Digital Influence Mapping Project

Visit NextNow Digital…Now

In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005.  This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.

For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.

Start with this post: Why Launch the Next Digital Consultancy…Now?

 

Content Marketing Designed to Help Behavior Change

Brands who want to get the most out of a content marketing program ought to embrace a user-centered approach to developing and delivering that content. The content and the channels that deliver that content should be designed around prospect and customer intent. What do people want to get done, what decisions do they have to make towards an end, what questions do they have.

Design around that not around what you want them to know about you. Good user-based design will always communicate the latter by “showing” not “telling.”

The ultimate utility and the hardest to deliver against is helping to foster behavior change. Helping people stop smoking, get exercise, manage their money, and so forth. In the property and casualty business, we want to help people lead safer lives. So much of that job is in people’s hands. It is the actions big and small they can take to reduce hazards around the house or risks related to driving.

 

Content to Drive Change: Aetna

Aetna recently released the 11 Initiative by Aetna. To inspire people to reduce or stop smoking (and therefore improve health and health premiums), they created an experience and a content aggregator on Tumblr. The experience (concepted with Ogilvy) revolves around a publicly placed machine that will dispense a rich 11-minute experience for every cigarette surrendered. The core pretense is:

“A recent study found every cigarette you don’t smoke could add 11 minutes to your life. So let’s talk about how you can make the most of them.”

The experiential rewards include petting dogs, a private magic show, seeing acrobats up close and personal. These are essentially the plot lines for online videos to drive relevant awareness of the program.

Users at the Tumblr site are encouraged to post what they would do with 11 extra minutes. For anything displayed on the Aetna site a clear moderation layer helps select the constructive suggestions vs those that may crop up off site.

The 11 Initiative is well integrated into their social channels and has taken over the cover photo on Facebook and Twitter.  The one place it falls down is their Web site. It is completely absent. I suspect that has more to do with how hard it is for companies to make easy-to-update web sites rather that a strategic preference to keep it off the site.

Practically speaking, this content initiative will not reduce smoking. Aetna knows this. But it may inspire people to take that step that will help them stop. It also telegraphs what Aetna is about – wellness. And it gives them a platform to communicate other important topics like key concepts in health insurance coverage. They have taken a big health problem and built a well-integrated program to raise their voice and the voices of customers around it.

 

 

 Content to Drive Change: Prudential

A year or so ago, Prudential launched The Challenge Lab. There are 5 challenges from “I Might Live How Long?: Uncovering why we have trouble imagining a longer life and how that can affect our financial future.” to “I Want it Now: Discovering why we want things now and how that behavior affects our finances later”

It’s all about making us more aware or mindful of our own behavioral economics. What makes us tick or, more accurately, what keeps us from saving for retirement.

This is a terrific site, if a bit cerebral for the average insured. There is a section on risk entitled, “It Won’t Happen to Me: Exploring our tendency to be overly optimistic and how it affects our long-term financial plans.” In each case, professor Dan Gilbert unpacks the issue in about :50 of video. The content is fairly light and leads you down the page to product/service calls-to-action. This is about helping people get smarter, possibly inspired to change and taking an action by connecting with Prudential on retirement planning or other services.  

They remain committed to this platform. I am working hard not to call it a ‘campaign.’ That word seems so inextricably linked to ‘ad campaign.’  “Bring Your Challenges” is a creative platform that adds meaning to the brand and gives them permission to talk more regularly with people about financial decisions that are too often “one and done.”

The extend the program into Facebook and YouTube amongst other platforms. 

In this case their TV ads do extend the BYC creative concept reinforcing Prudential’s role to help people do what they can – even if that means overcoming some of their most basic human tendencies – in order to save and watch out for their future.

 

Two user-driven approaches. Two “big platforms” that say as much about the brand as deliver tangible value to prospects and customers. Two programs helping people do what they need to get done and make the decisions they need to make.

Related articles

Idea Bar #15: Crowdsource Fleur Pellerin's Reading List

Hacking the Brief: A New Service for Brands and Agencies

Two ways to always be thinking about customer behavior

Government Leads in Crowdsourcing “Massive Awesomeness”

How is the US government using social and digital media and data to bring value to the people? Too often criticized for bureaucratic sluggishness and cross-interest paralysis, the US government is doing some surprising things to innovate. Just look at the Health Data Initiative (HDI), a public-private initiative whose founding membership includes the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).   

Todd Park, the infectious (in a good way) US Chief Technology Officer, recently kicked off the Health Datapalooza in Washington DC. It’s one manifestation of the HDI, “the public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications that raise awareness of health system performance and spark community action to improve health.” The Health Datapalooza is all about opening up data and hosting crowdsourcing efforts that inspire the best and brightest to make use of that data. The DC-based event has inspired other health data, “hackathon” crowdsourcing events across the country.

