Digital Influence Mapping Project

Don’t Overreact to a Potential Social Media Crisis

We do a lot of crisis management and crisis training for clients. There are certain new “truths” about how crisis can unfold across digital and social media that can put business at risk. The irresponsible videos from rogue employees at Domino’s Pizza, the thoughtless tweets from Kenneth Cole, and Tesco's struggle with an angry customer all had an impact on business.

The truths or qualities of social-fueled crisis are unmistakable. In social media, they can flare faster. Messages in social media can jump into traditional media thus flaring a lot more social media. Brands are held accountable online for how they respond (was it fast enough, sincere enough, contrite enough). Hacktivists have mastered the art of the groundswell and can move more nimbly and aggressively that most multi-national corporations. And so on.

Speed does matter

Speed is the one attribute that comes appropriately to mind first. The pundits all agree, “when the crisis hits the social Web you had better act fast…”Be ready to act fast but keep a cool head

Speed does matter. But so does judgment.  Not every flare up in social media will accelerate to a full blown crisis. The trick is to, of course, be ready, but also to keep a cool head and really listen and understand what is going on.

When detractors hijacked McDonald’s hashtags #meetthefarmers (promoting the farmers in their supply chain) and #McStories, the brand did not overreact. As Jim Nichols Imedia Connection said, 

“To its great credit, McDonald's does not appear to have done the "big corporation flip-out" we've seen from many large companies. They ceased the programs, learned a lesson, and moved on to further experimentation.”

I recently wrestled with two crisis where marketing efforts for brands earned complaints from users online. Knowing how things can get out of hand quickly, the brands were contemplating some serious and costly steps. Both kept a cool head and in both cases the flare-up was addressed simply and honestly. The community calmed down. The negativity on the Facebook wall slipped into timeline obscurity (no brand will ever have a timeline that is white as snow). 

Motrin missed opportunity

The well known “Motrin Moms” case may be one where the impulse to act quickly resulted in over-reaction and a missed opportunity. Moms reacted to a brand produced video spot joking that some moms wore their child as a fashion accessory. Not only did sociail media light up but traditional media covered it on the trades (AdAge) all the way to USAToday.

Within about 48 hours of the flare up, J&J McNeill Labs pulled the video and sent an apology to at least one of the bloggers who, of course, published it. Could they have engaged their critics in a conversation about their complaints and the brand’s intention? Could they have even solicited those critics to define the next video that did more accurately express their concerns? Possibly. I don’t want to be revisionist here. It was 2008 which was early days in brands getting comfy with social network interaction.  

Today, the brand would likely have the option of keeping the video running while constructively talking with critics about how they might improve the videos. 

Listen, learn and grow a thick skin

Thorough training and plans for crisis in the social age are important. No one at a brand wants their Faceboook wall filled with negativity or venom. At the same time, it pays to carefully analyze the situation and not overreact.  It’s possible that the issue and the complaints center on a vocal few. If addressed early and responsibly, it may not be necessary to pull the social media fire alarm. Providing the complaints have not mucked up your search results and only haunt your Facebook page, you may just need to grow a thicker skin.    

 

The Pay Scale of the Community Manager Just Went Up

Many of us participated in Facebook’s Marketing Summit last week. We shared some of our early view of the implications here. One of the byproducts of the integration of the new set of advertising offerings with page management is a more complex job and set of skills for the person managing that page. Chances are, you are not paying them enough.

History of Community Management

At the risk of sounding like the doddering old man, I remember when community managers lived on message boards. They got to know the members – the outspoken few and the culture of the many. Their “job” – sometimes a volunteer position – was to steward the community. They helped maintain a healthy environment but in many ways, their job was to stay out of the way of those drawn there to talk about their shared interests and affinities.

We’re talking AOL forums, the WELL or, in my case, the forums we had on Discovery.com back when we rediscovered the wreck of the Titanic.

It’s Just Conversation, Right?

With the dawn of the social network era, we began to launch a new wave of brand and affinity communities on Facebook, MySpace (wait for the comeback), Orkut and more. Forums still mattered. We debated whether services like Twitter and YouTube really represented communities. For branded Facebook pages, we saw the challenge differently than stewarding a community brought together based upon their love for crafting, snowboarding or Lykke Li because people were “joining” brand pages.

