Digital Influence Mapping Project

Welcome to Social@Ogilvy!

(this post is also found in s similar form on our new Social@Ogilvy site)

The Social Imperative

Brands will spend between 17-18% of their total marcom spend on social media within 4 years. They will spend more on social business solutions. They are seeing value and expecting more every year. 

The key reason? 90% of us look to friends and family for the most trusted recommendations on products, service and issues. 70% of us count on consumer opinions online above traditional media. And it’s only going to grow. Millennials are three times more likely than Boomers to look for a social opinion on choices they make. 

The future is brand advocacy. And it cannot be faked, gamed, or outright ‘bought.’

There are only three ways to connect with and build a strong relationship with customers and stakeholders these days. 

1. Deliver highly relevant content or service. This could be advertising, media relations or what we call ‘owned’ content (including valuable services). Now it’s all highly targeted and tailored. No more 360 degree ‘onslaughts’ of interruptive advertising. Now our messages must be deemed highly relevant to our targets to earn their attention. Lets use the ‘10 degrees’ that matter. Useful content to run a sustainable business from DuPont. Better ways to use member ‘points’ from American Express. 
2. Be discoverable in search. When people search Google, Baidu or Yandex, brands need to be there for all the topics that intersect between a person’s intent and where the brand can add some value. Ford on fuel efficiency. Hellmann’s on Real Food recipes. 
3. Earn our way into their ‘social graph.’  To succeed in social media, we must become genuinely valuable to the people we serve and earn their attention, their advocacy and their business.   Inviting people as VIPs into the launch of the new Ford Explorer in Facebook. Sparking a social conversation about the dreams of the next generation of Chinese from Johnnie Walker. Helping Hong Kong parents celebrate their baby pictures in a much bigger way from Huggies.

How we form opinions about products, services and issues is constantly changing. It’s imperative that we make social a new way we do everything.

What is Social@Ogilvy? 

Social@Ogilvy is the global, cross-discipline team of social experts from across all of Ogilvy’s businesses delivering social solutions to all parts of our clients’ business. This is new. This is bigger than before. We have been designing and executing social media marketing and communications programs for 7+ years as 360 Digital Influence – a specialty practice born out of Ogilvy Public Relations. We quickly grew to deliver social solutions for all sorts of marketing and communications clients. 

Now we have grown into Social@Ogilvy. We are a true global network with a common approach. 

Integrated Social Media Matters More 

The whole PR vs. marketing battle is moot. Social media will inform every discipline and deliver business value for the foreseeable future. Social media as a standalone specialty doesn’t make sense. All the power and potential in social based solutions comes to life when you integrate it into marcom and other functions. 

We design integrated social solutions that combine deep disciplines like crm, public relations and shopper marketing and rooted in what drives behavior.  We plan around owned, earned and paid media working together for a compound effect and at its heart our work is ‘social by design’ – phrase used now by Facebook but that captures what we do quite well. 

A Global Shift

We do believe there’s a new customer and stakeholder journey defined by the increasing impact our networks have on purchase decision and our behaviors. How we buy, vote, and form opinions has changed. We tap into our 130 friends (the Facebook average) to discover, consider, compare, decide and rave about products, services and issues.

This shift is happening in one way or another all over the world. Growth markets like China, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey will define the next episode of social media use. They are all growing their social network use and outpacing western markets including the US. That’s why we have grown the world’s largest global team delivering solutions relevant in each local market.  

And it’s more than just marketing, we design social business solutions that use the collaboration and advocacy strengths of social media to drive value internally and in customer relationships while at the same time managing risk. 

 

Join Us

We will be participating or hosting 23 events in and outside of Social Media Week this week in NYC, London and Hong Kong not to mention a dozen other markets. Join us as we launch this new ambitious business. It's been a wild ride to get to this point and we would love to see you. You can find out more at our new Social@Ogilvy site.

Bringing Play and Games IRL for P&G Detergent

 

An example of how to use game mechanics and connect Facebook experience with in real life (IRL) experience. This is from Sweden and as such hard to see how much of an impact it had. But it's interesting and up there with Chalkbot (the mechanics not the emotion) and the retro-interest we have in industrial robits (see the Yotel).  A small 'stain' on the experience is the horrible load times of the Facebook app.  It is accessing a live webcam so, perhaps, it's unavoidable. 

legitimate questions: 

• How could they have created even more online shared content?
• Is the 'game' (point and shoot industrial robot 'juice') too male a genre or is it of broad interest?  
• How do I get to their Facebook wall? If I am now engaged with the brand cause I 'liked' the page and what they did, how can I interact with them more? 

