Digital Influence Mapping Project

3 Ways to Connect Marketing, Journalism and Company Cultures

A journalist, marketer and a senior vice president walk into a bar

Most “3 guys walk into a bar”-jokes are about a clash of cultures or POVs. As brands explore what it means to shift marketing to content marketing and even bring in journalists trained in story-mining and storytelling, they will suffer culture clash. Every business is different, but there are three constructive ways to connect these cultures such that they strengthen each other. That may work for you. You may have your own suggestions – please share.

The clash

First there is journalism culture and marketing culture. One spawned by high-mindedness and a social responsibility, the other born to sell.

Here’s how Kevin Maney, journalist, separates advertising and journalism:

“Advertising is something a company wants to say, regardless of whether it’s useful, informative or relevant to the audience. Journalism is useful, informative and relevant to the audience, regardless of whether it’s something a company wants to say.

By definition then, advertising is usually content a company has to push at the audience — often by paying for placement. Journalism is content that people seek out and pull to them.”

This is pretty typical of a journalist’s POV on what marketers are trying to do. The best marketers out there are sweating bullets trying to understand customer needs and emotions and then connect with them in some authentic way. That being said, Kevin’s points about push and pull make sense.

Natalie Burg at Contently describes some of this tension a bit differently,

“And that’s just the first point of tension. Journalists focus on storytelling, fact checking and style; marketers care far less about Oxford commas than reaching their business goals. Journalists tend to be realists; marketers tend to be aspirational.

“They come from different worlds,” says Brendan Cournoyer, former journalist and director of content marketing at Brainshark. “No matter what, it’s an adjustment, and there can be some tension.” 

You can quickly see the tension between these two cultures. One is about attracting people through relevance and story, the other gets the job done.

The third culture is whatever company culture you have. Very few companies have a dominant marketing culture. Fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies like Unilever and Nestle do. Google and Microsoft have engineering cultures. Banks have banking cultures. Even brands like Nike have a performance culture above their marketing culture. Usually companies with strong cultures that are not marketing-centric have a distrust of marketing as a discipline. Journalism also seems too tangential to how companies make money to care.

So, three cultures often with some tension between them. How do you convert non-healthy tension into a new, powerful way of marketing?

 

Put the editorial calendar at the heart of marketing and communications

Imagine if you could document all of the product and service initiatives and persistent marketing commitments – new product releases, new service enhancements, conferences, research initiatives – all in one place. Then you got your entire marketing and communications force to coordinate efforts around the calendar? And what if the marketing ‘moments’ on that calendar were handled as interesting stories – some big, some small?  Now you are adopting a habit of editorial organizations. Actually, you would likely go beyond what most editorial organizations have achieved and built an editorial “map” visible to all inside the organization and with the express purpose of getting disparate players to sync up their efforts.

If the calendar becomes everyone’s “heads-up display”, it makes it easier to inject spontaneous and opportunistic stories as well. Let’s say a big global storm inhibits shipping from China, if you were a supply chain management company, you could more easily align marketing and communications to generate and publish useful stories about your POV on successful supply chain tactics during a disruption. Ann Handley offers a great example of “newsjacking” when Kapost jumped on a story essentially about a competitor in a rather nimble way.

The editorial calendar is a powerful organizing principal and one borrowed from a journalistic culture.

 

Align everyone to a common measurement model

Marketing is all about effectiveness. At Ogilvy, we always referred to the David Ogilvy quote, “we sell or else.” One of marketing culture’s gifts to this new land of content marketing is a business-relevant way of measuring performance.

By establishing a common and relatively simple model for evaluating marketing and communications efforts, suddenly all the stories in the editorial calendar and all the tactics deployed become more strategic. That means blending measurement for most marketing with most communications (i.e. public relations). It also means connecting the KPIs (key performance indicators) to sales-related results.

The common performance measurement model aligns all disciplines and is one of marketing culture’s key strengths.