They wanted something from the brand not just interactions with others publishing on the page. We even called it “conversation management” to try and distinguish from the seemingly old-school images of message board mavens asking members to be more civil as they debated the merits of different quilting techniques. Managing a Facebook page seemed so simple. If anything, you needed to hire someone who “got it” (i.e. think “young person”) and was willing to talk back and forth with the vocal minority. I even heard of brands delegating the job to the interns.

Protecting Your Investment

Fast forward to last week. As more and more brands invest in social media and in their Facebook commitments alone, the job of Community Manager becomes increasingly important. We are starting to see the benefits to business from community and ‘social relationship management.’ Cultivating millions of addressable customers on a Facebook page and letting them know that a new flavor just launched or that they and they alone could get a special deal became very appealing from a business perspective. The ‘measurability’ of all this remains a work in progress. But only the most stick-in-the-mud, ROI-first stalwart question the likelihood that this would significantly change business. If you are going to invest conservatively 10’s of millions of dollars in Facebook advertising as many big consumer brands are doing (I would guess that today’s FMCGs are ‘playing’ with budgets for Facebook alone that are 2-4% of total marcom spend), then you ought not leave the hub of that experience in the hands of anyone less than a race car driver.

Community Business Director

The community manager needs to be able to control the content of ads and the deployment of the units. In Facebook terms, they are emphasizing “story” over “ads” and suggesting that all ads be some form of valuable and relevant content. It is not just a semantic distinction. As ads can now be delivered to the Facebook wall vs. just the ad “gutter,’ it is critical that this content live up the same demands we put on our best Facebook wall content. It must genuinely earn people’s attention and action. You can browse through Facebook’s new ad “Offers” here and it will paint a clear picture.

“Community Manager” is a title that comes with too much baggage. The job is important enough that we ought to at least amp it up to “Community Business Director.” Here are the key responsibilities and skills:

• Define a strategy that connects business objectives to community and business outcomes
• Create content of all sorts from hands-on responsibilities to the capacity to direct a network of content specialists (e.g. spec the right video by the right production company)
• Plan, create and deploy advertising as part of a paid, owned, earned strategy
• Manage customer, fan, stakeholder dialogue
• Connect across the business with experts who can answer community members and solve issues
• Have strong technical and tools expertise (get the most out of systems like Buddy Media, SpredFast and more)
• Analyze data to find insight and define business performance
• Apply an understanding of key public affairs issues and legal positions to sensitive conversations online

The job requires new skills. Just adding the advertising or media planning and buying integration requires a new set of skills that used to be outsourced to a media planning function. Add on top of that the business maturity to get the most out of the community investment and you have a more important job.

It may require more than tuning up the right individual. It will likely require an organizational solution like a “director” who directs the activities of many managers towards a business outcome. I feel lucky in that our organization already has these skills integrated. What will happen to the PR firms out there who have no integrated media planning function or the small social media boutiques who cannot leverage buying power or are missing some other critical element.

No doubt that the image of the community manager spawned from Facebook’s announcement may be a bit aspirational. Still, we are heading to a much more sophisticated model and the time to put that person or team in place is now. We have.

 

(thanks to insites consulting for the image of their great cake)

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.

Are Social Media Ethics About Actions or Intentions?

What is your social strategy? Are you trying to increase the amount of positive consumer generated media (CGM) for your brand or are you trying to inspire and manage brand advocacy? The media mindset thinks in terms of CGM. How can they make more of that and put it in all the places where customers will find it. How they “make” that media happen is a means to a simple end. 

The social mindset thinks in terms of genuine brand advocacy. How can we give customers, employees, stakeholders a reason and a means to share a sincerely positive point of view about a brand with their friends, family and people ‘like them?’ How they make that advocacy happen is more than a means to an end, it is indivisible from the end. 

The VIP Deals Deal

It’s not just semantics. Look at the recently reported case of VIP Deals offering free iPad covers (their product) to customers who submitted a favorable review on Amazon. The NYTimes covered this recently and even posted the deal memo sent to customers here. Their goal was to generate overwhelmingly positive reviews. They offered the value of the product price ($30-$35 retail?), told the customer the action they wanted to take and insinuated the tone of that review. Can you split hairs and say that they did not require a favorable review? Perhaps. But there is no mistaking their intention. They wanted to “buy” favorable reviews, consumer generated media, to dominate a channel, Amazon reviews. 

