Mark Burgess
President
Mark Burgess is co-founder and president of Blue Focus Marketing®, a brand consultancy that builds brands from the inside out. He is co-author of the revolutionary bestseller, The Social Employee. Mark is a renowned global speaker and delivered a TED Talk on “The Rise of the Social Employee.” Mark followed The Social Employee with a groundbreaking new book, The New Marketing: How to Win in the Digital Age, focused on today and the future of marketing, so MBA students and marketers can seize their marketing journey.
Mark is an adjunct marketing professor at the Rutgers University Master of Business & Science degree program. And he teaches MBA and executive education courses at Rutgers Business School. Mark was published in the inaugural edition of Rutgers Business Review: “Shaping the Future: The New Social Ecosystem.” He teaches online marketing courses at eCornell and UCLA and has designed online marketing and digital certificate programs for leading universities.
Mark began his career as an adman on Madison Avenue at McCann. He has held senior roles in marketing and digital strategy at AT&T and PwC. Mark was a recipient of two Effie Awards for global marketing effectiveness.
Mark is a two-time course author for LinkedIn Learning, including Integrated Marketing Strategies, that is generating thousands of course completions. He was a contributor to the Wharton Future of Advertising 2020 project.
As an expert trainer for The American Marketing Association, Mark delivered industry-leading content marketing and integrated marketing workshops to hundreds of marketers.
Mark earned an Executive MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and a BA from the University of Pittsburgh. He completed marketing certificates at Dartmouth College and Duke University. Twitter: @mnburgess
Cheryl Burgess
CEO
Cheryl Burgess is co-founder and CEO of Blue Focus Marketing®, a consulting firm that delivers future-ready marketing and training solutions to customer-centric organizations. She is the co-author of a groundbreaking new book: The New Marketing: How to Win in the Digital Age — a book that looks to the future rather than analyzing the past, based on the contributions of CMO trailblazers and martech disruptors, behavioral economics luminaries at Yale and marketing sages at Kellogg and Wharton. She is also the co-author of the pioneering and bestselling book, The Social Employee, which features in-depth success stories from IBM, AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Adobe, Southwest, and Domo.
Cheryl is a global speaker and has been named a Top 12 Business Speaker by HuffPost. She is a LinkedIn Learning course author for Social Employees: The New Marketing Channel. Cheryl’s ideas have appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review, HBR Italia, Fast Company, and Forbes; she is a former special advisory board member to The Economist and The Economist Intelligence Unit. Other projects include the Wharton Future of Advertising 2020 program and the popular Wharton Business Radio ‘Marketing Matters’ series on XM Radio. As an IBM VIP influencer and futurist, Cheryl has spoken at numerous IBM events and contributed to leading initiatives such as The Future of Work.
Cheryl is an advisory board member to Omnicom’s sparks & honey, a technology-led cultural consultancy that is disrupting the consulting, research, and agency worlds.
She is a frequently invited guest speaker for Rutgers University graduate programs and has earned a BA in Journalism from the University of Pittsburgh. Twitter: @ckburgess
Social Employee Advocacy Workshops
Half or Full Day
Workshop Overview
Companies of all sizes are investing considerable resources in building a workforce of engaged brand ambassadors and many believe that social employee advocacy is the future of marketing.
Study after study has shown that social employee advocacy marketing generates more leads, stronger branding, authentic engagement, and better ROI than traditional marketing efforts.
Workshop participants will learn to focus on the What and the Why of social employee advocacy marketing. We will cover best practices including how to identify, empower, and activate social employee advocates within your organization. You will utilize a virtually risk-free pilot activation process to ensure social marketing success through the proven five Ds implementation framework — Discover, Design, Develop, Deploy, and Determine.
Jam Session | Half Day
Phase I: The What and the Why | 9:00 to noon
Focus is on the What and the Why. What is social employee advocacy marketing, and why is it important to your company’s brand? No matter what size company, employee advocacy is the future of marketing.
- Session Overview + Introductions + Goals
- The New Normal | Even Change is Changing
- Why Employee Advocacy?
