Digital Influence Mapping Project

Where Should Brands Spend Their Social Media Budget?

Last post I proposed benchmarks for what percentage of a B2C marcom budget should be spent on social media. The next logical question is how to allocate that spend. Clearly every product, business goal, world market and end user target will impact that answer. Despite the recent gains in more seniors adopting digital habits, I still wouldn't use the Old Spice video strategy to reach 65 and over Americans. Context matters.

Two ways to spend

Looking at just traditional marcom efforts (leaving out functions like customer care), there are two ways to spend on social media marcom. The first is campaign spending. This is what we awere all trained to do. It is also the only thing any of the awards programs out there pay attention to. The second is the sustained, persistent support of always-on platforms Like facebook and Twitter. We call it everyday engagement. Call it whatever you want but it has a lot to do with successfully building a direct relationship with customers and followers.

They are not exclusive. They work well together. It's tempting to put all the money in the campaign spend - the big YouTube play, the cgm/ugc contest, the unique Facebook tab. This is what will get you noticed inside and outside the company. But without the foundation of the everyday engagement, you may never keep that hard-won fanbase.

Like any new venture, building a foundation in social media requires investment in the early years. To get the "center for excellence," and its primary programs, off the ground, you need to hire some staff, spend on some first-time expenses, and learn from experience. Most of the everyday engagement effort - creating and publishing content, monitoring cgm, responding to people and customer care triage - do not require a big one-time cost. They require a recurring cost in human time and some expense.

The First Three Years

Year one - in the first year of true commitment to social media marcom, you can expect splitting a budget with most going to campaigns

campaign 80%   everyday engagement 20%

Year two - now you can invest in some infrastructure. You have gained campaign success, earned points for social customer care Twitter handles, and generally proven to leadership that this is worth doing. Now is the time to get a Buddy Media or Vitrue license, trade-up on your Listening post, and float some more sophisticated campaigns

campaign 50%   everyday engagement 50%

 

Year three: - truth is you will never dial back on your everyday engagement. What you will likely do is ramp up your paid media integrations with your truly "earned" social media efforts. It may not be fair to lump those in the equation here but I have. That's what explains the flop back in favor of campaign spend.

campaign* 80%   everyday engagement 20%

How do you split your spending?

*includes some media spend. Take that out and your back to 50/50 or even 40/60

How Much Should Brands Budget for Social Media?

What percentage of a B2C or B2B brand's budget should be spent in strategies and tactics that we would label "social media-related?" Within that percentage, how should the money really be applied with the big amorphous box we all call social media? Big questions. I find it hard to generalize while at the same time am driven to try and do just that. I want to establish some benchmarks based upon all of the brand work I have seen or touched in my job. Clearly what is right for a Unilever may be very different than what is right for a Siemens. Selling cars (Ford) is dramatically different than mobile phones (LG). Running your business in North America may be very different than China.

All these differences aside. I do see a common trajectory of 'spend' at least as applied to B2C and separately to B2B. That path has more to do with increased experience in social media tactics, the adoption of, what I will call, a social media business mindset and the integration path for social media going forward.

Experience in social media tactics - For simplicity's sake, lets look at what most marketers go through (including this one). Here are three stages of adoption:

• Social Media Experiments - usually the first year or two of unconnected social media programs involving bloggers, video content distribution, cgm/ugc contests and other tactics.
• Adoption and Integration - in the following years, the value or success of social media is felt within and there is a push to do more and integrate it with more people and disciplines.
• Go 'Big' - after some experience and success following integration, brands can't help but want to "go big" either with a substantial facebook campaign or a more impactful integration (e.g. committing to 20 people in social customer care via Twitter and Live chat). usually these brands have sketched out a measurement model that reassures them the effort is smart business.

Social media business mindset - Is using social media an obligation due to outside pressures (your CEO, board, competitors all told you to do it in one way or another)? Or do you see a way - perhaps murky now - but a way that all of the implied qualities of social media may actually change your business? I see plenty of CMOs and CCOs who fit into both camps. So, the choice is between social media as obligation or social media as quest.

