This panel session will walk attendees through the process for charting their brand's social graph, and the analytics they need in place to accomplish this. What's more, our panel of industry experts will provide an overview of some of the most effective ways for engaging those hard to find brand advocates once identified, using examples of companies that have done it successfully.

A new type of crisis communications is starting to take shape – damaging reputations of companies large and small – and businesses are not prepared to react appropriately. A “flash crisis” happens when a negative post on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp or any other social media outlet goes viral and the winds of chatter whip it into a firestorm.

In the Web 2.0 world speed can be your best friend and your worst enemy. Now, more than ever, organizations have to be savvier when it comes to their marketing, membership and public relations campaigns that involve social media. According to a recent poll by PR Week, only 9 percent of staff monitoring social media have previous experience in communications or are dedicated to monitoring conversations online on a full-time basis. This leaves many organizations vulnerable to crisis communications issues they may not be adequately prepared to handle. Join us for a highly informative session as our veteran panelists explore the tools and resources necessary to launch a successful crisis communications campaign. Best practices for responding or not responding to negative blogs, posts or reviews and template examples to notify key stakeholders such as board leaders, members and vendors to prevent the bad news from spreading are all part of the discussion.

As Facebook and other social media sites continue to grow in size, getting the best ROI from targeting different audiences within this sizeable group becomes ever more complex. In this session, we will discuss tools and techniques that can help focus campaigns on the appropriate audiences and optimize campaign performance: geo-targeting, behavioral targeting, multivariate creative testing, and more. Using the same keyword-driven, text ad creatives that run on search engines, regardless of audience characteristics, will not be enough to compete for eyeballs and ROI on Facebook.

The web is a buying engine and communities of interest (COIs) are where the action is. In the dynamic new media landscape, where anyone can be a publisher, marketers need to assure they are listening to and activating COIs by managing their customer engagement strategy through non-traditional access points and social objects that contribute to the conversation around their brand. Content optimization and community activation strategies should effectively complement existing SEO/SEM efforts and bridge channels to drive measurable increased awareness, engagement and extend customer lifetime value. We will demonstrate a proprietary method for identifying, scoring, activating and monitoring communities of interest and present real-world case studies of a Fortune 500 brand utilizing this approach.