Digital Influence Mapping Project

The Importance of Professional Conversations at WOMMA

In this past Sunday Review in the NYTimes, Shelly Turkle from M.I.T. offers a compelling case that our adopted digital behaviors may be satisfying our compulsion for 'always-on' connectivity while at the same time robbing us from the benefits of true conversation. 

This rings true to me. The effort needed to engage in a typical conversation is greater than that needed to constantly be referring back to email and IM. And the payout, the value to us as human beings of that conversation, is also greater, or, at the very least, is a critical value in and of itself. 

The value of professional conversations

Every time I attend a WOMMA event, I learn. More and more it happens in the side conversations in addition to the actual sessions I attend. The upcoming WOMMU event in Chicago from May 7-9 is a terrific chance to go beyond connections and actually have conversations with a diverse group of professionals. Each comes with their own lens and experience applying social media and word of mouth marketing to their businesses. 

I am sending a large group of our staff because I believe in the value of those conversations. Here's what I am looking forward to:

• Conversations with the other WOMMA past presidents which include Ed Keller, Paul Rand, Rod Brooks and others
• Talking to Ed Keller about his new book - due very soon
• Hearing Paul Adams from Facebook share his POV from his book, Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web
• Hearing Susan Emerick, Social Business Enablement, IBM share about enabling employees
• Attending Geno Church's special session on surviving a zombie attack

And, of course, the deepest value will be in the conversations that happen throughout the three days. 

Find out more and join us at the event. 

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.

What to Expect from Le Web 2011

My team at Ogilvy is holding a training summit in Paris concurrent with LeWeb 2011. And while the event has long been on my radar, this will be my first time attending. With about 3000 attendees and a flood of 20 minute sessions over 3 days, I am expecting a barrage of information. Oh, and I don't thrive in crowds. 

The agenda has a great mix of digital delebrities - Brian Chesky, CEO of AirBnB; Jeff Clavier, founder of SofTech VC; Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram and Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify. There are startups there competing for attention, recognition and dollars. The big  guns are there  Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter. And some great brands from Nestle, Orange, Dell and Dominoes. 

In-Betweens that Matter

With such a packed agenda, I suspect it will be the hallway conversations in-between that matter just as much. The 20-minute limit on sessions is a great intention so long as the presenters are led to edit to TED-like quality (succinct and with a POV). My expectations are modest there. 

I am looking forward to meeting people planned and unplanned. I pray that people will help me curate relevant connections as I am know we must all have a keen eye for self-preservation over such a busy conference.  

On Friday, there is a specific section focused on the Social Enterprise. I hope to see you there. 

EVENT - True Social Stories: An Insider’s Look at Transforming the Enterprise

Convinced that social media will alter, enhance or transform how they do business, more and more brands are investing in initiatives that tune up their entire organizations on how to use social media towards a valuable business goal. Sometimes that's applying discipline to how twenty markets around the world use Facebook. Sometimes it's a common measurement model to evaluate all social media work in marketing and communications, and sometimes its a methodical approach to changing the marketing mix over time between owned, earned and paid media. 

Join me at PivotCon in NYC on October 18 for an exclusive session with 30 top brands who will share their stories of moving from unconnected experiments in social to designing and rolling out playbooks, measurement dashboards, employee enablement programs, brand advocacy programs - all in the name of getting big impact from social. 

From Inside the Brand

The session is titled True Social Stories: An Insider’s Look at Transforming the Enterprise. Pepper Roukas from American Express will share insights about moving what once was a conservative services company to one that puts social currency" at the heart of what they do. Leslie Reiser from IBM will tell the inside story of creating the Paid Owned, Earned global guidance for midmarket. And Christine Cea from Unilever will reveal some of the "aha" moments in developing and deploying their global playbook on social engagement. 

The session will pull insights from the other 30 brands in attendance, as well. What have they each gone through this past year moving through phase 2 and 3 of the Social Media Adoption Path. 

 

How You Can Participate

• If you are a brand and care to join this session in person, we have purposely kept open a handful of seats. Simply email Ashley.Hurst@ogilvy.com  and she will let you know if there is space. 
• We plan to publish the top insights that come out of the presentations and discussion after the session. You can look for those on our team blog, Fresh Influence in the days following.
• Finally, tweet your questions for our panel @gemsie and she plans to pull them together for me to use during the session.

Hope to see you at PivotCon which Brian Solis will be hosting and hope to see you at our special session.       

A Great, Intimate Gathering of Senior Marketers Thanks to Compete

 
Later this week, a bunch of senior marketers are assembling in New Orleans at The Digital CMO: The Connection Project to discuss how digital, social and mobile is changing how we market. This is all thanks to our brothers and sisters at Compete who have put together a terrific roster of presenters and experiences. We use Compete for data and analystics in our social media work all of the time and I think highly of their business....

