Tod Maffin

Beyond Social, Digital strategy, author of TOUCH
Vancouver, British Columbia

What Tod is Passionate About

20/20 Vision: The Future of Business in 2020 

In this fast-paced glimpse at what the business landscape will look like in 2020, Tod Maffin will break down the top consumer and corporate mega-trends and reveals how they’ll affect all organizations. Areas explored:

– How will smartphone culture change how people make purchases?

– How will NeuroMarketing affect the way you communicate with prospects and leads?

– Why will you need to begin hiring loyalty concierges?

– How will augmented reality tools like Google Glass change your  business?

– Where will you find relief from the coming erosion of loyalty?

– What creative employee benefits will you need in place to retain key people within your associations?

– How will new market research models like micro-expressions and CRR radically change the way you do business?

– Will leading advances in brain science change your hiring procedures?

– How will you combat “loyalty-sniping”?

It’s a fast-paced look at what the future holds for us all, solidly anchored in real-world priorities.

TOUCH: Five Factors to Growing and Leading a Human Organization 

In a world filled with complicated web forms and digital marketing services, have we lost the “human” element in how we run our organizations?

Tod Maffin is the co-author of “TOUCH: Five Factors to Growing and Leading a Human Organization”.

In this information-packed keynote presentation, Tod will walk your audiences through the seven primary areas your organization needs to focus on to bring the humanity back into how you do business. The Five Factors are:

– Technology
– Outcomes
– Uniqueness
– Clarity
– Humanity

Topics covered:

– Leadership: Defining your organization’s human values, the business language of humanity, becoming a “Chief Humanizing Officer”

– Customer Service: Combating the death of loyalty, fostering a new ethic in your call centres, the role of the “brandividual,” etc.

– Human Resources: The new world of benefits, turning goals into games, launching a results-first program, social recruiting tools, the power of workplace senses

– Web/Social: Understanding the new human digital metrics, creating a people-based online experience, web workflow done the right way

– Sales and Marketing: Identifying influencers and leading brand advocates, exploiting our personal datapools, next-gen human marketing

– Crisis Communications: Responding to those with “digital personality disorder,” the SWARM system, managing your brand reptuation the human way

– R&D: Crowd-sourcing your research, developing products with personality, and more.

It’s time to drop the former focus on “Product, Place, Promotion, and Price” — and instill a new 4P ethos in your organization: People, Promise, Pride, and Pace.

Taking Crazy Back: Mental Health in the Workplace 

With depression rates soaring in the workplace, do we need a radical new way of providing mental health services to our employees? Tod Maffin thinks so.

Once the founder and CEO of a multi-million dollar technology firm, Tod’s workload and always-on personality finally caught up with him and over the following years, he was crippled by a devastating depression and addiction — all the while struggling to appear to be productive to employers and colleagues, and happy and healthy to his friends and family.

In this provocative keynote speech, Tod will reveal to your delegates how this always-connected landscape has seduced all of us into endless multitasking and infinite email — all the while pretending that this increasing workload is the best thing for “productivity.”

In fact, this hyper-connected economy may be both destroying the productivity of workplaces and eroding the mental health of companies’ most valuable asset — their people.

Tod will outline his own bold strategy for bringing mental health discussion out of the shadows in a way that will challenge your attendees for years to come.

Tod’s story is emotional — at once funny and poignant, sad and hopeful. Nearly all audiences give him a standing ovation for his work on the podium. He has spoken for the Canadian Mental Health Association, universities, companies, and many more.

SWARM: Crisis Communications in the Social Space 

Now that you’ve got your company’s social media platforms in place and staff trained, how prepared are you for when you’re attacked on those same platforms, either by angry customers, Internet “trolls,” or ill-informed pressure groups? In a session that can work as a full keynote or intimate session for senior leaders, attendees will learn:

After attending this session, your attendees will know HOW TO:

– Monitor for negative brand feedback
– Get instantly alerted to potential problems
– Respond to attacks in social media
– Convert “enemy combatants” to advocates

In a session that can work as a full keynote or intimate session for senior leaders, attendees will learn:

– Highly effective PEDB (Praise/Escalate/Delete/Ban) flow-strategy for managing your social media presence
– How to create a Negative Response Strategy for your firm
– The most effective, compliance-safe social media policies for employees
– How one of the most talked-about social media campaigns ended up nearly destroying its brand
– Tod’s model of a “web swarm,” and his five-step methodology for responding to a swarm
– How your legal and marketing teams should deal when your brand falls victim to “Twitterjacking“
– Case studies where organizations in your industry have faced attacks online, how they dealt with them, and the results
– Why your organization’s next hire needs to be a Chief Humanizing Officer and what that role would entail
– How to monitor the state of your brand’s reputation daily, with almost no technical expertise

Each attendee will also walk away with a detailed information kit containing regulatory-safe social media policy examples, a sample Negative Response Strategy, a flow diagram of Tod’s PEDB (Praise/Escalate/Delete/Ban) strategy for immediate implementation in your firm, a copy of Tod’s slides, and more.

What you learn at this session may save your brand millions. Or its life.

Smart Communities, Engaged Citizens 

They’re already there. Your citizens and businesses are engaging with each other, talking about your community, and doing business with each other. And your community’s voice is, well, is an aging web site.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Using the same web sites that your civic stakeholders are already using, you could be helping lead the dialogue, getting important information to people, collecting opinion on issues from zoning to schools to property tax. And all with safe, secure, and standards-compliant tools.