Integration path - The future value of social media is integrated in every discipline. Just as all marketers hoped that "digital" would be the new normal in marketing (it pretty much has), we expect that social strategies and tactics will be integrated in many disciplines. Look at Coach's The Poppy Project. Anchored by a microsite and a "Stumble Upon-like" tour of great fashion blogs, how much of this is social media vs. what we consider digital marketing? How much was the whole project spend and what would you label it? You could probably do it if you had the numbers. Now think ahead into the future. As programs get more complex, Facebook Open Graph becomes ubiquitous, brands adopt Social IRM - what can be distinguished as social media and therefore "budgeted" becomes harder and harder.

In many cases, brands will likely embrace the most valuable output of social media - advocacy (or word of mouth) and engagement - as 'must haves' for every program and brand. Key activities will continue to be labeled social media while more and more social elements will get baked into PR, user experience, digital marketing and more. In this way social budgets will be dispersed in the organization.

Rilla Delorier, CMO of Suntrust Bank, mentioned via AdAge:

"The great thing is less than 5% of my total spend is in social media. We've reached over a million customers this year through that mechanism. It's a very efficient way to get feedback on what's working and what's not."

She said this in context of a program called Live Solid. This features a microsite with embedded YouTube videos, a Facebook page and a Twitter handle amongst may other online tactics (SEO? SEM? Display? CRM?) and likely some related offline programs as well.

I don't have an inside view of Suntrust's experience. As a customer, this is the first remotely social program I have experienced. I figure that they are in the Experiments/Quest or Adoption/Obligation quadrant. What I can't tell from her quote is whether Rilla is a believer on a quest or proud of the fact that she only spent >5% to be able to check the "social" box.

Spend Matrix

Here's my view of total spend in single market from a prototypical $10m B2C marcom budget (modest to some, inadequate for big brands)

 

Mindset	Obligation	Quest	Well-Integrated*
Stage
Experiments	1%	5%	na
Adoption	5%	10%	6% (12%)
“Go Big”	7%	12%	10% (17%)
	Percentage of prototypical $10m marcom budget
	*budgets get lower as money is integrated into other functions. Total percentage is in ()

How the Fringe Festival Gets the Word Out

 

I just got back from a first time-trip to Edinburgh. The highlight as many of you likely know was the Edinburgh Fringe Festival which takes over the city for about 5 weeks in August and September and segues into the not-so-fringe Edinburgh Festival. The Fringe is hundreds, if not thousands, of performances - theater, comedy, dance, music, children's shows, opera and more. Shows are happening at a couple hundred venues across town from the morning until late into the night. It's an exciting (and trying) time to be in Edinburgh. 

My question is how do you navigate such long tail abundance? 

Many of the residents sample the shows. One refrain I heard often was that the prices of shows have gone up to the point where sampling with your feet (walking in and out of shows) was no longer realistic. Our cheapest ticket was about 7 pounds although I saw quite a few below that and even some free shows. Our priciest ticket was probably 16 pounds. 

I am no expert on the Fringe. But I shouldn't have to be to figure out where to place my bets, so to speak. I saw marketing break down in 4 basic categories:

Print and Out-of-Home  

This festival runs on paper. The wall posters were everywhere. Giant grids of posters showing a range of design and advertising skill. Pretty soon, it all became a pattern of colors, shapes and faces who I felt I should recognize but didn't. An official Fringe guide was a nice size book with entries for every show. It felt like a small phone book. Browsing it became a lifetime ambition. If you had the iPhone app as I did, there was no real reason to refer back to the book. I will say that the brand consistency between the program, Web site and the app was very strong and gave me confidence that I was looking in the right place. 

Human Experience

Performers and supporting staff were out on the streets handing out the other over-abundant print object - postcards. There were postcards everywhere. We all walked home with stacks of 5-10 from any given stroll. It seemed rude not to accept postcards from struggling performers. Sometimes the performers would try and coax you into a show about to start. One group of "Bagpipe Dads" followed us humming their human bagpipe sound until we took their postcards and made a gesture that suggested we would consider attending the show. 

This human experience is clearly part of the charm and helps make the sidewalks come alive. Most are in costume so you would be getting cards from zombies, warriors, kilt-wearing Scotsmen, fairies and punks. 