Check out the Cajun Code Fest held in Louisiana. It brought 300 coders together to wrestle with code sets from the government that included:

• SCHOOL NUTRITION DIETARY ASSESSMENT STUDY
• BEHAVIORAL RISK FACTOR SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM
• NATIONAL SURVEY OF CHILDREN'S HEALTH
• FOOD ENVIRONMENT ATLAS

Among other issues, they rallied their brainpower to crunch data towards useful solutions to childhood obesity. Check out their Web site and browse through the descriptions of the 37 datasets like those mentioned above. Even a layman (non-coder; non-data junkie) can start to imagine some of the possibilities if we could just bash some of this data together to extract insight and utility.

The Fanboy of Health Data

Todd Park is a force to be reckoned with. Just watch his introductory speech to the 2012 Health Datapalooza. A self-avowed  “fanboy of health data,” his brightness and enthusiasm is just what is needed to inspire 1600 entrepreneurs to convene for two days and lay the foundation for innovation that uses government data in creative and useful ways.

His proof point for opening up data or as Thomas Goetz, Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, called it converting ‘latent data into powerful, actionable data’, is the opening of weather and subsequently GPS data. Those moves created $90b of “massive awesomeness.” That’s innovation creating jobs, better outcomes for farmers and others who rely on weather, and just a ton of entrepreneurship (think Weather Channel, think Google Maps).

 “Awesome” is clearly Todd's favorite word. Hearing someone so effusive and passionate speak from a government pulpit is a breath of fresh air. He seems to have grabbed onto a behavior made popular in Silicon Valley in the private sector and figured out a way to elevate it to public-service-meets-the-next-wave-of-entrepreneurs.  I hope other governments around the world pay attention to this model and try to apply it to solve the big thorny issues.  

If you want to get a sense of some of the emerging solutions that were highlighted during the event, Read David Maris’ article at Forbes.com. He covers off on the winners and some of the interesting highlights. The value of the event goes far beyond those that won.

I am particularly fond of data visualization as part of a behavior strategy. David highlights the team from Indiana University who “entered a mobile app that provides images and information about the overall health of the population of each state.  So calling up an image of Mississippi, pulls up an obesity-adjusted outline of a person with other health statistics, while the Colorado outline is noticeably thinner.”

Also, the winner, VaxNation from Baylor, Rice and University of Texas students is "an app designed to make it easier for people to keep up with their families’ immunizations"

Read more about Todd Parks' enthusiasm and leadership at Mashable. 

 

One of CMO's top concerns in teh private sector is how to manage - make use of - the flood of data now avaialble to them. Perhaps there is a lesson in these open inititaives or the technology hackathons that came before them. 

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.

Idea Bar #14: Insight Service for Healthcare Pros

Healthcare companies including pharma are challenged with how to build relationships with physicians digitally. They have their direct marketing and, most importantly, their "detail" or sales teams who face increased scrutiny in terms of what they deliver to 'earn' doctors' attention.

Conversely, the most interesting social media innovation for physicians are private communities like Sermo that restrict how marketers can interact with the doctors in that community. How do you engage physicians onlne and in social media? And don't make the mistake of thinking your healthcare pro isn't online:

"Over 77% of online physicians used one form of social media or another to create, consume, or share medical content.

51% of online physicians forwarded useful content (eg – email, video, etc.) to a colleague".
Source – Jupiter Research, “Direct-to-Physician Online Marketing” - 2008

Deliver Useful Content

What's a marketer to do? Well, if you have a OTC product for, let's say, skincare or weight management, you might try being of-use to the doctors who serve patients with that condition. ("Skin Disorder" and "Weight Problem" are the #1 and #7 most popular health topic in social media respectively according to Forrester Research, “How Consumers Use Social Computing For Health”, 2007).

Create a Patient Insight Service from Your Listening Post Data

If you have an over the counter product, you don't need to worry about the current issues with adverse events reporting that is stiffling the use of Listening Posts by pharma. You can do what almost every marketer does today - establish a Listening Post to capture what consumers are saying publicly across social media - blogs, message boards, Twitter, Facebook, etc... - in relation to a product or topic.

If you make a skincare lotion, you will listen not just to what people say about your brand but to all the conversations that may intersect with your category and product in some way - "winter skin," "sun damage," or "skin whitening" if you are in China. These are examples of category terms. You might go broader to better understand the context of when people think and act on skincare.

You need to do this for your own efforts. It will affect your marcom effortsin may ways. Why not re-package what you learn and make that available as a service to doctors and dermatologists? You could create a valuable email update that can be delivered beyond simple email - subscribable RSS feed, mobile updates, smart phone application with update functionality (think how your CNN module delivers updates to the main screen).