How Game Dynamics Can Drive Social Behavior

Game mechanics or 'gamification' are kind of buzzy terms right now. Still, they represent very powerful ways to motivate behavior. Rajat Paharia, the founder and Chief Product Officer of Bunchball – a developer of a technology platform that incorporates “game mechanics” into digital work, gave a great lecture at Stanford - “Driving User Behavior with Game Dynamics and Behavioral Economics.”

He's a great fast-talker who clearly understands this space well. It's a great watch as he covers some of the basic concepts including those we already use in our social strategy planning. 

Behavioral Economics Applied - Gamification

Gartner places "gamification" on their hype cycle about ready to crest the initial rise of expectation before  deep descent into the "trough of disillusionment." That doesn't mean there is no "there, there." It simply means that Gartner sees the concept and companies labeled "gamification" garnering some unwarranted and inflated interest. 

The concepts of gamification are just a smart application of those action-inducing mechanics that fall under the term 'behavioral economics'  

Behavioral economics - "A theory stating that there are important psychological and behavioral variables involved in the economic decisions of consumers or countries.(I found the business dictionary definition more down-to-earth than Wikipedia)

Gamification - "Integrating game dynamics into your site, service, content, community or campaign in order to drive participation"

 

Models for driving participation and word of mouth

Our job is to drive advocacy and action toward a business result. Whether it is for car manufacturers, tourism, FMCG products or main-frame computer companies. The 'art and science' of what we do combines three rubrics that make our work predictive and plannable. These include the Influencer Network Model, the 6 Drivers of Influence from Robert Cialdini and the 7 Drivers of Word of Mouth. Gamification is a fourth and very effective model to drive people to action and advocacy. 
The key features of 'best-practice' gamification includes (these are from Gabe Zicherman who is pretty smart in thsi space): 

• Rewards
• Status
• Achievement
• Respect
• Altruism
• Self Expression
• Competitiveness 

Three examples of Gamification 

The Insider Circle Leaderboard - We developed a brand advocacy platform called Insider Circle that manages a scalable community of fans and builds  a productive relationship between brand and fan. Irfan Kamal who designed the platform argued for a "gamified' premise form the start. Today it features a full leaderboard that allows community members to rack up points for actions taken and gauge how they are doing against other community members. This simple feature drives a competitive streak that motivates action. 

VW Roullette - VW needed to impress upon car buyers that a particular vehicle is fuel efficient. To make the message memorable and drive people to authentically want to explore the features of the car that contribute to that fuel efficiency, they create a 'gamified' experience that drew people in to follow a long driving challenge via a data-enhanced Google Map. people could essentially bet when the vehicle would run out of its single tank of gas. The best part of this model is that people who wanted the best chance of guessing well explored the features of the car that might contribute to fuel efficiency. Clearly they came away with knowledge of how many features were designed to improve fuel efficiency. 

HealthMonth - One of the founders of HealthMonth started 43Things, one of my favorite sites to admire (but not really use). HealthMonth allows us each to set goals for ourselves in multiple categories from dieting to mental health. these selections get distilled into "life points" which you track, of course. You are also directed to groups of people who are also striving to reduce the amount of fried food they eat every week or increase meditation. The group support each other via Twitter. Another great example of behavioral economics and game mechanics at work.   

Twitter Strategy Made Easy by Melvin

Just think, they put this all together just to justify to have something to Tweet about. I was exhausted just watching. Then I thought, "how many social strategies are a flurry of activity with a small payoff?" At least this is ...art.

 

Melvin The Magical Mixed Media Machine from HEYHEYHEY on Vimeo.

Will Data, the Crowd or Personal Guides Deliver the Golden Age of Travel?

Is it just me or is the social Web alive with travel innovation? This coming from a guy who diligently fed data into Dopplr for years without any apparent pay-off. So, I am a bit of a sucker for anything to do with travel. Still, I think there is reason for even more critical folks to be encouraged, excited even, about what is coming in travel innovation. 