Digital Utility

The Web site is very strong and has one thing the truly great iPhone app didn't have - reviews. First the app. The darned thing was designed really well. It was synced to your clock so when it launched, it displayed the next shows by time. You could sort by category and make a time selection. This really pays off on one of the chief attendee behaviors - attending a show based upon time of day and serendipity. More importantly, it allows you to tag shows and create a favorites list. It is much easier to browse and track availabilities for a dozen shows then several hundred. 

But the app didn't have reviews. That is the one big thing the entire experience was missing. Then, of course, I realized when I got home that the Web site had reviews - both official critics and the crowd. Had I known, I would definitely have used the reviews to make some choices. Problem is that I was often out and about while making those choices. the reviews really needed to be baked into the app to be truly useful.

   

Social Web

The Twitter tag was #edfringe and I followed it prior to arrival. I am sure there were all sorts of other tags associated with particular venues or even shows. I just wouldn't have had any reason to use those unless I was more of an insider. Because I was traveling and ringing up a fair charge for data, I limited my FourSquare usage so I never figured out if the venues were really leveraging that platform. But again, it wouldn't help a newbie select a show more than reward a repeat user at a particular venue (again, there were hundreds of venues and no reason to stay at one). 

I was traveling with my family. Had I been on my own, I likely would have looked for tweet-ups and other social gatherings and memes to participate in. 

Two things for next year:

1. With such a flood of choices, we need credible, easy-to-navigate reviews on our mobile devices. That means reviews from folks we can trust and some assurance that the reviews are not being 'gamed' in any way. What a terrific sponsor opportunity though - drive reviews through a brand contest of some kind. 
2. We could try to establish a hashtag scheme that helps us all find quality. Perhaps a series of hashtags denoting quality - #edfringe_A for a great show, #edfringe_C for a so-so show. With my tweetdeck tuned to three channels, I could quickly see what is rising to the surface. 

A great experience. If you go, get the app. 

And last but not least, check out this Flickr gallery for some great shots of the people there. 

Brands: Claim Your Facebook Place Today

 

Facebook is going on a feature binge. The latest installment is, of course, the much anticipated Facebook Places. With 150 million of the 500 million Facebook users accessing the service via mobile device, this will be a big step for brands that have customer POS or PO I("points of interaction"). That means if you have retail stores, dealerships or even temporary events like conferences or sampling events you should take steps today to claim your actual "place" today.

Why You Should Care

Location-based marketing and communication is one of the next 4 big trends (stay tuned for the other three) and is not a simple passing fad. Combining social behaviors (communicating with friends, meeting up, broadcasting your lifestream) with geolocation information has proven itself valuable with the rapid growth of services like Gowalla, FourSquare and the geolocation-enhanced Yelp. I "check-in" to locations all the time via FourSquare and enjoy connecting with people I know as I travel. The social value of these services are outlined well in Facebook's video on the launch of Places (see below). 

Facebook has an advantage over FourSquare: As with other location-based services like FourSquare, people will 'check-in' at your location. If you are a car dealership, they will check-in. If you are a restaurant, they will check-in. If you are a B2B company at a trade show, they will check-in. The feature will attract those already using other geolocation services and, more importantly, it will attract Facebook users new to this feature/service. The sheer critical mass of friends on Facebook will drive many to use this feature within Facebook vs. another service that cannot access their Facebook friends. (e.g. I only see my FourSquare "friends" when I check-in via that service)

People will explore using this feature: As the Internet continues its migration beyond the desktop, people will explore new ways to leverage access wherever they are. They will (are) accessing relevant services which means relevant to their location and context. From social benefits (connecting with friends at the Grinderman show) to utility and value (earning loyalty premiums from local hotels), consumers will try new ways to derive value and brands should be all over that.