The review space has long been suspected of abuse. Employees giving their own hotel, restaurant, lawnmower a positive review. We imagine  pay-per-review farms in off shore locations and more incentive programs like VIP Deals than are ever revealed. It is not clear what most consumers think of product reviews. I would guess that there is a large amount of skepticism even while we all still look at them to make quick judgments (who wouldn’t download the 4 star weather app on iTunes over the 1.5 star – presuming similar price?) 

Media or Advocacy?

Brand marketers must decide what their intention is – media or advocacy. That choice will inherently guide their actions. Big, multi-national brands need to make this choice more than any small business. What they do in one market will quickly infect another. It’s not as simple as saying “when in China….” All local activity is now global.  The danger in a pure media mindset is the possibility of losing sight of what makes social media so powerful – its ability to earn people’s advocacy and share that at a large scale. 

Getting the right actions and intentions

• One of the best resources for brand and business leaders on practical social media ethics remains the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (disclosure: we are a governing member and I remain as a non-voting board member). Their ethics code and disclosure guidelines  are a foundation that any brand marketer can apply with confidence. 
• We have just updated our Ogilvy Social Media Engagement Code  which is being reviewed in draft form but I have shared here. We have had a social media-related  ethics code in place since 2005 and find it invaluable to rally our global network around. This is how we roll. 

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #4 Social Selling as a Service

Sales force-driven organizations are wising up to using social media to build relationships with customers. Businesses are investing in sales enablement software like Salesforce.com, iCentera and Jive that have social-related functions internally to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing and some even have ways to manage social contacts.

Sales as Content 

Sales organizations are all a-twitter about content marketing, certain the answer to closing sales is in a steady flow of just the right white papers or video talking heads. All that is right-minded in my book. The sales process, especially in B2B, starts earlier and earlier with business leaders investigating their problem online before they may have even formed the words to describe the problem exactly. Companies like IBM with their Expert Network and use of LinkedIn  are building presence and thought leadership online that tries to anticipate the business leader’s pain before it’s diagnosed. 

Sales as Service 

Thinking about content as sales “bait” is one thing (and a little insulting to the customer, I might add). Thinking about sales as a continuing service to customers and prospects is different. Instead of simply ramping up on valuable content, sales organizations who want to get into the sales cycle earlier and even build strong relationships with prospects well before closing would do better to think like IDEO. 

One of the most well-known product design firms in the world, IDEO is expert at getting to the root of customer problems whether they be rooted in usability, service, or some anthropological insight. They’re good at making life easier for customers. True, their solutions tend to be in the product and experiential like designing the Community Pharmacy for Walgreens. Beneath the actual solutions lie a relentless curiosity about behavior and behavior change, “We identify new ways to serve and support people by uncovering latent needs, behaviors, and desires.”

If a sales organization spent their energy on understanding their customer’s actual experience and behavior and then sought to deliver services that made their lives a little easier, they might end up with a great strategy for building enduring relationships. Inevitably it would actually point to creating content that is helpful to customers/prospects/influencers. So, right back to that content marketing model we are all working on just within the context of delivering service.  

It might also cause the sales organization to create tools and applications that make it easier to make a smart business decision. Pull out your iPhone. Mine is full of consumer-facing examples of new customer services from my airlines, Delta; my aspirational travel agent, Jetsetter; even my car insurance provider, Geico. IDEO would think holistically (design thinking) about the buyer’s experience and how we might overcome barriers, friction points, and emotional moats.  That is a refreshing way to state the goals of social selling. 

Do: I am all for quick hits and big solutions. I would suggest committing to a content strategy based upon delivering the most useful content possible to your customer’s decision-making process. What reports, white papers, customer testimonials would help them make a good decision? Simply putting on the buyer’s hat vs. your own seller’s hat can drive you to create more useful content. Meanwhile, try a process where you think more creatively about delivering useful services to help the selling/buying process. You can hire a consultant. You can interview customers. You can trigger some effective brainstorming to explore new service territories. 

Resources:

• IDEO Method Cards – this pack of cards introduces you to a variety of ways to apply a design approach to business problems. Flip through. Find 3 that sound promising and just try them.
• Patterns - a useful blog from IDEO on design thinking and application 

Timing: By 2nd Q it will be key to be executing on a content marketing strategy that embeds social components. By 4thQ, it would be terrific to have a utility or buyer service in place being used and tested.