 

Build belief in a new connected-customer journey

Executives in an engineering culture, a banking culture, a health care culture need to understand the impact and contribution to the business from marketing – especially this ‘new marketing’ where valuable content plays a much bigger role.

How you build belief is really up to what works and what communicates best on that culture. Engineers may favor quantified problems and well-designed solutions. Bankers may favor the numbers. However you need to present your case, you need to be doing it all the time. Belief rarely happens with one event (crisis can do that, look at Dell, BP, GM). Belief is built over time and it is prone to erode or give way to competing beliefs.

Three things that appear critical to building belief in what the journalism and marketing cultures are trying to do: the new customer journey, the numbers and the work.

The sales funnel isn’t dead. It just doesn’t explain how buyers behave anymore. Whether a consumer or a business decision-maker, how we buy is changing. With immediate access to all the information in the universe via Google, peer recommendations via social and more, how we move through to make a buying decision – never mind choices around sticking with a company – has changed. Gaining agreement internally around this new customer journey will help build support for marketing going forward.

Do you have an executive marketing dashboard…that you believe in? Getting that weekly or monthly one-pager that really captures how you are doing helps (especially if it’s based upon the common measurement model above.

Executives are people, too and great, beautiful work helps rally support. Always be sharing the great work. It inspires and helps people want to be a part of something inspiring.

 

Now I just need to come up with a great joke to pay off on “A journalist, marketer and an SVP walk into a bar…”

 

 

 

Related articles

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5 Lessons For Brand Publishers From the NYT Innovation Report

4 Ways to Get Integrated Social Media Programs to Work

7 Ways to Make Content Marketing Accountable

The broad promise of brands building direct relationships with stakeholders via genuinely valuable content seems right enough. Coca-Cola seems to be living its Content 2020 mission (see this original manifesto). GE continues to innovate with content that captures the grandeur of great, big machines. (see their Instagram channel). Even the investment firm, Blackrock, has committed to a steady flow of POVs meant to help customers with their investment strategies (see the Blackrock Blog and how they publish in LinkedIn).

We all want content marketing programs that are creatively relevant, operationally successful, and measurably effective. These seem to be the three key activities we must continually master to make these content marketing efforts pay off. They all have to be done. It’s likely that one of these, however is more of a lynch-pin. I would guess for Coca-Cola, creative relevance comes first and without that, nothing else matters. For many more, effectiveness is key to building belief internally that content marketing is serious business.

 

7 Ways to Design to Effectiveness

Have you ever designed and even deployed a content program only to define the measurement criteria after-the-fact? I have, and I don’t want to do it ever again. Even an experiment or pilot deserves a crisp, hypothetical measurement model.  

Having the measurement discussion during the ‘marketing brief’ phase is the only way to go. Here are 7 ways to design highly measurable programs. I know there are more and that different businesses demand their own. These are simply the ones that I can apply today.

 

Conversion, Relevance and Retargeting

Content marketing is not just middle-of-the-funnel stuff. If Lowe’s Home Improvement delivers valuable ‘how-to’ content promoted out via Facebook and other platforms (see this article on creating home gyms), They can easily re-target ads to those who have engaged with the content. These ads can be customized messages that drive people considering a home-gym project to buy online.  

Metric: conversion and/or sales

 

Building Relevant Awareness

Unless you have a new product or brand, simple awareness isn’t the name of the game. We want the right people to understand what a brand stands for – what it could mean to them. That’s making a brand more relevant, thus, relevant awareness. Ford wants people to believe in Ford as a technology brand, as well as 2-3 other qualities. Sure it’s top-of-the-funnel but that’s how we begin to attract the right people with the right intent for deeper engagement and, ultimately, sales. 

Metric: reach + positioning (via survey)

 

Engagement to Preference

“Engagement” usually is an amalgam of likes, shares, comments and time-spent with brand content. Many of these are indicative of people ‘leaning into’ your content and more consciously thinking about you. Today it's more than just spending more time with a brand or even more interactions. In social, "engagement" covers all of those actions which actually spread advocacy (like when I "share" via Facebook which forces the story out to my friends). Great content can do more than engage. It can strengthen and, even, create preference for a brand.