The price of entry is relatively low: Even if you are skeptical about mass-adoption of geolocation services or, gulp, doubtful of facebook's ability to steal the thunder from Loopt or FourSquare, the price of getting involved and claiming your POS and POI today is so low you should do it. Oh, and you shoudl establish and claim your own place today before someone else does. Just like on FourSquare, anyone can establish a place. Three reasons why that matters:

1. You want to put your best foot forward. When folks go to check-in at your location, you want them to see the best, most accurate information not some half-baked entry or worse from an unaffiliated user
2. You want to harness the content and social graph of users willing to check-in at your location and that will be most impactful if you have established one, comprehensive listing for your business. Even as a user, I hate when I check-in at a location only to find that there are 3-4 duplicate listings for a place with insignificant differences in the record for that place. As a brand, you want to have as many people as possible checking in to your official Facebook Places records. You want to consolidate the reach of their social graph around your best location(s). Remember when they check-in, they are broadcasting a message via their New Feed to all of their friends - "hey I just arrived at Pete's Apizza..."
3. You want to start accruing the benefit of consumer generated media which is what gets created when folks check-in at your location. Brand presence today is created by third parties. That's what is most credible and most scalable. 

Here's how Inside Facebook sums it up:

"In other words, any business or other organization with a physical presence should make sure to claim and manage their Place page. The most immediate reason is that lots of users will be generating content on the page, with or without an admin to moderate it. The more important reason, though, is that Places is a promising new way to connect with customers, clients and partners."

What You Should Do

Do three things today to prepare you for a fuller use of Facebook Places today. There is little risk inherent in these initial steps save for the effort involved in taking them. For brands with hundreds or thousands of POS/POI's the combined effort may be significant (e.g. getting 3000 stores to create their individual Facebook Place entries may add up. And currently Facebook functionality requires individual entries created from the actual geolocation. In other words, the store managers will need to do this). 

1. Claim or establish your business inside Facebook Places - Inside Facebook has the best DIY guide to setting up and/or claiming places for your brand. This site, in general, is a terrific resource to understand Facebook and it remains one of my daily feeds/reads. 
2. If you are brand with many locations, create a template of 'best-practice' information and circulate to POS/POI managers to implement
3. Make it someone's job to monitor your Places check-ins

More advanced steps - if you are farther along with location-based marketing and/or consumer reviews than you are likely all over this already. You will likely want to jump ahead and prepare to use the service more proactively:

1. Create a response plan much like you would for FourSquare or Twitter such that you can reach out to loyalists who check-in at your locations and/or triage customer service issues shodul they complain via that feature. 
2. Build a promotion around 'check-ins' to reward the behavior and build usage. Brands have quickly learned how to use the Facebook "Like" feature to promote social graph pass-alongs (have they over-used it? ). Now do it with check-ins by rewarding the behavior
3. Add a Facebook Places section to your social media "Activation Guidelines" that tells business managers within your company how to leverage the service feature. "Activation Guidelines" are part of the governance package that corporate social media 'Centers for Excellence' (see this post) can create for their organization. Unlike the typical 'social media guidelines' intended to communicate the do's and dont's of social media behavior to employees, activation guidelines are the accumulated best practices and social brand governance meant o guide the best, most impactful social media marketing practices throughout the enterprise. 

(image of Facebook Places dialogue box respectfully reproduced from Inside Facebook)

Facebook's video describing the service for your viewing pleasure (Facebook has done a good job communicating via video)

7 Responsibilities of the Enterprise Social Media 'Center'

There seems to be a shared experience among big brands as they advance along their use of social media. many are quite sophisticated in terms of the programs they are deploying from social customer care to alternative marcom programs to B2B lead generation. Many start by hiring the one "social media guy/gal" and then evolve to a core group (3-7) that form a "center of excellence" around them. This "center" is actually a federation of of folks from other departments - marketing, communications, HR, customer service, product development and more. 

Often the center of excellence is formed after some experience with social media marketing  - even years worth of marcom programs and basic social web page deployment (e.g. lets get our main Facebook page and Twitter handle up and active). All sorts of challenges arise at this point not the least of which is the CMO's Dilemma. 