(thanks to madupiyadasa for the pic)

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #3 Gamification Endures

No, it’s really not about gaming. It’s about good old behavioral economics using game mechanics. PFSK recently ran a series profiling how different organizations were using points, leaderboards and social proof to drive behavior change. They have sunk a fair amount of energy into reviewing the use of game mechanics in groups like RecycleBank, LetGive, Stickk and SuMo . They have also produced a report that is worth previewing and grabbing called The Future of Gaming.

The world of ‘gamification’ is certainly buzzy if not frothy. Loads of marketers are talking about it. Many startups are employing it as if it were the magic sauce that could overcome anything even a bad business plan. Still, there is wisdom underneath it all and gamification as a sometime appropriate feature to stimulate behavior change is here to stay. 

The background of this recent surge of game mechanics applied to everything from brand advocacy (our own Insider Circle platform or Crowdtap) to environmental or health behaviors to fundraising is all over the Web in sites like Gabe Zichermann’s  Gamification Blog and even the Wharton School of Business. My own quick summary of gamification’s role in behavioral economics is here. 

Too Much Hype? 

The hype feels too much. Ian Bogost,  a professor at Georgia Tech, calls it in his blog:

“More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway….Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid.

The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business…Gamification is reassuring.

It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they're doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding "a games strategy" to their existing products, slathering on "gaminess" like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant's indulgent sales lunch.”

Using game mechanics has been over-hyped even before many mainstream brands have tried of applied it. That doesn’t mean there is no there-there. As a tactic to strengthen and support behaviors for which there is already a strong engagement value (a reason to care enough to pay attention and consider action), game mechanics can help reinforce actual habit. Like a lot of good ideas, it has its place in moderation. As the new social wonder drug, it will likely disappoint. 

Do:The application of relevant behavioral economics research in marketing is overdue. We have built our own planning model in social media marcom on some of the most rigorous and proven models to drive behavior change. So, the ‘do” here is to make sure at least your social media strategy team if not your overall planning team are incorporating relevant behavioral economics concepts to make programs more predictably successful.  As for the subset of tactics known commonly as game mechanics of gamification, find a program – either to enable employees or some type of advocates – and build a pilot program to gain experience in this valuable tool set. Choose a behavior a bit more complex than simply buying another box of product. 

Resources:

• The Gamification Blog – a steady stream of examples of game mechanics applied 
• The Gamification Summit Spring 2012 in SF – also put on by Gabe and his crew and last year’s looked great
• PFSK – a generally great source for trending topics and most recently gamification

Timeline: Make a behavioral model a priority in 1st Q. Run a specific game mechanics- based pilot  by 2ndQ.

4 Ways to Get Integrated Social Media Programs to Work

Go to any social media conference now and every other speaker will be touting the benefits of “owned, earned and paid media” as if they discovered fire. But few know how to actually make this work within big consumer and B2B brands.

There are two barriers that I see keeping us from living the dream. 

Multi-agency friction

The way that brands task their multi-agency rosters with bits and bobs of particular programs works against integration. Big organizations have diverse business owners each contributing to revenue outcomes like increased sales of products and services. Many of them hire specialist firms to extend their team’s ability to design strategy or execute marcom programs. There’s a certain belief that brand marketers need to pick “best-of-breed” specialists and constantly pit them against each other to leverage the best commitment or price. It’s all quite logical in a way. It also produces far too much friction to really overcome some of the barriers to truly getting all of your disciplines working in a complimentary fashion. The best that most brands ever achieve is a campaign success where 2-3 disciplines (out of 5-6) are aligned enough for a time to produce remarkable results for a short period of time(think Old Spice).

Big teams vs. small teams 

Brand + Agency teams have become large. Whenever something isn't quite going right, the answer is to add someone new to the team. It's crazy. The type of innovation we are looking for (“imagine a program where all disciplines were aligned to inspire as much sustained positive word of mouth for a new product – all measured by a common, focused dashboard…”) comes easiest from small, tight teams with common motivations. Either brand managers need to become the team leader of these small teams featuring a few members of different tribes and agencies or brands are going to have to take a chance on a single agency/partner who has enough of the right disciplines within their camp to pull it off.  

 

4 Ways to Get Integrated Social Media Programs to Work

• Behavior-driving Planning Model

It is so hard within a multi-agency team to have a single planning methodology prevail. I am a fan of Ogilvy’s Fusion model not because it’s ours but because it’s designed around driving behavior. Rather than have every discipline chasing its own planning approach measured by impressions, click-to-actions, GRP’s or whatever, focus on a collaborative planning approach that is designed to get people to take an action or actually change behavior. Do you want people to try a new product? Buy more at one time? Exercise every day?  And just where are they on the proverbial customer journey? A behavior-driving model can take advantage of the most useful research in behavioral economics. It's a more sympathetic approach to our customer and more effective.  