Metric: reach + positioning (via survey); engagement + positioning (via survey)

 

Attracting New Recruits

Content marketing can serve recruitment. Many of the big consultancies like Ernst & Young are designing social + content programs to identify quality candidates earlier and earlier (and beating out their competitors at the job fair table). Brands that were once mysterious or “boring” launch content programs to reveal the inner greatness of the company.

Metric: new candidates + quality scores (to confirm they are the “right” candidates)

 

Strengthening Trust, Brand and Reputation

Many companies put a value on the strength of their brand. Sometimes framed as ‘brand health,’ content (and social engagement) can have a measurable impact. Many brands establish content and social channels to build reputation now and grow channels and positive communities now for activation should an issue or crisis arise.

Metric: sentiment, trust, competitive benchmarking

 

Increasing Marketing Efficiency

A full content marketing program where you are targeting important audience segments, consciously strengthening search engine results and improving operational efficiency can make for a more efficient marketing mix. Advertising in proximity to owned and earned content works harder (gets better results without additional cost).

Metric: ROI studies against measured values (e.g. sales)

 

Improving Discoverability and SEM Efficiency

Maybe this is a bit tactical. Still, many brands put a value on their ranking in the first two search results pages for hundreds of terms. Organic placement can be combined with paid search engine marketing(SEM) to efficiently drive traffic to a valuable storefront or thought-leadership platform. You need great content for that.

Metric: search visibility/ranking for relevant terms/intent

 

Attend Social Data Week for Big Insights

Next week I am speaking at Social Data Week in San Francisco. My colleague, Irfan Kamal, speaks at Social Data Week in NYC. When I heard that DataSift was organizing events dedicated to social data, I jumped at the chance to attend and share our own approach at applying data to the work we do for big, global brands.

Folks from Dell, CBS, Twitter, Marketwired, and, of course, Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble are all there focused on the role data plays in social media or, more importantly, the role that social data plays in business.

I will share about a unique study we did globally. We crunched over 7 million brand conversations to understand what people care about most in relation to brands. What drives casual and passionate advocacy. It’s a great way to use data.

I am not sure if there is still space to attend on either coast but here’s the link to find out more and register.

Three Helpful Principles for Strong Content Marketing

Nothing captures marketer’s attention today like content marketing. It’s been adopted by every pundit and marketing expert as the wave of the future. And for good reason. Picture this – in the future, we will have all the data integrated into useful dashboards that allow us to deliver just the right content or experience to every individual in our 50 million-person database. This will be valuable content that helps them get through life and inspires them to share with their social connections. We will cultivate great, long-lasting relationships with our customers and stakeholders. It will be efficient. Salesforce calls it the Connected Customer. I sometimes refer to this data-driven, technology-enabled approach as new marketing. That’s because I believe it will eclipse the channel-based marketing practiced today.

There’s plenty of best practices being shared everyday. Today, I was thinking about three simple lessons-learned worth passing along.

 

Know the Complete Value of Your Content Marketing

I spent some quality time with a blue-chip B2B marketer in a Asia Pacific market recently. They have been pioneering certain aspects of content marketing. Certainly, they have gotten great at creating iconic and shareable content that achieve pretty significant reach. Locally, they are trying to localize and operationalize their use of content via LinkedIn and other platforms. The trouble is they only value lead generation.

I am all for lead gen. Especially in B2B. Still, there are other business benefits from building a sustained relationship via valuable content. If we establish valuable content around the business or personal needs and problems that our products ultimately deliver against, we build an expectation and, potentially, a preference for our brand. Customers will think of us first.

If our content is truly useful or remarkable, our immediate followers will pass it along via their social graph. Their friends will find it more interesting because it came from people they know. This increases discoverability and the relevance of our content. And let’s not forget organic (and paid) search.  