Here are a few of the speakers/sessions:

• Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post Media Group
• Pat McLean, Executive Director, Verizon - Verizon.com: Creating a Digital Brand 
• Tony Marlow, Director, Corporate Insights, Yahoo! & Brian Cooper, VP, Technology Sector, TNS - Connecting with Consumers: What Makes People Tick?
• Drew Patterson, CEO, Jetsetter.com - How Jetsetter Connects with Today's Traveler
• Michael Yapp, Director, Google Zoo - Understanding Brand Connections in a Consumer Owned World 
• and yes me, John Bell, Managing Director, Ogilvy - The CMO's Dilemma 2011

I prefer small events like this one (I think there will be about 150 or so attendees from brands there). Invitation only and while I tend to be relentlessly focused on work at these things, I hear rumor of a special Neville Brothers experience which being a Wild Tchoupitoulas fan from oh so many years back, I find deeply satisfying. It's also in N.O. where I have been traveling for years and have a soft spot in my heart.

Will keep you posted....

Why you should be going to SXSW (and why I am not)

Our team is heading off to SXSW in a couple of weeks - both Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence team and a wider contingent of Ogilvy folks. we have a lot of panel speakers, we will have a few special events and/or meetups. Tune into my team's blog to get the latest on these events as we get closer and their experiences on the road. 

A few years ago, I would have been a little less enthusiastic about such a big group going. Not any more. Whereas SXSW used to conjure up images of either 20-something, hipsters with a high tolerance for parties or social media blow-hards massaging Powerpoint-inflated egos, the event now has reached such a critical mass that tons of smart, disciplined digital folks attend and talk shop as well as socialize. 
If you are a brand marketer there are three reasons you must go:

Stimulate your brain and become a better marketer

Google attends, Ford attends, Ogilvy attends, NYTimes attends, small interesting businesses attend. The wide variety of people and organizations ensures this isn't the usual echo-chamber. I just spent the past two weeks with 80 of Ogilvy's social media strategists in the US and Mexico. These are some of the smartest young whippersnappers (what does that word even mean?). My brain boiled with ideas just from being around this community of 'lean-forward' thinkers. We generated more good ideas in 2 days than in 2 weeks of solitary writing and thinking. 

That's what you will get out of SXSW if you play your cards right and hang with the right folks. 

Walk the walk of being 'social'

This is a bit of a related corollary to my first point. SXSW is a social microcosm (getting more macro every year). The activity of moving between sessions, going to invite-only parties, seeing folks you haven't seen in a long while, intently following tweets in between live exchanges delivers a great dividend: shared experience and interests. This leads to a stronger connection and bonding. And it will grow both your weak and strong ties, each of which has a benefit. We could all use more of that. It really will help you do your job.


Find and connect with talent    

A ton of folks attend. Many are passionate. Most are smart. Many know what they are doing. And a bunch are great marketers. That is a valuable concentration of talent. I need to find a few key players for my team at Ogilvy. Our group is actually looking for quite a few folks. If this year is anything like last year (seems to be) we have a steep growth pattern. Personally, I am looking for a couple of really experienced, senior folks to help me grow from the scrappy startup to the global business we have become. I am lucky to have a team of great talent scouts on the ground in Austin that week.

Why I am not going

There is only one reason why I am not attending. I used to have a lot of reasons for not attending. Most are not rational. Some have to do with what SXSW used to be like vs. what it has become. This year, I was looking forward to attending for the 3 main reasons above. I even had a decent hotel room that I just let go of. 

But when I looked at the schedule filled with immovable client commitments in different parts of the world, I realized that by attending SXSW, I would be away from my children and wife for 4 straight weekends on top of rigorous weekly schedules where I don't often see them, I just couldn't do it. I need them more than I need SXSW. I have the faith that I will find additional opportunities to connect with people I might have seen there.  And I know I have a great team on the ground out there who will represent like no other. 

Go. Enjoy. It's a good move. 

Ogilvy & Social Media Week

This week is Social Media Week. A bit of a global, collective event that just "happens" thanks to the efforts of Toby Daniels, his merry band and the efforts of many enthusiastic individuals throughout he social media spectrum.  

You can attend a session live in one of nine cities from New York to San Francisco to London and more. Since we have a global team, we are running sessions in many of those cities. 

LONDON - our team in the UK will be running their Idea Shop Social pop-up store where you can walk-in and get strategic guidance for how to apply social to your business.  This is a great small business service and should be a lot of fun. They will also be running an "Idea-a-thon." On Friday of this week, UK time - "People tweet us briefs using the hashtag #ideashop. Together we answer the briefs.  Then the results are posted online for everyone to enjoy."

NEW YORK CITY - our team in NYC will be hosting a workshop on Facebook for brand marketers in partnership with Buddy Media. How's Your Facebook Strategy Doing? is now full. We will have several brands there and Facebook. The session will start with a panel but quickly segue to roundtable work groups on Engagement, Acquisition, Measurement and more.

