Before diving into various social media tools, it is important to develop a social media strategy. By developing a strategy, you can ensure that messaging is consistent, content is delivered with quality, and your brand is properly represented.

This workshop helps self-motivated, high achievers grow their commitment and competence in development stages for leadership. Minimize your perceived need to micro-manage—and be micro-managed!—by articulating what you need to manage yourself and your work with your boss, colleagues, and subordinates. Discover ways to sell your solutions for success.

Personal Branding is the process of marketing yourselves to others. It is critical during times of career transition, but also an essential element at any point along your professional and personal journey. By thinking of yourself as a brand, you can identify what makes you unique and valuable, and find ways to position yourself in a crowded marketplace. Your brand can open the door to a new career, a new business, a new educational opportunity, a new board assignment, and so much more. This session will explore the process will walk you through the steps to effectively discover, build and communicate your brand throughout your career.

Mobile web usage is exploding in front of our eyes. With the sheer number of mobile devices and their capabilities growing exponentially, how can you make your content accessible to everyone? Responsive design to the rescue!
Back in the mid 1990s, when GeoCities websites and the 3D dancing baby were all the rage, Anthony Ticknor was busy learning to create his own websites. With previous experience as an analyst at Northwest Airlines, and as custom-development-team lead at James Tower, Ticknor joined The Nerdery in 2009 as a front-end developer. Since then, Ticknor has proved himself on hundreds of projects as an expert on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In recognition of his technological expertise and leadership, Ticknor was recently promoted to principal software engineer after a two-year stint as a senior front-end developer. Ticknor regularly speaks on design and front-end development and is the founder of The League of Front-End Developers.
Twitter: @apticknor

Nels Lennes is the Artistic Director and co-founder of HUGE Improv Theater, Minneapolis' first and only theater dedicated to the art of long form improv. In this 45 minute session, the group will learn about improv as an art form and participate in several activities exploring the nature of improv as a catalyst for positive communication, collaboration, and creativity.

Learn from the team that created the University’s first comprehensive brand, Driven to Discover. They’ll take you on the journey from in-the-field research to creation to execution and finally, measurement. You’ll be given all the tools you need to integrate the brand and achieve your distinct marketing objectives.

As the Knowledge Economy has given way to the Creative Economy we’ve seen an innovation explosion. Creativity has never mattered more and truly creative thinking, ideas and solutions are the way to win the consumer and succeed in the marketplace. We’ll share basic rules of engagement that allow you to fuel creativity everyday.

The media is inundated with press releases. What and how professionals at the University present information to make it germane and timely can make all the difference in whether or not events, people, and issues at the University get their due visibility. Looking at tenets of marketing as well as business communications will assist you in gaining appropriate coverage.

Innovation and the design thinking have been successfully implemented and integrated into the processes throughout Mayo Clinic. Using successful communication, messaging and collaboration design thinking has had enormous impacts on how new ideas are generated at Mayo Clinic. Allison, Rose, and Marc will discuss the process of introducing design to a scientifically based practice, how buy-in is gained, and give examples of successful design thinking approaches from experience.

With declining budgets and the never-ending electronic boom, mass email has become common in communications. From planning to execution to follow up, we'll explore a mixture of best practices and common pitfalls with an eye toward Lyris ListManager, the University of Minnesota's enterprise mass email system.

I hope you brought your “get messy” clothes, cause we’re going to roll up sleeves and print some stuff. We’ll talk a little about the process of screen printing, but more importantly, we’ll be pulling some actual prints that you can take with you. Learn, print, get messy.

Joseph Campbell talked about the "Hero's Journey", the archetypal heroic saga. There is a hero's journey in all of us. Any loss, trauma, triumph, viewed in retrospect reveals the ingredients for a story. Based on the concept "there’s the trip you plan and then the trip you take", we will explore methods of creating our own hero's journey.

This roundtable will focus on the ways in which communicators from across the U of M can help with advocacy initiatives. It will include a brief presentation of current advocacy strategies and then a discussion about future plans and opportunities. We want to hear from you, too, so bring your best ideas for improving advocacy communications with you.

What are the best ways in the new media landscape to reach a diversity of communities and constituencies and how do we generate meaningful dialogue on the issues that matter most for people's day to day lives?

This roundtable session is intended for individuals involved in all levels of event planning and coordinating—from beginners to those more experienced. We will begin with some tips from the perspective of the venue and then open up for questions and sharing. Please come with your questions and best practices for events of all types.

Mark and Tim will lead a roundtable discussion on the current landscape of mobile website development and use. The School of Public Health has implemented mobile for its magazine and news website, using a Wordpress mobile theme and is currently developing an Intranet using responsive design.

So you've earned hundreds of fans and followers. Congrats! Now, how do you keep them engaged, interested, and talking about you? Liz will talk about creating content that drives engagement and find your voice, so you can keep the conversation going.

How is video relied on too heavily? What makes a well-told story in moving pictures and sound? How can communication use video to best effect?