“B2B customers are in fact 57% of the way through their purchase process on average today before they even make contact with a supplier.” Google and social media are two of the places buyers spend time before they pick up the phone.

And certain types of content can build trust. When we put our own experts out there sharing their POV, we can humanize our brand and allow people to build trust in people. It still surprises me that marketers see the responsibility for trust-building as a public relations-only task.

I love lead gen. It certainly matters a ton towards true sales opportunity. And yet, content marketing delivers a lot of sales-related value beyond simple lead gen.

Here’s another view on valuable metrics from Ritika Puri in CMO.com

 

Strive to Rise Above the Clutter

With billions of pieces of content shared everyday across the social Web and the reality that according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003”, the pressure is on for us to create high quality content not more content.

That’s an important distinction. Some marketers might be less discriminating believing in the principles of repetition and consistency – that we want people to come across our message/content several times to ‘stick.’ Too much mediocre stuff is just noise and will be filtered out no matter what. So stop chasing “impressions.”

According to Nadia Cameron in the Australian blog, CMO: 

“Research conducted earlier this year by the Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA) and the Content Marketing Institute found 96 per cent of Australian marketers are using content marketing to reach out to customers, allocating 25 per cent of their budget on average to these activities. Yet a recent whitepaper published by analyst firm, Altimeter Group, found organisations continue to fail in their content marketing quest.

For McCance, the big issue is the level of cut through marketers can achieve in a world increasingly populated by content. “This wasn’t such a dominant strategy a few years ago and you had a higher likelihood of breaking through,” he said. “But in many industry sectors now, marketers are pursuing a content marketing strategy and it cancels people out; there is a huge level of noise in the environment and it’s getting harder to break through to your target audience.

“People are setting the bar for their content marketing strategy at a ‘thought leadership’ level, and having something smart to say. We find that while the information is a ‘nice to know’ for customers, they will probably do what they’re doing already. It’s not causing them to change their actual behaviour.”

 We need to be ruthless in creating value. Do we understand enough about the specific needs and pain-points for our buying customer? How about the actual product users or recommenders within an organization? Are we then converting that insight and understanding into content that pays off on those demonstrated needs?

Cameron’s article goes on to conclude, “Instead, B2B marketers need to turn their attention to ‘commercial insights’ that disrupt the customer’s mindset, CEB claimed.”

Insights are good. Disruptive insights also good. Still, we simply need to remain committed to understanding our customer and creating content that will be found valuable by them.

 

Be Diligent About the Data

Clearly, we are now all fascinated by the prospects of using data to create the right content, understand how people respond to it and how we can fine0tune it to be more relevant by our individual customer/followers.

Mining search and social data for insights or information that can be used to create the most useful and compelling content is a great, fundamental practice. So is looking at performance data on specific pieces of content. Pete Blackshaw at Nestlé publishes a “Top Posts of the Week” leaderboard that signals to marketers what is performing well. That begs marketers to look into the most successful content to understand the lessons of great content and apply them.

It’s easy to do this once. It’s harder to make it the way we do things. Those brands that make data-driven content an everyday practice will benefit more than those who don’t.

Related articles

3 Places to Get Smart About Content Marketing

Is it Content Marketing or Clever Advertising?

86% of B2C Companies Rely On Content Marketing (Infographic)

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #1 Comprehensive Content Strategy

Buzzworthy: Online, Integrated Word of Mouth Does Drive Sales

Misleading headlines in research

Eric Schmidt, senior manager-marketing strategy and insights at Coca-Cola, presented research at ARF’s Re:think 2013 conference that seemed to indicate that what the AdAge article is calling “buzz” doesn’t drive short terms sales of Coca-Cola product.

