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?

 

The Well-designed App: Countable

Well-designed apps that actually meet an unmet need tend to stand out from the crowd. Countable rises above so many apps out there. If you are a citizen of the United States, I highly recommend downloading it. I have become very active as it has a great alert system, and it answered my big question very early in my use.

Initially, I doubted if my simple input of comments on a particular issue was really visible to anyone. I know that Countable is trying to stimulate a community within the app. I suspect that will be more vibrant over time. Users can follow users and so forth. But that wasnt what I was most interested in. My biggest questions was whether my comments were actually sent to my representatives. Once I voted within the app and entered a few comments,  I quickly received an automated email reply from my senator thanking me for my input.  The app does deliver the mail. 

 

What it is:

Countable is a mobile app that alerts you to which votes are happening now in Congress and how your Senator or Representative votes on the issues. I gives you real-time access to your government and makes it easy for your POV to be heard. It aims to help make governing more transparent and our congress people more accountable. 

What it does well:

• Tells you how your congress people are voting on specific bills
• Alerts you to pending votes, debates or current topics and solicits your comments to send to your congress people
• Increases the value (reach + engagement) of your advocacy by requesting you to create a video of your POV and sharing your POV via social channels
• Provides advocacy widgets that can be easily embedded in any Web site

 

If you are concerned about how your views are represented, the current state of our government, or what can we do to positively affect change and "show up" as citizens, Countable might be a wise download.

 

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Mobile apps vs. Mobile Web: Which Should Brands Support?

What’s your preference – mobile app or mobile web site? If you are like me, I appreciate the quickness and focus of a well-designed app. And I am happy to discover a well-design mobile web site. Both, in other words.

A preference for both

A study from Quixley reported out via eMarketer found:

“…32.6% of US mobile device users prefer to use both a mobile app and a mobile browser at different times. Taking a closer look, 19.6% of respondents said they preferred a mobile browser, and 23.1% of mobile device users said they favored mobile apps. Some 24.7% said they had no preference.”

Why do we like both? The Quixley study found:

“When it came to why users liked mobile apps, 28.3% said they provide a better user experience. Additionally, respondents liked that apps offer access to more features and capabilities and that they have push notifications and alerts.

… Some 20.5% of respondents said they didn’t like that mobile browsers weren’t as fast as an app. The fact that the user experience wasn’t as rich and there were no push notifications were other reasons respondents disliked mobile browsers.”

The future of either

With consumer behavior clearly split, what is a major brand to do when forming a sustainable mobile strategy to support marketing and customer experience? No one wants to invest in a costly strategy that may quickly become obsolete. Small, smart devices like phones aren’t going away any time soon. The size of the screen may continue to stretch or squeeze, but the utility of a hand held, pocketable, connected device will not diminish any time soon.

The browser-based Web continues to be a tremendous access point for information. Given ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet, the mobile web will remain important for the foreseeable future.

That leaves mobile apps. Will they be around in 5 years?

There is really no way to know this for certain. When you read the many POVs on line they really fall into three buckets:

1. The mobile web advocates who believe the feature set of the mobile web will improve and make apps obsolete. These views tend to oversimplify the many types of customer relationships and often ignore the service brand
   1. Morgan Stanley: No, Apps Aren’t Winning. The Mobile Browser Is.
2. Those that acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of both native apps and mobile web. These tend to support the notion that both will continue to evolve for some time.
   1. Mobile Web vs Mobile Apps: Where Should You Invest Your Marketing?
3. The innovation enthusiasts who see an evolving future for apps with new streaming capabilities, Web interoperability and new app form factors around notifications and alerts.
   1. Google and the Future of Apps 
   2. The Mobile Apps of the Future: What Will Be Popular in 10 Years? 

Mobile apps for service brands

If you have an enduring relationship with a customer via service like a bank, an insurance company, a credit card company, then you can likely find a compelling business case for a mobile app. It improves your chances of delivering additional value and a superior customer experience. Just notifications makes the app worthwhile. Add the quickness of a well-designed app and the ability to push updates and the strength of the app in a service relationship is clear. 