A month ago, I met the CEO of Jetsetter when we both spoke at the Digital CMO Summit. That day, he introduced the new Jetsetter iPad app which is a beautiful gem. I love all of the Gilt group deal offerings. They are so not-Groupon. Essentially, the app takes a great idea and makes it look and navigate terrifically. It doesn't change it. That's where the personal guides come in.

Personal Guides

It's probably more accurate to call this new category of service 'personalized guides." Drew Patterson revealed that Jetsetter was starting a service for a fee where travelers could query Jetsetter experts from around the world for personalized itineraries in certain locations. Of course I lost my magic postcard which held my invitation to take advantage of that service. Still, I love the idea. 

Now you can do same through Fortnighter. For somewhere between $100-$250 you can get somewhat personalized recommendations from hotels to restaurants to activities. The service only lets you personalize so much. And it caters to the single or couples traveler. That leaves me and my family a wee bit left out. Still, I like the notion of concierge-like service and I believe in the premise - if I am going to invest a chunk of money and time to go to Istanbul with my family (true - going this July), then I would be willing for some local guidance on what to do there that deviates from the beaten tourist path while letting us find the really good pizza in town.

Still another example is really not an example fo a social enablement. Its more an example of how niche travel may find an audience. Political Tours offers travel itineraries around political history. A tour focused on Turkey Elections 2011 would include really cool events like this one:

"Day 3 Turkish foreign policy – moving eastward? A panel discussion with leading Turkish commentators. Lunch at Imroz in Nevizade with an introduction to the Tarlabasi district: urban projects and gentrification. Guided Walk through Tarlabasi with Constanze Leitsch, a migration expert. Visit to Kürt Kav, a Kurdish foundation, a Greek Church with Father Dositeos. Meetings with local artisans. Dinner with NGO activists"

I love this experiential approach to travel and wish I could "sample" it while there. My family would not appreciate a full immersive, multi-day focus on politics. Nor would they agree to me slithering off to do this on my own. 

The Crowd

While still people-powered, another way to go is Wizard Istanbul (thanks, as always, to Springwise) The service operated by the Culture and Tourism Ministry of Turkey, lets me ask a question via Twitter and Facebook and someone - presumably another traveler, resident or the Wizard, him/herself will answer. I submitted a couple of questions around whirling dervish ceremonies/performances and pizza. We will see what the crowd comes back with.

The service recruits writers willing to answer the questions. This is a terrific service from a forward-thinking ministry. I suppose it's possible that the service will get overrun by spammers or folks with commercial interests (disappointing to realize that most hotel concierges make recommendations for places that kickback a fee). For now, I prefer to keep my naive hat on and will plan on using the service before and while I am there.

Data

Marketers get frothy just thinking about how new access to data can deliver value for customers and brands. I remember a financial services company had an ambition to let member's access aggregate member data on the restaurants they most frequented - "X  members prefer Le Cirque over the Jockey Club." It fell apart when data revealed that most members went to McDonald's.

I tend to like to think of myself as the travel who shuns the usual touristy destinations (yes, same guy who asked about Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul). Aggregate data scares me as it suggests using the great median as a guide. 

 
But there are exceptions. These maps from Eric Fisher (and collected here on the Dohop blog - thanks to Datamining) plot out photographs from Flickr on top of city maps. Blue dots are from locals and the red dots are pix taken by visitors. This one is from Sydney where I just returned from. 

Here's why this particular data is helpful. We take pictures of memorable or remarkable scenes. Sometimes this is highly personal. Other times what I find photo-worthy, you will too. These maps tell me what others have felt worth a photo - something they found remarkable or memorable. As a traveler, I could use that. Imagine taking this data and mapping other data about the images (thumbnails or tags?) or from another source like FourSquare. Could we come up with maps of remarkable moments and vistas that others could tap into easily?

 

I tend to think that the more personal, human-powered services offer the most cool innovations currently. But data is on its way. We just cant forget that cool data can only get you so far. One must have a business model to support the services rendered, as well. 

4 Reasons Your Web Site Sits at the Heart of Your Social Strategy

Your social media guru (derogatory term) tells you to "fish where the fish are" meaning shift all your energy away from your brand Web site to Facebook. Your "traditional" digital agency keeps selling you Web sites. Who is right? 