To put social media into high gear and realize the true potential of integrated programs, the core social media group (the core of the "Center," if you will)  needs to tackle 7 key responsibilities:

1. Form the Center of Excellence: Since 'social' affects many parts of the enterprise, it's best to set aside all claims to "who owns social media" and form a working group from across all disciplines and departments. Lest this devolve into committee-hell, establish an agenda around some of the other responsibilities.  Our "Center" has 4 main activities:

• share best practice planning frameworks for how to do social media well
• establish measurement models that are reliable and responsible
• collect and share our toolbox of services, software and solutions
• convene a forum for sharing cases and solutions to keep learning and innovation going

2. Establish order on the use of the branded social Web: let's face it, having an 'anything goes' hands-off approach to determining how Facebook is used within the organization doesn't serve the public very well. By this time, most organizations have dozens of rogue Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn groups - all sorts of videos and images and more. A customer or influencer searching for something about your brand has to weed through all that, magically detect the 'official' pages from those set up by an enthusiastic employee in India and then decipher the official pages set up by 6 competing business units. Never mind the customer-created pages. Time to sort that out. 

This group is also the right one to define how best to use different platforms all the way down to some tactical details like should you embed photos in your Facebook page or use Flickr with an app. 

3. Draft policy and governance: How should employees use the social Web?  What is your official stance on FTC Guidelines in the US? What will be your disclosure and behavior policies abound the world? If you deal in healthcare or finance, how will you interpret federal regulations in different markets? Today there are ample risks for brands from employee behavior online like the Dominos case to FTC Guidelines issues like the Ann Taylor case (all resolved). Time to be clear to avoid unnecessary risk and pave the way to productively using social media. 

4. Define common measurement: This is the #1 barrier to the growth of the use of social media within an organization. The Center can be a hard-charger for putting in 'pretty-good' models immediately. Usually this is establishing some shared meaning and respect around some KPI's (e.g. does the organization value social media impressions? How about sentiment in word of mouth? How do we interpret the participation metrics in our Facebook page?) Engaging the research and measurement leaders in the organization to work as part of the Center and throw out workable models early on is key. 

5. Establish a forum to share best practices: We are all innovating here. We need a place where we can share what we have learned and, ideally, it would be a forum that encourages sharing failure too. Many organizations only talk openly about successes. Sometimes they gloss over lessons learned from things that didn't go quite right such that they can spin an experience as a success. Strive for success and celebrate failure. Thats what we learn from. Just be sure to  create a meeting, a wiki - whatever your org uses to share learnings or you may lose all those great lessons. 

6. Write a training curriculum: Many organizations have training specialists. Still, the Center learns from experience and is best suited to codify learnings into teachable lessons. The training group in HR can eventually deliver that training but so much of what works in social media comes through experience, it is tough to get anywhere unless practitioners have a hand in the curriculum. Identifying influencers online is trickier than it seems. Knowing how to accelerate word of mouth via paid media without spoiling the organic interest can be dicey. 

7. Implement a listening post to serve the enterprise: there are hundreds of listening technologies out there. Each has its strengths. Inside the organization, some business owners want a source of marcom insight. Some want monitoring for rapid response for customer service or crisis. Still others need to benchmark cgm for measurement purposes. Sorting through all the use-cases and all the technology claims to find the best match is tedious and can be expensive. If the Center takes this on, they can potentially save the enterprise money and time by evaluating for all needs. The same is true for any shared investment like social content management systems (e.g. Buddy Media, Vitrue, Context Optional, etc...). The Center can play an important role for many of these shared investments. 

There is a hidden 8th responsibility. You might take it for granted - I have on occasion. The Center of/for Excellence and the core group should be a champion of innovation. That is not as easy as it sounds. most of these other responsibilities are about developing the reliability of the use of social media. If you are a fan of Roger Martin like I am then you know "reliability" is at the other end of the spectrum from validity - the domain of innovators. Innovators are not always weighed down by the burden of proving something based on historical data (reliability). They are trying to prove that something new is valid. Somehow, the Center for Excellence, must deliver the evidence that helps optimize the organization's use of social media while actively trying new things with new partners, platforms and technologies.  

The Next Media (from Brands, too) Delivers Value First

Lee Rainie, Director at the Pew Internet & American Life Project put together a nice presentation about their latest study on how media consumption has changed since 2000. Towards the end, he offered a slide on a different model for the media organization of tomorrow (really today). 

