Poppulo Customer Summit, USA – September 12th, Chicago

Next month marks a milestone for Poppulo’s rapid growth in the United States – with many of America’s most distinguished brands already clients – when we will host our first customer summit in the US.

With a compelling line-up of internationally renowned speakers and contributors, it promises to be an unmissable event for our customers, thought leaders and employee communications professionals. In previous years, the Poppulo customer conference was one of the highlights of the internal communications calendar in Europe, and now it’s coming to the USA..

The decision to bring the customer summit to Chicago next month reflects Poppulo’s rapid expansion in North America and the response we’ve already had from our customers has been tremendously positive.

The summit at the Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel will bring together Poppulo customers from throughout the US, three leading keynote speakers, highly engaging panelists and compelling case studies from Bloomberg LP and GSK.

It will be a day of exchanging best practice insights, learning from thought-provoking workshops and networking in friendly informality with some of the brightest minds in the employee communications industry.

But just like all Poppulo customer events, we believe it’s really important that the summit delivers actionable insights for our customers, whether they are Communications Directors, Managers or Executives.

They can look forward to listening to our brilliant keynote speakers, David Grossman, Lesley Everett and Rob Biesenbach; they can learn from the incredibly informative insights of Ethan McCarty of Bloomberg LP and Richard Gera of GSK and they can take part in panel discussions with Stephanie Down of CGI, Mike Goonan of Sealed Air, Josh Chapman of Charter Communications, and Glen Turpin of First Data. In addition, Lindsay Jones and Alyssa Hagan, both of HealthSouth Corporation will take part in what promises to be a really interesting Q&A.

Poppulo CEO Andrew O’Shaughnessy, who has long recognized that employees are a company’s greatest asset will give a brief welcome to guests and he will be accompanied at the event by Poppulo colleagues from our offices in Boston and Ireland .

David Grossman, founder and CEO of The Grossman Group, is one of the most respected figures in internal communications, having counselled many of the biggest names in business over the past 30 years to drive employee engagement and bottom-line results.
We’re all really looking forward to hearing his views on 21st Century Communications.

Lesley is respected globally for her expertise in corporate and personal branding and we got a tremendous response to her Poppulo webinar. At our customer summit she will focus on the significance of the corporate brand, linking to the IC function, linking in turn to the increasing importance of the personal brand in business.

Rob is a master of what people can’t seem to get enough of: storytelling. If you Googled the word at the beginning of May it had been searched for 82 million times. A week later it had climbed to 84 million. This month ‘storytelling’ is tipping 97 million!
So we look forward to hearing Rob in full flow on such a fascinating topic.

As well as hearing from David, Lesley and Rob, customers at the summit will have an active part in participating and presenting throughout the day. One thing we’ve learned down through the years through our dedicated customer success team is that internal communicators are always interested in what their peers are doing.

A total of eight customers will address the summit, all senior members of their own company’s internal comms teams. Some will participate in a panel session while others will present case studies of how internal communications operate in their own companies.

One of those case studies will come from Ethan McCarty, Global Head of Employee & Innovation Communications at Bloomberg LP. Ethan’s team have recently adopted Poppulo and it’s tremendously exciting to work so closely with them to elevate employee communications even further at Bloomberg.

Ethan will talk about ‘Rethinking Employees and Employee Communications’. He will outline how imperative it is for companies to recognize employees as a network to communicate with, and through, not simply ‘to’, and how previously segmented internal and external communications are increasingly blending in strategic digital cohesion to achieve business goals.

He will take us through his fascinating journey at Bloomberg LP where three years ago the internal communications function was of the traditional ‘postal delivery center’ variety to where it is today, a strategic capability for the organization, driving significant behavioral change. It promises to be a fascinating story.

Our other case study will be presented by Richard Gera, Digital Communications Channels & Services Director at GSK, who will fly especially from the UK to present at the summit. His presentation is titled ‘Moving from the theory of digital workplace to a reality that senior leaders buy into’. Richard will share GSK’s journey over the last six-to-nine months of moving from the theory of digital workplace, to a tangible program of work that senior leaders take notice of, fund, resource and proactively sponsor. Summit attendees will gain insight into GSK’s implementation of their ‘Making it Easy’ strategy, centered around creating a more cohesive digital experience that employees love.

Poppulo’s VP of Product, Mossy O’Mahony will present our always-innovative product roadmap and customers will get to hear about what we have in the pipeline. Mossy will also host a Q&A with Lindsay Jones and Alyssa Hagan, both of HealthSouth Corporation who are pioneers of our ground-breaking Cross-Channel Analytics product. The ability to quickly and easily assess and analyze the effectiveness of employee communications across multiple channels (email, intranet, video and social) is adding huge strategic value to our customers and this Q&A will provide a real example that in action.

Finally, we will be conducting three workshops on how to optimize what the Poppulo platform can achieve for organizations. We have found in previous workshops that they facilitate greater awareness of features that may be underutilized by some customers, who learn from interacting and networking with other customers and Poppulo staff at the event. This year, we will be highlighting further improvements to our Events Module and we look forward to telling you all about them.

If you are a Poppulo customer and are interested in attending the summit on September 12th, please visit our dedicated webpage where you can register your interest. If you have any questions, please email conference@poppulo.com.

If you would like to find out more about how Poppulo can improve employee communications in your company, why not contact us for a free consultation.