Tod Maffin will show your attendees how successful cities and communities your size are already using mobile and social media to be more effective in their communications, cutting costs, and — most importantly — developing an engaged, active citizen base.

He’ll break down three successful campaigns for re-election and walk your group how the elected representative used specific digital tactics. The keynote is fast-paced, information-packed, and fun!

Deconstructing Viral: How to Build a Killer Viral Marketing Campaign 

Can blind luck be reproduced? Absolutely, says engageQ digital‘s Tod Maffin.

Today’s viral campaigns may seem like jackpots in a one-in-a-million lottery, but it turns out they are well within the reach of any marketing team’s grasp. All it takes is knowing the secret ingredients behind some of the world’s most talked-about campaigns.

By reverse-engineering each element of a successful viral campaign in your industry, Tod Maffin will show your audience the key markers that can launch a campaign into the viral stratosphere — markers that can be programmed into the smallest budgets.

He will literally “deconstruct” a viral campaign, piece by piece, then show your group how to re-assemble a campaign for their own organization. And, using his methodology, he’ll detail for your attendees each of the six action steps required for launching an impactful and measurable viral campaign. You will never look at a viral campaign again the same.

After attending this session, your attendees will know how to:

– Develop a marketing campaign that is much more likely to “go viral”
– Convert a brand takeover attempt to a viral mini-campaign
– Create your own ACC-Matching grid to microtarget exactly the right viral influencers
– Craft the right Stunning, Serious, or Silly tone which will resonate with your targets
– Reward and incentivize people who help spread your campaign
– Deliver continued successive rounds to dramatically boost virality

Recruiting and Leading the Social Generation 

How to Manage, Inspire, and Retain Generation-Y and Millennials

They’re fickle, media-savvy, highly-connected and living on the cutting-edge of technology. If your organization thinks grooming your future leadership is about placing stale ads in papers and using old-school recruiting techniques, there’s a nasty shock in store.

Successful companies are harnessing the powerful networking forces in social media sites like Instagram, SnapChat, Tumblr, and Pinterest to find and recruit the future workforce. The Social Generation knows it is in the drivers seat in the workforce these days. Employers worldwide are scrambling to understand what makes this unique generation tick.

In this engaging presentation, Tod Maffin walks audiences through the minefield of challenges involved in this new world of talent management and delivers invaluable insights into the future generation of workers: where to find them, how to attract them, and, perhaps most importantly, how to keep them engaged, motivated and fully productive.

From developing personalized benefits packages to learning an entirely new leadership model, the presentation walks you through, in plain language, the specific areas you need to focus on. Your attendees will hear real-world case studies of what works (and examples where attempts to manage this generation went spectacularly wrong) and will walk away with a detailed kit of resources and notes of the presentation.

– Integrating the Generations
– Living a New Leadership and Management Style
– Rethinking Benefits and Evaluations
– Creating a Safe Space Where Innovation Just Happens
– Structuring a Team by Removing Its Structure
– Fostering Loyalty by Training Them to Leave
– The Six Reasons Millennials/Generation Y Leave Their Employer

The presentation is completely flexible, from a 60- to 90-minute keynote presentation to a half-day interactive seminar format. It’s designed for human resources professionals, small-business managers, and anyone else who works with people aged 18-32.

Why You Need Tod

Tod Maffin is president of engageQ digital, a digital marketing agency that helps such brands as the Grey Cup, Mountain Equipment Coop, Ivanhoé Cambridge, Abbott Pharmaceutical, OK Tire, and more.

He is co-author of TOUCH: Five Factors to Growing and Leading a Human Organization and two other books.  His insights on the future of business have been covered by major media including the Globe and Mail, USA Today, CBC, the Huffington Post, and more.

His energetic, upbeat, jargon-free and highly entertaining presentation style ensures that audiences are not only captivated and engaged, but entertained and motivated. He has addressed audiences around the world — from Stockholm to Berlin and from Romania to Australia — and is one of very few speakers capable of bringing an audience to their feet in a standing ovation at 7am.

In January 1999, he founded MindfulEye, an artificial intelligence firm that developed the patented Lexant technology to perform syntactic analysis on public opinion comments posted on the Internet and aired in the media, thus providing a “mood monitor” of stocks. MindfulEye went public in 18 months and precipitated a meteoric rise in his popularity as a technology futurist.

Today, thousands of professionals in the international media, technology, and business communities follow Tod’s insights. He continues to report on national technology trends on CBC Radio, is the past host of todradio dot com and Real Life Chronicles, and was one of the world’s first podcasters and web masters.

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Why You Will Love Tod

“One of the country’s most influential futurists.”

The Globe and Mail

“Your keynote rat­ings reflected 5+ out of 5 and a stand­ing ova­tion (which is in itself a rar­ity and speaks vol­umes). Feed­back from del­e­gates included, “Awesome speaker, sim­ply out­stand­ing”; “Absolutely amaz­ing speaker!”; “Best speaker ever.”

Elizabeth Lengyel
Conference Board of Canada

“Tod is not a cookie-cutter speaker. Rather, his ability to listen and identify a company’s specific needs and then tailor his approach to its stage of readiness is really unique to most gurus in this area. He is an absolute professional who will enthusiastically tell you your present and future. If you’re ready to hear it.”

Catherine Legge
CBC Television

“Tod’s presentation has fundamentally changed how some broadcasters who watched him at our conference continued their business operations. He is really just that good!”

Western Association of Broadcasters


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