You need to keep it simple. Think what we have all learned form the emails of the Obama campaign or the updates from Daily Candy - keep it short and simple. That also makes them well-suited to more mobile distribution. Here's an example of a simple insight with a related graph. I am sure given more time and analysis, these bits could become quite valuable.

 
Combine the conversation insight with a product performance graph or data point and you have been useful and reinforced a point about why your product stands out.

Distribution and Subscription

Creating a compelling content offer is one thing, getting it to docs and derms is another. But now you would have something valuable to deliver via partnerships, your own Web sites, even your advertising could feature content nuggets that drive you back to the service. There are tons of ways to get this out there and then build up a "list" of physicians.

WOMMA Looks at the FDA Social Media Hearings

After the first day of FDA Hearings, WOMMA, Ogilvy and LiveWorld held a tweetup at Ogilvy with WOMMA's legal counsel, Tony DiResta. Tony guided WOMMA through our work that led to the recent FTC Guidelines on Endorsements and Testimonials. He's also author of the WOMMA Blog, DiResta the Law, where he shares on the legal side of social media and word of mouth marketing.

He offers his own perspective on the first day and where he thinks this all may lead. After spending most of the two days there myself and [presenting to the FDA on the second day], I would say that all of his first day observations are relevant for both days.

Part 1

 

Part 2

Part 3

 

We will have a live wrap-up of the FDA hearings at the WOMMA Summit this week. We will also have a live session with the FTC in attendance as our next step in developing precise and practical best practices for that agencies recent Guidelines to marketers.
  

WOMMA Presents at the FDA Social Media Hearings

I attended most of the the two day FDA Hearings on use of the Internet and Social Media and was pleasantly surprised. The agenda was jam-packed. It was like speed-dating or some other rapid-fire challenge. While I was skeptical of the format and whether there would be substantive suggestions and ideas, both worked out well.

Speaking on behalf of WOMMA, Melissa Davies (member company Nielsen) and I delivered two different "testimonies."

WOMMA FDA Presentation November 2009

View more documents from jbell99.

I addressed questions 1 and 3 from the FDA docket. My goal was to share our recent experience with the new FDA Guidelines, suggest a level of brand responsibility around sites where brands establish a "material connection" and offer a suggestion for a new vocabulary to bring whatever guidelines come from the hearings more up-to-date and aligned with the industry.

WOMMA FDA Presentation on Adverse Events November 2009

View more documents from jbell99.

Melissa shared her POV on the real instance of Adverse Events based upon some novel research her company had done.

One thing did surprise me. Most of the presentations not-focused on adverse events were focused on digital marketing basics - search marketing, banners, et al. Its true, pharma has been held back in the basics. The FDA needs to deliver some 'pretty good' guidelines on this Web 1.0 stuff quickly and then turn its attention to the true social media practices.

There were quite a few presentations that corroborated our point that the FDA could serve the public best by delivering some basic "guardrails" and then encourage and allow marketers to define the actual best practices around implementation.

We need to create a climate condusive to innovation from the market. That's what led to Web 2.0, social media and the Internet, itself.

FDA Social Media Hearings Live

The FDA "socal media" Hearings are going on all day today and tomorrow. Packed agenda - 60+ speakers including Ogilvy and WOMMA. You can watch it live here from the FDA.

Join Us for a Post-FDA Tweetup in DC

WOMMA and Ogilvy will be presenting at the FDA "Social Media" hearings this week in Washington DC. I will be speaking on behalf of WOMMA in my role as President of the Board. Rohit Bhargava will be presenting on behalf of Ogilvy in his role spearheading our Digital Health business. We have all been waiting for some time for the FDA to engage and start evolving their guidlines to address the changes wrought by social media. The 2-day hearings is just a start. And a ton of experts will speak over those two days.

On Thursday night, November 12th,  from 6:30pm - 8:30pm, WOMMA and member companies -  Live World and Ogilvy PR -  will have a tweet up at the Ogilvy offices in DC (1111 19th Street - 10th floor). Tony DiResta who is WOMMA's legal counsle will give a post-hearing wrap-up and a lot of us who participated will be there offering our won thoughts. Mostly its social.

You can RSVP here or just show up.

WOMMA to Present at FDA Hearings on Social Media

On Friday, November 12th, Melissa Davies, Research Director at Nielsen, and I will present on behalf of WOMMA during two sessions with the FDA. These are part of the long-awaited FDA foray into considering new guardrails for health products marketers in social media. Pharma, one of a few heavily regulated industries, has stepped cautiously into social media over the past few years. Still, pharam is not as paralyzed as some would suggest. Dose of Digital maintains a great list of pharma social media activities from Twitter to communities.