 

This is a perfect outline for the role of the news organization and for the brand stepping into the content creator role. Almost all of these eight functions can also be played by a brand. The one exception is "watchdog" as that role inherently begs for a third party whose interests are only on the public good. 

Here is the full presentation:

How Media Consumption Has Changed Since 2000

View more presentations from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

How We Get News and Information

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released some interesting research about how Americans are getting news. No big mystery that the Internet is more and more the center of that universe. But interestingly, there is also some tension between our habit of foraging around to many sources - online and offline-  and our sense that we only go to a few sites to get news. 

"The process Americans use to get news is based on foraging and opportunism. They seem to access news when the spirit moves them or they have a chance to check up on headlines. At the same time, gathering the news is not entirely an open-ended exploration for consumers, even online where there are limitless possibilities for exploring news. While online, most people say they use between two and five online news sources and 65% say they do not have a single favorite website for news. Some 21% say they routinely rely on just one site for their news and information."

The report also identifies our other big behavior - making news a shared experience. 

"To a great extent, people's experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads. For instance, more than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails."

"...And 50% of American news consumers say they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know. Online, the social experience is widespread:

• 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% say they share links to news with others via those means.
• 51% of social networking site (e.g. Facebook) users who are also online news consumers say that on a typical day they get news items from people they follow. Another 23% of this cohort follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites."

What the report doesn't adequately answer is any measure of how Google serves as the first stop when someone wants news or information on a subject. I am going out on a limb here to suggest that Google remains a top referrer to most news sites followed closely by the rise of Facebook. 

The Next News: 5 Trends & Implications for Communicators

We are all living through the long reboot of the traditional media and news business. Being in the midst of the change makes it difficult to recognize on a daily basis exactly where the broad media world (publishers of news and information via broadcast, print and digital channels and platforms) will end up any time soon. It's too easy to shake our heads at the apparent resistance of the newspaper industry to change while the business disintegrates. While there may be resistance (there is in every established business), there are plenty of smart people inside that industry exploring answers. Just look at what the Knight Foundation is funding in terms of media experiments. 

Communicators need to change, too

Marketing and communications specialists are no different. There are plenty of forward thinking innovators just as there are plenty of folks relying on past models to carry them through. To be ready for change and to willing to make that change, we need to recognize the implications of how media is changing to understand how we might adapt and take advantage of that change. Ross Dawson had a useful article creating the Future of Media. I wanted to look at what these things mean for communications professionals who work on behalf of clients/brands. 

Here are 5 trends and their respective implications for communicators:

Outsourcing to content networks

This past week, Demand Media made news with its planned $125m IPO. They provide content and social infrastructure applications via their own content sites and partners sites like the San Francisco Chronicle. Their manifesto reveals the principles drive a new media company:

• Start each day by listening to the customer
• Make content that is unequivocally useful
• Build superior web experiences
• Invest heavily in our professional freelancer community
• Focus on the economics
• Never rest

They are doing what established media companies find so difficult - scaling content development via a network of freelancers, balancing community and content, and delivering value as defined by the user. There are others in this space. Examiner.com maintains a network of hyperlocal writers creating news distributed through their Web site in a scalable model. Even Huffington Post is praised for its mix of community and scaled content from a network of writers.

Implication: If a percentage of content on the San Francisco Chronicle comes from Demand Media, who should communications pros be pitching stories to? How can they connect relevant brands with niche writers? It's going to take a more thorough indexing of individual writers - sometimes within networks -  and its going to take a new approach to the working with a combined paid and earned model. 

Maintaining a database of the hundreds of thousands of citizen journalists out there is a Herculean task, never mind building relationships with them. In the Long Tail world we rely on business like Demand Media and Examiner (and Huffington Post and BlogHer) to aggregate them. Sometimes they are also the branded portal (e.g. Huffington Post), sometimes they are the unseen guts of other media properties (e.g. Demand Media). Communications professionals will need to think in terms of a blended paid/earned model to get access to these experts. Each of these businesses see themselves as gateways to their writers and discourage communicators from reaching them directly (or more aptly, the effort of reaching out to them directly doesn't match the return). Communicators need to think more creatively about combining paid media and earned media that deliver a value all the way down the chain to the consumer/customer/public. 