Presuming you have a digital strategy derived from an overall business strategy and then, like a neatly packed set fo Russian dolls, you have a social strategy based upon that, you will likely find that your Web site should sit at the heart of the business strategy and therefore at the heart of both your digital and derivative social strategy. 

(Note about the "nested strategies" metaphor: At the end of the day, your business strategy trumps all. What are you selling and who are you selling it to? Are you acquiring new customers or serving the ones you have and so forth. The only reason we have a digital strategy is cause everyone needs a specific 'stimulus package' to help them catch up with consumers' digital habits. Once that is done, we will likely not be talking about a separate digital strategy. Likewise on social strategy. It really is a part of that stimulus package. We might all do better not calling out a distinct 'social strategy' save for the fact that it remains new and must be forced into our attention.)

There are four reasons that your brand Web site should at the center of your social strategy: 

• You want to build trust
• You need to won the right search shelf-space
• Your CRM program is important to you
• You may someday sell via eCommerce

Trust

Brand web sites still earn high trust marks from consumers. They should. If I want to learn about the features and be benefits of products and services, I go to the folks that make that product. When I want to know how other customers feel about the product, I will search the social Web and review sites, specifically. This shouldn't be news to anyone. But think about building trust. A simple equation for trust (that I think I picked up from David Maister) goes like this:

Credibilty + Reliability + Intimacy divided by Self-Orientation

Think about that. It's not a static, steady state. While many brands are out there shaving hairs of "truthiness" with product claims, you could be the brand that continues to publish plain-spoken product and service information on your Web site and in general work that channel to earn more trust. You might do that by going beyond the straight-shooter talk about products and services to actually engaging with your customers there (e.g. inviting customer feedback) and in so doing reduce your "self-orientation" ('look  at how great my products are'). 

Search

While tempted to narrow this down to just Google, Bing is actually growing (14% of US market). Therefore, having a rich search program that includes the major search engines not just Google is important. Search engines continue to be the great aggregators funneling traffic just about everywhere. Brands need to be have their sites and pages within their sites return well against a complete brand vocabulary (brand, proper nouns and sub-brands and a complete topic collection that relates to the brands business and what customers are searching for - see Jeremy Sanchez's paper on Speaking the Customers Language). We need our Web sites as our primary Google-juice. Your Facebook page won't serve that purpose, nor will your YouTube page (although each si an important part of the SEO recipe). you need web pages chock-full of content that consumers are searching for. That's on your Web site.

CRM

Let's face it, CRM (or 'socialCRM' if you insist) is the future. So many of the great social technologies that we are learning to love like FourSquare (location-based services) and Jetsetter (high-quality deal sites) are ways to manage customer relationships. Facebook is a way to manage customer relationships (if you just knew they were customers). With more and more pressure on brands to deliver superior services above and beyond what their core products deliver, personalized service may be the answer. Brands can tune a CRM system by adding social data to growing customer profiles. They can use that channel to drive purchase and advocacy. While a CRM system is based upon progressive user profiles and content delivered via distributed means like email, mobile and Facebook, most of these touchpoints serve as hubs pointing to deeper content that can be found...on your Website. 

eCommerce

Lets presume you are not doing ecommerce today. If you are then you know the value of your Website. It's based upon sales. But if you don't sell through your Web site and you may not sell directly through any channel, you might really examine whether that might change someday. I doubt P&G knew 5 years ago that they would sell directly. Now they aim to sell direct through Facebook of all places. If the Internet has done anything, it has surely shown how brands can sell direct. I have all but given up finding Hugo Boss black jeans in stores. I now just buy them direct online. Your Web site should be your storefront or your storefront of the future.   

A Brand Ecosystem

 I hate the word "ecosystem."It reeks of fluff. But in this case it seems to fit the circumstance. Your Website serves a central role in what can only be described as an ecosystem of sites and overlapping communities. Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube brand pages, email lists, mobile subscribers and your Website(s) weave a complimentary cluster of communities that you will want to do everything in your power to funnel into a single, social data-infused CRM system so that you can reward your customers and encourage them to tell their friends and families about the products, services and companies that matter most to them. 

So, don't worry, your investment in your Website is sound...so long as you made search engine optimization, a door into CRM and building trust the top three requirements (vs. some impenetrable, Flash-based alleged 'brand user experience').  