Personally, I wouldn’t get too wrapped up in analyzing the ROI based upon current development costs. Those will go down. Third party app providers will make it even cheaper to deliver white label solutions. If you are a service brand, you no longer have to aspire to become one of the top 50 apps to ever hope that your customers use you. You deliver service that customers need and provided you improve that via a mobile app, they will use you when it matters most. You can even expand the definition of what matters to them.

In the insurance space, carriers know that the claim experience can be improved via mobile services and tools. See these examples of claim service enhancements via mobile.

Insurance carriers may broaden the relationship and interactions they have with customers. See these examples of mobile apps from insurers that go well beyond claims. Some may become winners, many will fall by the wayside. This type of exploration is important.

Create great apps for your customers, it's worth it

Mobile apps will likely evolve and continue to deliver a faster, more focused customer experience. If you are a service brand and want to improve your customer experience, then create and sustain a great app experience even as you improve the mobile web experience. Customers have spoken.

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3 Great Ideas from Cannes Lions 2014

The Awards are over. The agencies have all packed up their bags and tallied their wins against the millions of dollars of effort. Brand marketers are heading home with trophies or not. Hangovers and trucker sunburns are tended to.

And a lot of inspiration is floating through the air. No matter the pomp and circumstance of a global festival on advertising, there are great ideas that get shared. Many win awards. There were three creative ideas that caught my eye as I browsed through the tons of creative from the comfort of my new Connecticut home.

A Way to Change Deadly Behaviors

Last year, one of the big award winners was Dumb Ways To Die. Put together for Melbourne Metro Trains to promote rail safety, the campaign captured people’s attention as a clever, delightful way to spark people to think about safety around trains.

This year, VW created a theater experience that made the myriad of messages we all hear on distracted driving to life. Having spent time with a bunch of social marketing (behavior change) folks, I cannot swear that this is scientifically effective but I am guessing it is.

Thanks to Dom Heinrich and his Pinterest board of predictions (the place I discovered this gem)

 

 

Creating a Virtuous Cycle of Sharing and Giving

STIFTUNG ARTENSCHUTZ, a German conservation group, wanted to raise awareness and drive people to take action to help save the Cat-Ba Langur from extinction. Part of the job was to acknowledge and overcome the usual placebo effect of social causes in social media (they don’t often drive change).

Now this being Cannes, some type of trendy solution has to wheedle its way into the work. This time it’s 3D Printing. But before your eyes make it all the way around the “roll”, take a look at the video and think about what they have done.

They created a mobile-enabled experience that actually led to the creation of objects that could be auctioned off to raise funds and grow awareness.

Here’s the full entry for more information

Watch the video on Vimeo here

 

 

Mindboggling Technology to Create an Interactive Marketing Moment

More and more we look to use data in creative ways to build relationships with customers or earn people’s attention and their advocacy. OgilvyOne and British Airways took amazing pains to create a seemingly simple and delightful interaction between outdoor billboards and the BA flights that zoomed overhead.

Here was the brief: “The objective was to raise awareness of the breadth of destinations offered by British Airways, their new routes and frequency of flights.” I am pretty sure they delivered.

Here’s the full entry for more information

 

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Two Approaches to Crowdsourcing Photography for Brands

 

There are 1.5 billion smartphones in the world.  According to Business Insider,

“The annual smartphone growth rate in 2013 is projected to be 44 percent, which is just ever-so-slightly down from 2012′s 45 percent but is still a torrid pace.”

With cameras built-in to most of these phones, that’s a lot of photographers. And with over 16 billion photos published via 3 year-old Instagram, a ton of people are getting better all the time at ‘pretty good’ photography.

We are all adopting new behaviors about capturing, publishing and sharing pictures. Brands can take advantage of this change (and should).

Empower your crowd of could-be photographers

Percolate has done quit a few smart things. I particularly like them because they are committed to design. Not ‘make-it-pretty-design’ but putting design at the heart of their products where they really listen to users and solve problems via design first, technology second. This includes their approach to image capture.

Photographer 2.0 is one of the great features in their platform for sourcing content. Simply put, it’s an app that allows a distributed group of photographers –like your employees in your marcom department – to grab images and send them to the Percolate content workflow. These images pop into a database ready for publishing via your content + community team via Facebook, Instagram, dotcom and more.