Meanwhile Coca-Cola's Wendy Clark, senior VP-integrated marketing communications and capabilities, countered via another AdAge article that integrated social media – social media programs that are integrated in overall marcom efforts – can be highly effective. The research may, in isolation, be true – that “buzz” cannot be connected to short term sales lift for Coca-Cola products, but that is not what any of us are doing in social media. Wendy does go on to challenge the study pretty directly, “In beta testing with Facebook, we've been able to track closed-loop sales from site exposure to in-store purchase with very promising initial results that are above norms for what we see with other media.”

Even Eric framed up the limits of what his analysis covers, “…he cautioned against reading too much into the research, noting that it covers only buzz, not sharing, video views or other aspects of social media.”

 

The value of social media to marketers

 I hate the term “buzz.” As the former President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and a guy who runs a global business applying social media to business with measurable results, I find the term one-dimensional and misleading.

What we are all doing online is expressing some form of word of mouth – and it's not all created equal. When someone authentically recommends or relates something positive about a brand to their friends, family and social connections online and off, that is a powerful and trusted source that affects people’s opinion and their purchase behavior. Still, a customer “gushing” about great service or a great product experience online is not the same as an innocuous statement “blah, blah, blah, Coke.” The blanket term “buzz” does nothing to help our understanding of what is actually happening in social media – a range of consumer advocacy from subtle and implicit to bold and explicit recommendations.

If we simply treat online word of mouth – the very nature of social media – as just “impressions” to be counted and weighed against other impressions, we will never realize the true promise of word of mouth via social media.  Word of mouth via social media delivers a scaled approach to building measurably valuable relationships with customers, activating an advocacy base that drives opinion and behavior beyond what traditional marketing alone can do and dramatically improving the efficiency of the complete marcom mix (equal or better result from equal or less investment).  

“Buzz” is almost as bad as “chatter” – two words used in the AdAge article to dumb down what is a more complex and powerful phenomena. Both words conjure up an image of clouds of white noise surrounding us like flies. That’s my friends, family and social connections you are talking about.

 

Integrated social media marketing does drive sales

With respect to Eric Schmidt, there are limits to the research on “buzz” as to its usefulness in guiding our use of integrated social media. It made a splash and good headlines. It heated up debate even within Coke.

Our own research via our Integrated Social Media Sales Impact Study demonstrated the correlation of social media in the mix for quick service restaurants (many of which, by the way, serve Coca-Cola products).   Clearly, the value of positive word of mouth is highly affected by the product category and context. Our study showed impressive benefits of social media as part of the overall marcom mix to driving higher levels of consumption (the things you buy at QSR’s like Coke) and greater brand-relevant KPIs. It’s all here.

Much like Wendy Clark at Coca-Cola, I don’t want marketers to mis-read the headlines around this one study. The power of social media is within an integrated approach. That’s what we do here at Social@Ogilvy and what we have spent 8 years strengthening. And we have done it for many multinational marketers across categories – including our wonderful client Coca-Cola.

As we all know, ‘attribution is a bitch.’ In our lives as consumers, I think it a fool’s errand to try and zero-in on the one communication that trumped all others and inordinately drove a sale.  What we will continue to do is go deeper and deeper to understand how effective social media marketing and communications integrated in a multi-channel, multi-screen consumer experience drives business results – including sales.

Related articles

Integrating Social Media into the Marcom Team

Coca-Cola: the 's' in social media doesn't stand for 'sales'

Coca-Cola's Wendy Clark Defends 'Crucial' Social Media

Great Measurement Event in Dublin Now

I met Damien Mulley (@damienmulley) a few years back when I first visited Ireland to work with our team here. He is one of the earliest folks to get serious about social and has been sharing that with brands and organization since. He took a bunch of us to a wonderful dinner last night at Chapter One - a worthwhile WOM story, in and of itself. 

He also runs two great events in Ireland and today is one of them - Measurement.ie. I will be keynoting later on and am looking forward to a lot of sessions including the next one from Matt Morrison (@mediaczar) from Starvest. I saw that he actually has an homage slide to Robert Cialdini in his deck. 