Scaling via consumer generated media

Most media properties have incorporated some degree of consumer generated media. Whether it is CNN's iReport or the New York Times, media properties have embraced consumer generated media as a supplement to their main editorial and as a way to reward engagement with their content (if my content is featured there, I will promote it). 

Implication: As the best writing continues to be curated and aggregated by those who have reach, brands need to refine their approach to influencer outreach. They need to get to the writers before they are aggregated.  A two-tier effort can help optimize coverage for a brand. The first tier is very close, personal relationships with the top 10, 20 or even 50 high-reach and relevance writers (influencers). The second tier is less intensive and includes a longer list of relevant influencers who may want to stay connected with what the brand is doing. This is the evolution of media relations and not a new concept.  

     

Our News Feed is in Facebook (and Facebook mobile)

There's a reason, Mark Zuckerberg calls the feature in Facebook 'News Feed.'  More and more people rely on the updates from their social graph - all of their friends, colleagues, influencers - as they appear in their social network updates. How many times has Twitter been cited over the past 2-3 years as the channel for breaking news? Well, all of that gets funneled through the Facebook News Feed. If my friend "likes" or shares a story from the New York Times, it shows up in my News Feed and I may click through to the story. If my friend "likes" or shares a story from TheFordStory.com (client), it shows up in my News Feed and I may click through to the story. 

Implication: Social networks make us all curators on behalf of our extended 'friends.' Brands can be content creators and/or media publishers themselves by following Demand Media's principles of listening to what their customers want to know about and publishing that. So, first, let's start behaving like the best content creators and publishers out there. Then, lets get that content into the hands of people who want it - where they want it.  By developing an approach to "social grassroots" brands can develop an authentic following (one based on delivering true value not corporate messages) via social networks and earn a place in the News Feed of customers and prospects. A third and final point, part of making the most relevant and useful content is formating it for delivery the way we all consume content. Make it work on mobile devices and you will up your reach considerably. According to Pew, "33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones."

Our news on-demand is in Google

When we want to know about something - news or information - we go to Google or whatever major search engine serves our market. 

Implication: While "universal search" in Google displays true "news" content under that header, it does so on the same page that all the other results appear on - thus universal search. Consumers may distinguish between what the New York Times has to say about a product recall, but they may also be interested in what the company says about it. Brands must take up the challenge to be prolific content creators and be expert at multimedia search engine optimization. This must start with what we call "Consumer intent modeling" or the simple process of paying attention to what people are searching for to match their needs better with our content. We need to work hard to have our content show up on the first two pages of Google search results for the terms consumers find relevant. That's how they find news and information they are looking for. 

The coming renaissance of professional journalists

I grew up admiring journalists like Tom Wicker and David Halberstam. They played a role that I valued. While the headlines around news and media is dominated by shrinking newsrooms and troubled business models, I believe that overlooks a coming renaissance for quality journalism. Yes, the kind of stuff I would pay for. 

Implication: Traditional 'earned media,' where a communicator connects the needs of the audience, the journalist and the brand and does so without hyperbole or spin, is not going away. Just as there will be a premium of great journalism, there will be a premium on great communicators willing to earn their way into stories through relevance and value more than anything else. 

The Power of Integrated Social Media: Video

Earlier this month, I was working with my team in Australia. They immortalized me via their video program called the Red Chair Series. Here are some of the things they asked and where that conversation led. It is actually a good companion to the book, Socialize the Enterprise, which Ogilvy just published:

• Has social media led to a shift in consumer behavior?
• Is social media a fad?
• What makes an effective social media strategy?
• How do you compare social media ROI with traditional media? 
• Has social media impacted politics and government? 

CNN International: My Old Spice Commentary

As I mentioned in a my post about the Old Spice viral video phenomena, I was asked to comment on a CNN International story on that topic. Well, since then, we have all learned that the videos contributed to a significant boost in sales. And in a fit of false modesty, I never linked to the CNN story where I was featured. 

So, here it is in all its glory. Wait for it, wait for it, ahhhh - hey, wait a minute. How could they get my job wrong it so simple really  - "360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy...?" Oh well, it least my jacket didn't moire.