SAN FRANCISCO - the gang in SF is running a session on Social Experience Design called Beyond the Like Button. This is also sold out at this point. They will be covering "the effects of the decentralization of the singular brand presence, how social media has affected customer contact channels and CRM initiatives and how marketers can best align with user needs and behaviors across the expanding digital space (smart tv, mobile phones, gaming consoles, tablets, smart appliances)."

Should be great week and we look forward to seeing everyone online and offline

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. 

Australian Social Media: 3 Priorities for Brands

I am back from Australia, Brian Giesen and Graham White lead a terrific team of 360°Digital Influence strategists down under. They showed me a lot of what is happening in that market. I spoke with several journalists from The Australian, CBS and others and heard a POV that I just don't agree with. Simply put many people said, "we're behind (the development of social media) the US." Having been through a few markets during this most recent trip in Asia, I can't say strongly enough that the US is not the end of the rainbow. There is not one evolutionary path for the adoption of social media especially as it relates to digital marketing. 

Where is Australia heading? If anything, they like Brazil, may be heading towards a faster adoption of social networking for marcom purposes and a faster adoption of mobile social networking than the US. Unlike the US and many other markets, their newspaper business is not dying. That may be a "yet" but as one veteran reporter put it, they may just not have the heritage of bloated staff counts grown when print was the way people consumed media. They may have less "right-sizing" to do. In general, traditional media remains strong in Australia. 

Three Priorities for Brands:

1. Jump directly into adopting Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and manage the group via a conversation calendar-model. Brands have a terrific opportunity to grow their 'social grassroots' base of followers. This is doubly important because Australia doesn't have the same breadth of influential bloggers as the United States (not as many segements). 

2. Put half your effort into building out the mobile experience form your brand which, of course, includes how they interact with Facebook, Twitter and teh up-and-comer in market, FourSquare.   

3. Embrace integrated social media programs that make use of other forms of marketing and communications and marketing. That means use paid media to drive engagement with whatever you are doing in Facebook or Twitter. Don't waste time exploring whether social media is the miracle "cheap" replacement for traditional marketing. 

Four Telling Trends

Here are four trends that I find telling about Australia. Each has been compiled by our Australian team in a great snapshot of the region.  

 

Australians spend the most time worldwide consuming social media. With almost 7 hours per month spent in social media they "out-social" the US, UK and Italy (one to watch btw). If you factor in the relative population size that puts 17 million users online (80% of the population with 62% via broadband) vs. about 230 million US users or almost 77% of the population). 

The social network story is dominated by Facebook. And before we say "duh!" remember that in many Internet-rich countries around the world like Brazil, Japan and Russia, Facebook is not the leader. In Australia, no one stands in Facebook's path towards commanding mass-attention, even the 55+ crowd in Australia is jumping on board.

 

The biggest gain in year-over-year change in social media usage is interacting with a brand via social networks. That means Facebook and Twitter. Australian consumers are willing to engage with brands via these platforms just as readily as in the United States. 

 

The under 35 crowd wants to access social networks like Facebook and Twitter via their mobile device. With 89% SMS penetration and 20% Web access via mobile (and likely 20% smart phone penetration), all eyes should be on developing the mobile experience for brands.  

Australia has its own path towards adoption of social media and it will likely leapfrog other countries including the US in terms of how brands take advantage of their particular usage. 

This Week at PRWeek Lab: 12 Lessons on Socializing Ford

This Wednesday at 11:30am ET, we will be presenting a session in cahoots with John Stoll, Manager of Global Corporate News at Ford on socializing the enterprise. Originally billed as "5 Lessons", we will actually deliver 12 lessons from our experience.

This is part fo 2 says of an innovative virtual event hosted by PRWeek called PRWeek Lab. While I have participated in virtual events before, they remain a bit of an experiment. We will be online live from 11am to 4pm ET each day June 2-3 running our own presence - Ogilvy's Innovation Academy - where you can experience 3 short samples of the curriculum we use for our staff and clients.

But back to the main session. Here's the skinny:

Socialize the Enterprise: 12 Lessons Learned Applying Social to Business

Featured speakers:
John Stoll, manager, global corporate news, Ford Motor Company
John Bell, global managing director, 360° Digital Influence, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide

Ford has applied social media more strategically and thoroughly than other leading brands. In 2009, the Social Media Index named Ford the top automotive brand in social media. How did Ford apply social media in a most critical year? How has it changed their communications function, team and mission? Join John Stroll, manager, global corporate news, Ford Motor Company and John Bell, managing director of Ogilvy's 360° Digital Influence team as they offer a peak beneath the tent. What five lessons did they learn that surprised even them?

Please join us at the event. You can find out more here and register.