Measurement Kevlar: The Master Markleter's Armor for 2013

We'll see how my session is received (just gave it this am to a closed group of brands who were very engaged). I wanted to share what i see as the big measurement jobs to be done for major brands this year. Some of it is advanced thinking yet still, it's time. Here's the section titles:

Cultivated Brand Advocacy - Time to proactively design, execute and measure organized brand advocacy programs

Integrated Social Media Impact - The customer journey is complex. We buy based on lot of influences from word of mouth (often via social media) to advertising to media relations. Its time to measure the impact of social media within intergrated programs to understand its effect/contribution to brand metrics and actual sales. 

Everyday Social Media Measurement - We can measure the performance and efficacy of social-centered programs today. We have a model. You have a model. It's harder work than most established measurement model but time for us to get limber and get busy. 

Anyhow, I will share the story/presentation later on.

Now, back to the conference which you can follow via teh sponsor Hashtag #DoneDealSocial

What is your social value formula?

 Executives understand that social media has value for their business and a far greater potential then how they are using it today. Most of the multinational brands we work with are in their third year of committed effort introducing social to marketing, communications and customer service efforts. What were once unconnected experiments in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or blogs, are now efforts to enforce some interpretation of ‘best practice’ customer engagement across Facebook fans in 40 countries, for example. 

According to the new McKinsey paper, Making Sense of Social Media, from partners David Court, Roxane Divol, and David Edelman, 

“Despite offering numerous opportunities to influence consumers, social media still accounts for less than 1 percent of an average marketing budget, in our experience. Many chief marketing officers say that they want to increase that share to 5 percent.” 

And I would stick to the, now, three year goal of 18% of total marcom spend put forth in the Fuqua School of Business research from 2010. Either way, we need to expand our use of social media – especially in marketing, communications and customer service. 

Finding your value

A few years ago, a global financial services company was exploring how social media could further their goals or at the very least , how they might anticipate new threats from social media. Internal evangelists butted heads with “traditionals” who needed proof before endorsing any real investment in social media. One of those evangelists came up with a simple value formula. 

Since they were a service brand, they had already established a simple value for a public customer complaint. When someone declared a serious service complaint, it cost them “$X” in terms of referral or direct business. They then mined Twitter and a specific travel forum which featured a concentration of brand experience comments from customers. By tallying up the negatives and ranking them in severity, they were able to demonstrate that a month’s worth of unchecked negativity had put almost half a billion dollars of business at risk.  That became a motivating ‘social value formula’ for decision-making executives. 

The McKinsey paper cites another example:

“…to ensure that the company was doing a quality job designing and executing its social presence, it benchmarked its efforts against approaches used by other companies known to be successful in social media. It then advanced the following hypotheses:

• If all of these social-media activities improve general service perceptions about the brand, that improvement should be reflected in a higher volume of positive online posts.
• If social sharing is effective, added clicks and traffic should result in higher search placements.
• If both of these assumptions hold true, social-media activity should help drive sales—ideally, at a rate even higher than the company could achieve with its average gross rating point (GRP) of advertising expenditures.

The company then tested its options. At various times, it spent less money on conventional advertising, especially as social-media activity ramped up, and it modeled the rising positive sentiment and higher search positions just as it would using traditional metrics.

The company concluded that social-media activity not only boosted sales but also had higher ROIs than traditional marketing did. Thus, while the company took a risk by shifting emphasis toward social-media efforts before it had data confirming that this was the correct course, the bet paid off. What’s more, the analytic baseline now in place has given the company confidence to continue exploring a growing role for social media.”

Find your value

In the McKinsey example, I am struck by the simplicity of the brand shifting budget to prove their hypothesis valid. Too many brands are cautiously going at half-steam in social media hoping that the killer data point, the mythical social “GRP” or value of a fan, will reveal itself from some third party. The social value formula should be bespoke to your business. And, it’s available today if you are simply willing to prove it valid. What is your social value formula?  

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.

