Social, mobile, video, and cloud technologies have empowered your customers. Your best strategy: empower your workforce to solve their problems. We describe how to turn your workforce into HEROes—highly empowered and resourceful operatives—and create a HERO-powered business. We answer these questions:

• How have empowered customers changed the business dynamic?
• What strategies can your customer-facing workers use to serve and energize those customers?
• How can you manage your business to unleash the creativity of empowered employees?

Can a company with roots in the 19^th century capitalize on 21^st century social media technology to win and keep customers? For Avaya Inc., a global leader in enterprise communications systems, the answer to that question is an emphatic, bottom-line-results YES! Social media is a natural fit with Avaya’s core business of helping organizations and their people communicate better using technology. When Paul Dunay joined Avaya as Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing in 2009, he quickly set to work building the company’s social media capabilities to better engage customers and meet their needs. Paul will present his formula for creating a social media strategy in a services organization as well as present some success stories and new product innovations they are working on as a result of using social media.

The crazy, complex, and messy world of social media is wreaking havoc with many traditional models of marketing. Instead of passively listening to carefully crafted marketing messages, customers and prospects want to collaborate with companies, co-creating everything from new products and services to the marketing messages that they feel best meets their needs. In this dynamic, hands-on, and collaborative session, Luke Hohmann will show you how Innovation Games® can transform marketing through serious games as you play a game specifically designed for ITSMA members. He’ll conclude the session with a few examples of how organizations have used both online and in-person Innovation Games® to improve marketing messages, co-develop strategic product roadmaps, and identify new business concepts.

Thought leadership frequently comes up as an area of focus for marketers. They associate this with activities such as crafting or articulating a differentiated value proposition or a program to author white papers, or more recently running microsites or blogs. However, these activities do not guarantee that the target audience will associate a company or a brand with being a thought leader in that market space. This is the biggest challenge with thought leadership as a marketing activity. For thought leadership to be a marketing outcome requires activities that not only include but are more often than not, driven by a large number of subject matter experts. It has to be the cumulative effect of multiple interactions or touch-points that the target audience has with the brand. This session will focus on how Infosys aspires to be a thought leader in its market, and how this objective is driven into a number of marketing programs as well as business-as-usual activities.

Can emerging online strategies such as social media really hold a candle to what we’ve always done offline? Armed with the results from ITSMA and RainToday.com’s recent lead generation survey and ITSMA’s social media survey, Julie “Offline” Schwartz and Chris “Online” Koch face off to settle the key issues, such as:

• What should be the relative roles of offline and online in the larger marketing strategy?
• Which is better for building relationships with buyers, online or offline?
• What is missing from both offline and online strategies today?

Referencing his groundbreaking book, The B2B Executive Playbook, Sean Geehan will describe the framework and key principles used in developing a playbook for creating strategic relationships that yield valuable business results for you and your customers.Joining Sean will be Anubhav Saxena, Global Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at HCL Technologies. Anubhav will illustrate how HCL successfully applied these playbook principles and the difference it has made for HCL.  In this session Sean and Anubhav will discuss how to:

• Align your organization to the market
• Engage your most valuable customers using:
  • Executive Councils & Customer Advisory Boards
  • Executive Sponsor Programs and Summits
  • Reference Programs
• Build deeper relationships and sales penetration
• Generate powerful results through sales and marketing collaboration
• Drive sustainable, predictable, profitable growth

In the face of unprecedented marketplace disruption, is it possible to inspire new marketing models that deliver long-term impact?  With intense scrutiny on marketing budgets and programs being slashed or eliminated, what does it take to launch new initiatives – and sustain them? As marketing professionals are challenged to adjust to changing market conditions, what characteristics are critical for our talent to not just survive, but thrive?

Over the past 24 months, Deloitte has made important improvements that support the business model and align to the future direction.  Pauline will share her insights about what proved to be the most effective catalysts, how teams broke through barriers, and thoughts on what it takes for team members to advance the initiatives that matter most.