Imagine giving select people within your marcom team, the enthusiastic designer in the product design lab, the event-team, even the sales team, the simple instructions to be on the lookout for interesting visual moments. It could be behind-the-scenes at the brand film shoot, on the floor of the trade show, even a spontaneous customer testimonial. The IOS and Android app acknowledges that ‘pretty good’ and authentic photos are valuable.

You don’t need 1000 employees shooting images to make this worthwhile. 

Empower a crowd of photographers

This same idea can be broadened outside an organization to engage a world’s worth of photographers. Imagine yourself a home furnishings brand like Ikea or a property insurance company. What if you could enlist 500 photographers from 35 countries to capture images of what they consider “home?”  As part of a focused program (aka “campaign”), you could get unique content that really brought the idea of home to life via the visual images. These come from experienced photographers working in more of a journalism mode (nimble assignments).

Scoopshot is doing what Visual.ly is doing for infographics – providing a simple to access marketplace of photographers.

Here’s how they explain it:

“Scoopshot currently offers the media and brands unrivalled access to more than 280,000 photographers, and counting, in over 170 countries worldwide. Scoopshot's service is used by more than 60 publications globally including Metro International, WAZ Media Group, the Daily Star, De Persgroep, Ebyline, MTV3 Finland, Expressen and Hürriyet.

Scoopshot has recently launched a new web-based platform, Scoopshot Labs. The new service, published May 2013, aims to make crowdsourcing and authentic mobile photography accessible to everyone, individuals and companies alike.”

As brands adjust their ideas about where content comes from, crowdsourcing visual imagery either through a field-force of friendlies (people who know your brand like employees or agency partners) or through a world-wide, efficient marketplace deserves a section of the New Marketing playbook.

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Three Steps to Putting Mobile at the Center of Marketing

All week, we are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Martin Lange will lead the charge for Ogilvy. You can follow our observations via our Tumblr blog and our core Social@Ogilvy blog and Twitter handle.

Last post, I suggested the need and a way for putting social, mobile and value creation at the center of the creative and strategic marketing and communications process ("The SoMoVa System").  Practically speaking, brands can organize their efforts to bolster the mobile portion of that equation in three steps:

 

Unlock the mobile storefront: Consider this the hygiene step. Every brand starting a new initiative or refreshing an existing one must do the base level of mobile accessibility. That means creating a great experience for smartphone users, simple phone users and tablet users.

Part of this is simple design for the screen and likely connectivity throughputs (e.g. 3G and lower) part is designing for the use-cases or likely customer experience.

To this day, I am stunned by how many restaurant sites are not enabled for mobile with four buttons on screen: menu, location, make a reservation and photos. I stand on a corner of St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin trying to find a great place to eat.

For too many brands, their mobile “door” remains locked for all intent and purpose simply because they have no good mobile experience. Time to unlock that storefront and invite people inside.

 

Teach ourselves to ‘think’ mobile-first: One big challenge inside agencies and brands is the sense that mobile ought to be everyone’s expertise from day-one. While it will be someday, we ought to care enough to make our brand marketers more successful immediately. We designed a training program for social media strategists 7 years ago.  It has evolved and grown. We believed we needed to supplement what even digital marketers understood about social behaviors and practices.

By creating the Principles of Mobile Design (“design” here takes the high road meaning the design of the experience not simply an interface), we establish a best practice checklist for expert marketers. Are they considering the top 3 mobile use-cases for their customer? Are they using the location-based data from mobile and/or the camera capabilities and/or the social network connectivity?

We also need to inject mobile expertise – creative, strategic and technological – into our creative ideation process. New team structures and fresh collaboration practices.  Don’t treat mobile as a channel (just as you would not treat social as a channel). Making ideas mobile from the get-go is best.

 

Disrupt before the disruption: Martin Lange cites Uber and MyTaxi as disruptive services. My favorite is Bands in Town which alerts me to when any of my bands are playing in town – no matter what town I am in. How will mobile disrupt the core business of many of the brands out there? To some extent, it is pure hubris to think that an internal effort can anticipate the unimaginable disruptions that may come from a vast entrepreneurial landscape. On the other hand, smart businesses can do two things to stimulate that within their organization:

• Sanction ‘disruption-hunting’ from the top – the C-suite can challenge managers to be their own competitors at times. When I first started Social@Ogilvy 7+ years ago, there were plenty of business leaders invested in television advertising who would have liked us to go away. A little air-cover from the C-suite goes a long way to build internal courage.