- The Rise of the Social Employee
- The Benefits of Social Employee Advocacy Marketing
- How to Create a Social Brand Culture
- Creating your Brand from the Inside Out
- Brand Success Story (Case)
- Collaboration > Ideation > Design Thinking for Social Employees
- How Social Executives Drive Brand Value
- Why the Best Storytellers are the Best Leaders
- Overview: Success Stories from Leading Brands
- Brand Storytelling and Content Marketing
Design Session | Full Day
Phase I: The What and the Why | 9:00 to noon
Focus is on the What and the Why. What is social employee advocacy marketing, and why is it important to your company’s brand? No matter what size company, employee advocacy is the future of marketing.
- Session Overview + Introductions + Goals
- The New Normal | Even Change is Changing
- Why Employee Advocacy?
- The Rise of the Social Employee
- The Benefits of Social Employee Advocacy Marketing
- How to Create a Social Brand Culture
- Creating your Brand from the Inside Out
- Brand Success Story (Case)
- Collaboration > Ideation > Design Thinking for Social Employees
- How Social Executives Drive Brand Value
- Why the Best Storytellers are the Best Leaders
- Overview: Success Stories from Leading Brands
- Brand Storytelling and Content Marketing
Phase II: The How | 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Our goal is to design a social employee advocacy blueprint that is sustainable and scalable to increase visibility, brand recognition, and loyalty—and reduce marketing spend.
Step 1 | Discovery and Insight Gathering
Step 2 | Design Goals, Social Media Policy, and Responsibilities
Step 3 | Develop Training and Rewards
Step 4 | Deploy the Brand Story and Amplify your Voice
Step 5 | Determine Metrics and Align to Goals
Next Steps: Your Social Employee Journey Starts Today
The Social Employee (McGraw-Hill)
Watch: Welcome From the course: Marketing Foundations: Integrated Marketing Strategies
The evolving media landscape has resulted in the omnichannel consumer, who uses traditional, digital, and social media. Integrated marketing is all about how marketers can leverage the best of these channels to engage their customers. Learn how brand choreography, an innovative integrated marketing communications (IMC) framework, can help breathe new life into your marketing efforts. TEDx speaker and author Mark Burgess helps you use brand choreography—and real-world best practices established by leading brands—to deliver the right message, to the right customers, at the right place and the right time.
Learn about brand value propositions, strategic positioning, buyer personas, the latest thinking on content marketing, and traditional, digital, mobile, and social marketing vehicles. Discover how metrics can help you make better data-driven decisions. Find out how to develop integrated campaigns that offer better customer experience and better ROI.
Social Employees: The New Marketing Channel (LinkedIn Learning + Lynda.com)
Learn how your brand can unlock the power of the Social Employee Revolution! In this 22-part video tutorial series, Blue Focus Marketing shows you how to activate social leaders within your organization, design an innovative content marketing platform, and launch an effective social employee pilot program. Are you ready to take your social brand to the next level?
Podcast - American Marketing Association - Social Employee Advocacy Marketing Workshop Recorded 08.16.16
Mark and Cheryl recorded a special Podcast for the AMA in support of our new Social Employee Advocacy Marketing Workshop.
American Marketing Association (AMA) Face-to-Face Training
Want to create a powerful new marketing channel for your brand? Ask us how to customize a one-day Social Employee pilot activation workshop for you.
Wharton Marketing Matters Business Radio on Sirius XM - Channel 111
Our approach
Employee Experience (EX)
What is the Employee Experience (EX), and how can your organization embrace it to unlock the power of your workforce? The logical counterpart to User Design (UX) and Customer Experience (CX), the EX asks a fundamental question: If your employees aren’t excited about what they do, why should your customers be excited about your brand? At Blue Focus Marketing, we understand that an engaged workforce is a more productive one. By championing the EX, organizations have the opportunity to craft better products, boost social employee advocacy efforts, and propel their brand into the 21st century.
Think of Your Brand as a Planet
As a handy metaphor, think of your brand as a planet, and your employees as satellites drawn into your orbit. It is your brand’s duty to generate enough gravity to hold those employee satellites in place. Otherwise, you may find them drawn to other brands with a stronger pull. If this happens to your workforce, you don’t just risk losing some of your employees, you risk losing your best employees. It doesn’t have to be this way!
Get In Touch
Ready to build real social leadership within your organization, energize your content marketing strategy, or perhaps just get tips on making a really good chicken soup? We’re here to help! At Blue Focus Marketing, we believe that marketing excellence lies at the intersection of authenticity and ingenuity. Contact us today, and we’ll help you craft a roadmap to social business success.
Address: 810 Dow Road
Bridgewater, NJ 08807
Phone: 908.393.4775