WOMMA has just gone through a productive year with the FTC that culminated recently with the FTC Guidelines on Endorsements and Testimonials.We will have a follow up session with the FTC at this year's WOMMA Summit in November.

WOMMA's Role

Ultimately, WOMMA wants to protect the consumer and the trust that brands can build with consumers if they use social media well. Consumers increasingly expect brands to engage and be available in social media. Brands value third party word of mouth as one of the most trusted sources for opinion and purchase decision. Brands and consumers want to connect in socila media. And we have to do it right or the basic premise beneath WOM - trust - will crumble. We also want to empower marketers to productively engage within social media. Pharma has been held back in part because of their fear of additional regulations or actions.  

The FDA's 5 Questions

The FDA has set up a listening session on November 18 and 19. The agenda is full of marketers and each of us has a 10-minute slot to help inform the FDA's 5 questions. 

It is not clear yet if these are even the right 5 questions. Still, in respect to the FDA and the simple principle that we have to start somewhere, I am grateful that they opened their doors. You can review the FDA's Notice of Public Hearing here.

Here are the 3 questions we plan to address with a quick summary of our POV:

Question #1: For what online communications are manufacturers, packers, or distributors accountable?

In today’s social Web marketers and consumers alike are flocking to third party sites and platforms both to be where consumers are and to garner legitimate third-party mentions that corroborate their products’ benefits or around a topic related to a disease or condition. The power of word of mouth means that marketers want influencers/bloggers to experience their topic, product, or service that relates to a brand and then share about it authentically.

WOMMA has an aggressive POV on what is proper disclosure both in spirit and actuality. Aligned with the recent FTC Guidelines, we see the opportunity for marketers to not only practice ‘full disclosure’ of any and all material connection between brand and influencer/blogger, but also to strongly encourage those influencers to do their part to properly disclose. As with the FTC Guidelines, it doesn't take payment to define a material connection. Marketers are better off disclosing any type of material connection whether they be travel expenses for a health blogger, technology support on an unbranded community, or even the snacks at a tweetup. Disclose and let the consumer judge credibility. 

Question #3: What parameters should apply to the posting of corrective information on Web sites controlled by third parties?

Social media is defined by conversations and a hyper-democratized  approach to publishing. Brands and marketers want to connect more directly with customers to better understand their needs and build a stronger relationship. In addition, brands want to ensure that the full story behind products are shared outside their Web sites. They want to be where consumers are spending their time and that is increasringly across the social web.Can pharma marketers be allowed the opportunity to comment on blogs and message boards – completely transparent about their identity and interests – to help keep the information about medical products as clear as possible?  Most pharma marketers do not feel empowered to comment or "fact correct" as the historic FDA guidelines might interpret that as a new instance requiring advertiisng or labeling information. Imagine if every comment required that full page disclaimer you see in print ads.  Conversely, we must not require an unsupportable burden - the requirement to "story-correct" across the vastness of social media. Like the FTC Guidelines, the marketer must focus their energy on keeping their own communications accurate and encouraging and even enforcing accuracy from any influencers they proactively outreach to.

The challenge with health care information is to allow for this conversational interaction while always putting the full story behind products and services front and center. No blog comment field or Tweet will sustain the full content of a product Web site. We may need to allow pharma a consistent "one-click" solution where marketers can comment and link back to the full body of a product insert.  

Question #5: Specific to Adverse Events Reporting

One of the biggest effects of social media is the new opportunity for brands to hear what consumers are saying in public discussions about products, services and issues important in their lives. Smart marketers have adopted “big ears” to make sure they listen and respond to customer concerns. 

The historic and important requirements around adverse events reporting have held many health care marketers back from listening to consumers. How the intent of adverse events reporting actually applies when a patient posts a product experience in Twitter with no contact information in their “bio” or exactly when an adverse event is established over the course of several blog posts is not clear. We need to find a clearer way of recognizing an adverse event and then reporting it that does not hold back a marketer from listening to what consumers are saying in the public space.

Outcome of the Hearings
The real solution may lie in the FDA establishing clear principles and then encouraging the industry to define exact practices as we are doing at WOMMA in relation to the FTC Guidelines. Can the FDA really hope to define the exact nature of a url or how to balance their historic need to approve marketing claims with the non-stop, real-time nature of a twitter-ized social Web? Will this type of detailed regulation help or hold innovation back? We need principles that protect the consumer but do not curb marketers from innovating.

Stop by:

If you are in DC for the hearings, stop by Ogilvy on Thursday night. WOMMA, LiveWorld and Ogilvy will be hosting a post-hearing Tweetup to recap what we heard that day. RSVP Here