The planning model should also tell the team what they find important. As more brands use contests and promotions to lure consumers to interact on Facebook, some marketers are swearing off contest incentives preferring to generate engagement and word of mouth through "ideas." This is an example of a belief that ought to be shared by the core planning team (I am neither endorsing this particular notion or bashing it - merely using it as an example).  

• Unified Story and Content Strategy

Different brand organizations use different tools to align work across their marketing and communications. “Brand Keys,” “Brand Creative Ideas,” “Brand Platforms,” are all models for distilling what a brand stands for and what the most contemporary messages are during a particular season. But few brands develop a holistic approach to content no matter whether delivered via the Facebook wall, television or online display advertising, or in the stories pitched to traditional media. Customers, consumers , people-like-us are losing track of what they ought to expect from different channels. They just want relevant content – if they actually want anything at all beyond a good product that delivers on a promise. Marketers can make better use of the mix of touchpoints with customers if they take care to form clear story(ies) and then manage content cohesively across the different ways and places customers make use of it. 

 

• A Blended Measurement Framework

Instead of having a different metric for each discipline, have a limited number of KPIs - each of which reflects desired behavior and is shared by all efforts. Perhaps, brand marketers feel like they already have this or that sales data is the bottom line. What I see again and again is teams tracking and reporting 10-20 data points and often becoming lost as to which are most important. They count Facebook fans, comments on wall posts, wall postings, individual ‘likes,’ tab interactions, retweets in Twitter, Twitter follower acquisition, blog mentions, “impressions,” and so much more. Some are trying to roll up all types of interactions like commenting and ‘likes’ into a single engagement metric. That certainly helps marketers get focused back on driving engagement (e.g. time-spent or interactions believed to be steps along the way to persuasion and product-related behavior change).  Like our planning model – what do we want people to actually do? Let’s count that.

If we need proxy metrics to help optimize an effort, let’s make the effort to confirm that they are the ones indicative of behavior change. 

• Prioritize Key Operational Changes 

We have to do things differently to expect different results. Brand marketers are used to commissioning one of the agency partners to come up with the creative big idea that all other disciplines will interpret. It's time to evolve beyond the creative idea as the only binding principle. Now we need a small team who will work together to optimize the relationship the brand has with the customer and make certain it delivers great value to both brand and customer.  

Since marketing has become more ‘always-on’ and less purely campaign-focused, it makes sense to designate a small strategy team that guides all disciplines through their ongoing and iterative execution. A small team can look at the overall effort and make a call that the paid advertising online is not leading to the level of active fan acquisition, for example, or that the volume of peer recommended trial is not all that was hoped and that 2-3 disciplines might work together to incent more customer sharing and trial. Designating this small strategic team at the helm would be a big shift from the large group model so often put in place. 

What other operational changes: 

• Run brand program reviews like editorial meetings - look at the data and decide what is working and what is not. Make changes on the fly and try that
• Embrace the pilot - in the race to get immediate results, some brands avoid pilots as they seem like lengthy trials with little business impact beyond learning. As Facebook says, "Fail fast." We can get better results quicker by conditioning ourselves to run quick pilots that can easily be scaled. 
• Let the word of mouth guys run the core strategy team - as more brands embrace the importance of brand advocacy and word of mouth, it makes sense that the experts at driving valuable word of mouth be at the front of the bus

How Social Media has Changed the BBC News Operation

There's a pretty good post on the BBC The Editors blog featuring a video that highlights some of the changes brought by social media to their newsroom. It includes shots of the BBC "UGC Hub"( User Generated Content).

"Many of our leading journalists and presenters now incorporate social media platforms into their work: Tim Willcox; Lyse Doucet; Robert Peston and until recently Laura Kuenssberg (who has now been joined by her Twitter followers, with our blessing, at ITV News).

We've innovated, experimenting with branded hashtags to curate coverage; visualising Royal Wedding day tweets on our website; and work is under way to seamlessly integrate field despatches from our correspondents and reporters into our core news services and social media output.

And like many established news providers, we have created an open and modern set of guidance to help our staff engage, gather news and spread their journalism, working within the BBC's editorial values that are at the core of our journalism."

 

 

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.