 

(creative limited edition nested dolls is designed by Yar Rassadin, who took inspiration from the Pantone color system and the UFO - photo from Lushlee)

Jumpstart your UX Team for Mobile

Thanks to my regular read, Springwise, I saw these awesomely handy design templates for all types of user experience/interface design including smartphones. I am a digital creative director by background and have spent many years sweating over interface design issues for brands like Discovery, Microsoft, Viacom and others. There is so much art and science in UX design that those with years of experience learning the subtleties of what is likely to work best are really more valuable designers. 

Then why do I want to buy pads and pads of these templates and hand them out to not just the UX teams but the account teams across the agency? Sacrilege! Chaos! The downfall of all that is orderly and tight! Possibly. 

This simple innovation democratizes design of a user experience. At the very least it may motivate the "web design" team to stop forgetting about the mobile site that should always be created at the same tome as the main site. 

Making Mobile Interface a Default
Imagine these little pads on every designers desk. Suddenly its harder for everyone to "forget' that mobile is the preferred interface for many of us. I would love it if UXStickyNotes came out with a couple of non-smartphone templates too. As my brothers & sisters at Iconmobile will testify, the possible handset configs in terms of screen size et al are too numerous to bother sketching. Still, having a pad to remind you to design for smartphones, for mobile web browsers, as well as, PC-based access at the same time is a good discipline. 

Opening Up the Tools of Design
Give it to account people? Really? Well, it would be great if someone like Steve Krug or Joshua Poter would create the "10 Truths of Internet Interface Design" (No more than 10 pages, please; one idea per page; easy to visually scan format, please). At the risk of suggesting that years of experience and process can be boiled down into 10 pages and a UXstickynote, the effect of making all of this available to more people may be an accelerated flow of ideas. I am not suggesting that untrained or unproven designers design the final version of your next mobile web site. But they may have strong ideas that can more easily be captured and conveyed by sketching it out vs. being interrogated by a 'requirements-capture' team. 

I actually don't know the affect of making these templates available to more people in the organization. All I know is that I just ordered a bunch and am willing to see.  

South African Talent Breaking Through

I had a great conversation with Jon Cherry who runs a experiential marketing start-up in Cape Town, South Africa called Cherryflava. Beyond just the state of social media in South Africa (Jon's blog had won an Ogilvy-sponsored award this year as a best blog), we spoke about talent and artists in South Africa. 

One of Jon's points - that there is a lot of under-leveraged talent in the South African creative community. He was speaking broadly about all types of art, design and craft. And he was hopeful if not bullish even, about there being great artisitic talent just waiting to be combined with innovative marketing and product development smarts. South African talent would become more of a regional if not global cultural force.

African Cartel

I couldn't help but think of his POV when I cam across African Cartel, a marketplace for African Artists (clearly not just 'South' Africa). While I believe Jon had more product design and development in mind vs. pure art, African Cartel is doing its part to showcase artists via digital marketing. Their video on the "Robot Artists" - artists who specilaize in 'township art' - is really well made. Smartly, it tells a full story of the artists - their particular circumstances including a fairly rough marktplace where they sell their paintings at busy intersections. African Cartel offers an alternative. 

Their mission is simple:

"The mission of African Cartel is to provide a platform to showcase talented African artists to tell their story and provide a platform to market and sell their art."

Add to this Cape Town's ambition to be the World Design Capital in 2014 and I get a picture of what Jon is talking about. Not only is there loads of talent there, but clever use of the Internet may bring them to the world faster than anything else.

I hope South Africa wins the bid for WDC2014. Regardless, I believe that folks like Jon Cherry and African Cartel will demonstrate to the world, the strengths of South African and African creativity. 

*Photography of Leenon Matthew's art from African Cartel's web site. 

For the Guy/Gal Who Has Everything: Web Trends 3.0

I love great visualizations. This is going to be a year for more of them, no doubt. Oliver and his folks at IA Japan have released another version of their mashup of the Web 2.0 landscape and the Tokyo subway map. It is but one group's view on cataloguing many of the significant brands and businesses online. It is done so well that it is worth having. You can buy a poster at their site. You can also download jpegs and even a full pdf.

The best part if their interactive start page which makes all of the "destinations" on the route clickable - not sure what Badongo is? Just click on it to go there.

Buy a map for someone you care about in social media. And tag their site, they do great work.