• Put a bounty on disruptive ideas – are we all doing enough to stimulate and reward idea-generation from across our employees? Do we have a formal program that solicits ideas and then funds the most promising?

 

Three ways brands can make offer a shot of mobile adrenalin to their organizations:

• Unlock the mobile storefront
• Teach ourselves to ‘think’ mobile-first
• Disrupt before the disruption

How SoMoVa puts Mobile at the Center of Marketing

We are not mobile enough. Brands are under investing in meeting customers at all of the mobile touch points just as they are under investing in social media. But business leaders want to lead and do more in mobile.

THIS WEEK

Media companies, brands, technologists, carriers and Ogilvy will flock to Barcelona to the Mobile World Congress 2013 to not just pace the trade floor for promising mobile solutions beyond the obvious, but they will also attend insightful keynotes like the panel on Vertical Disruption featuring GM, American Heart Association and Qualcomm and the panel on Mobile Innovation 2023 offering a near-future vision.

We will publish throughout the event and distill what we learn into useful takeaways just as we did for CES. Our own Martin Lange will be leading the charge and you can follow his team’s Tumblr here. Start off with their ‘5 Trends to Watch For…’

 

Mobile in the Middle of SoMoVa

Marketers need a “stimulus package” for mobile. They need an artificial way to motivate their marketers to commit to making mobile a core expertise and a primary way they engage customers. Someday, mobile will just be how we engage people from smartphones to the tablet-of-the-future to the ‘internet of things.’

But until that future arrives, and to ensure it does, we need ways to spark the imagination of marketers to put mobile first now - to make it routine and consistent. Clearly, mobile usage broadly defines varies market-by-market and consumer context-by-context. Still, you would be hard pressed to examine a market anywhere in the world and not be able to identify ways in which mobile is changing the customer journey.

Many would say that mobile (and social) don’t fundamentally change how marketing works. Maybe. To help ace marketers focus on mobile and social behaviors, I would suggest a simple rubric with checklists to help us all put these considerations front of mind.

 

Social + Mobile + Value = Successful Marketing

 

Okay, okay, that’s not all that goes into “successful marketing.” These ingredients are now essential, however.

 

Social

 Brands can increase the social qualities of their marketing and communications by designing programs around the “Principles of Social Design.” These are the lessons we have learned that explain why people share all types of word of mouth (i.e. “earned media”). The more they do this and learn their own context-specific principles the more they will meet consumer’s needs.

 

Mobile

Likewise, brands can increase the mobile accessibility and utility by designing programs for the customer across the heterogeneous experiences of mobile. That means understanding the context in which we reach for our tablets at home on the couch or press on our smartphones standing in the aisle.  Google’s Multiscreen Study continues to be a great reference that starts to articulate useful context.

We need the equivalent “principles of mobile design” to serve as a checklist to inform creative and strategic work from all marketers not just the token mobile experts. At the very least, our checklists include “…the inherent advantages found in the mobile world: location sensing, cameras and instant access to social networks.”

 

Value

Every marketer thinks about the additional value they are delivering to customers whether in the form of complimentary recipes posted on Facebook or via a mobile app or something much bigger like a Nike Fuel where a whole new business model is inspired by technology and mobility. What is the core value we are trying to dial up? How is that being enabled or amplified via our mobile and social-first design?

 If brand marketers and their teams had this simple rubric and the questionnaires for each axis in front of them as they designed marketing and communications programs, it might serve as a stimulus package to making SoMoVa central to how we serve our consumers/customers today.

Filtering CES 2013: This Marketer’s Guide to What Matters

This week 156,000 people and 3000 companies will form a virtual mosh pit at CES 2013 in Las Vegas. What was once all about devices – TVs, audio, phones, computers – is broadening every year to include new technologies that don’t look like the traditional devices. Software in all its many forms will play a huge role.