Actionable Social Business Predictions: #2 Social Insights over Social Data

We have long been fascinated by the wealth of data we could collect, analyze and put to use via digital media.  It’s taken us years to get beyond the intention and excitement of doing that to actually using data in constructive ways.

Now along comes all this social data spread between platforms like Facebook and Twitter and conversation search tools like Radian6 and Sysomos. The promise of knowing what your fans and detractors are saying about your brand is irresistible. The chance to put these social "signals" to use cannot be passed up.  

Well, as more brands finally commit to infrastructure to collect social data, the pressure is on in 2012 to lead with social insights derived from this data vs. data for data’s sake. To many first-time efforts in social listening end with phone book-sized reports with pages of pie charts and bar graphs that portray data in an academic way. That means it’s not functional and at best information for information’s sake (just as useless in the here-today as raw data)

We Need Marketing Scientists (on the lookout for insights)

Some marketers emphasize the need for “marketing scientists” to sort through “Big Data” to find meaning. That is spot-on and certainly where we at Ogilvy see the present never mind the future.

McKinsey summarized the challenge, 

“The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus…Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.”

So while big brains wrestle with big data in 2012, most business leaders must convert their ambiguous desire for more data and the irresistible hunger to add social data to the mix into daily efforts to derive actionable insights from whatever data they have today. There is a big difference between data and the actionable output of that data.

Kara Martens calls out social data as big area for growth n 2012 on the Shoutlet blog. She may very well assume that data and insights go hand-in-hand but it takes special effort to actually boil insights. Doug Palmer, Vikram Mahidhar and Dan Elbert on the Deloitte Review identify the challenge:

“Simply put, with so much data available, especially on social networks, the ability to know the people you sell to and to monetize that knowledge has never been greater….That said, most companies are only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible with social data. Many are still operating in the pre-social media age, simply trying to make sense of the data they have—rather than the variety of sources that exist.”

Demand Social Network Insights

 Many big brands are doing big deals with Facebook. One of the payouts of that type of deal is insights from the platform and Facebook team. More than what any social media strategist can wring from the DIY Facebook Insights screens, the promise of this deal is that Facebook – keeper of more social data than the gods – will share relevant insights with their best, paying customers. That’s likely a good deal. And it’s the type of deal point that LinkedIn, Google and others should deliver on as well. Next time you consider a big deal with the social networks, make sure you are getting a good slice of insights (not just data and not just what anyone can derive from the platform). 

Listening Tech Only Part of the Answer

Too many social listening efforts focus on the technology. Firms like Radian6, Visible Technologies, and Sysomos provide a tech layer to search and sort. What they don’t do is provide any true capacity to seed those engines with the right queries or dig into and discover insights that and help business decision makers today. We need people with aptitude and experience to do that. Analysts who understand the business and the customer and who know the difference between usable insights and info porn. 

Do:It’s not enough to hire out a bunch of great researchers. We need to build capacity within the organization to understand and recognize good insights. That means training, identifying best and worst practices, and building a system that rewards insights. 

• Find a “bright spot” in your organization. This is some group who has gotten good at extracting and applying useful insightsMake their work the archetype for others to follow.
• If useful, draft a playbook or other instructional for how to actually do listening well.
• Train marketers to recognize insights. Even if they are likely to delegate or outsource to a research team, they are stronger if they can quickly recognize great insights (and imposters)
• Create an award for “top insights.” C’mon, we all have internal award systems. Time to elevate great insights that drive business and in the process tell everyone that leadership cares about them. 

Resources:

McKinsey Global Initiative Report on Big Data – a good read that takes the macro approach to putting big data to work

Deloitte Making Sense of Social Data: Digital exhaust and the next frontier in social data analytics – also more on the macro side of things but a sober, business view of social data and how it can drive business advantage  

Timeline: This one’s overdue. More and more companies are embracing a operational approach to social listening (doing deals with technology and insisting/recommending that brand managers use social listening).  Any effort to do this without insisting on distributing actionable insight and information throughout the enterprise is wasting time and money.  

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