CES is evolving to include all sorts of more embedded & connected technology (e.g. cars, home automation), key “human verticals” like health and fitness, and everywhere access (mobile TV). All of this offers glimpses of potential new human behaviors. But at such a scale, it begs thoughtful review and analysis even to find the most interesting bets. 

A marketers lens

Much of the show will remain focused on introducing devices with incremental feature enhancements. Ultra 3D is a good example, Any tablet that may be revealed is another. I respect that someone may be interested in those devices and each may represent potential big business for someone. I am much more interested in specialty areas.  I am not attending this year, but several people from the Ogilvy and the Social@Ogilvy teams will be. And while I believe that ‘being there’ will be the best experience, I am convinced that many of us can stay connected to select coverage of the show and learn more about what matters to us thanks to those brave souls trekking through the record 1.9 million square feet of exhibit space, endless presentations, interminable social events and more.

Best ways to follow the event

To plan out how you can tap into Ogilvy’s feed from the show and the most relevant coverage, check out our post – Suit Up For CES 2013: Your Coverage Guide.

 

Seven Topics to Watch at this Year's CES 2013 

More Social TV and the Second Screen Experience

77% of the time we are watching TV, we are simultaneously on another device.  22% of that time is “complimentary usage” meaning that whatever you are doing on the PC, tablet or smartphone has something to do with the TV (vs multitasking like checking email).

How will technology continue to shape this complimentary behavior? Twitter made some wise moves by really courting television media companies to integrate Twitter handles and/or hashtags to inspire a two screen experience. Services like GetGlue helped people build community around programs they love (i.e. “check-ins” to Walking Dead).

What will emerge at CES that further enables a SocialTV or complimentary second screen experience? One reason I am keen to see innovations here is because people have already changed their behavior and demonstrated demand. There are plenty of other technology innovations that did not catch on. Will 3D TV, now Ultra 3D, really go mass? Check out the focus on 2nd Screen Experience. 

 

More Connected Automotive

We all spend so much time in our cars. Smart connectivity and/or new behaviors that enhance that experience via utility or entertainment without introducing additional safety concerns are a big deal. We work with Ford. I own 2 Ford vehicles. I love what Sync and My Ford Touch have made possible. Sync plus Siri is pretty great. Finding a restaurant and calling for a reservation via voice commands and with 1 initiated step and 1-2 voice reactions is a bonafide improvement on tasks.

What’s next? I am productivity geek. I think in terms of time chunks. An hour long drive to me could easily be 20 minutes of voice-accessed email, 20 minutes of Mashable headlines and stories and 20 minutes of the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recording (due next month).

Google’s great Multiscreen World research preso (get it here), points out how we initiate an activity on one device and continue on another.  How will the “buyer journey” change as I seamlessly continue a shopper activity started on a PC and moved to my drive to store/pick up/purchase location? (e.g. “hey Best Buy, I will be there in 20 minutes and can a TV sales specialist just show me three of the 60” 4K TVs that I tagged online?”)

Check out the automotive focus here. 

 

Next Gen Entertainment Content

Content marketing is the new “social media”. It is capturing the interest of marketers and will only be eclipsed when we actually know what to do with “big data” on an everyday basis. In its hugeness, CES 2013 has sections dedicated to content and specifically, they have a track called Entertainment Matters. If you want to get a sampling of what Hollywood-centered content creators are doing and thinking in terms of creating, delivering and monetizing new forms of content, check some of these sessions.

Our own Doug Scott, President of Ogilvy Entertainment,  will be driving a session Brands: This Is How You Work With Content Creators.

 

Attentive Computing

Computers/devices that can understand what I want to do by deciphering where my attention is, where my eyes are looking, where my hand points will change how we interact and rely on technology. (Check out an MIT view of Attentive Visual Interfaces here).

A neat example of this is Tobii Technologies “gaze interaction peripheral” which essentially will add eye gaze to the ways in which we control our devices. Freeing computer control from our hands driving some type of interface could lead to many unanticipated behaviors well beyond controlling Master Chief in Halo.

 

Connected and Enabled Healthcare and Fitness

Nike Fuelband adorns the wrists of at least half of my colleagues, or so it seems. Devices like the Fuelband or the Basis Band which launched at least year’s CES, are the tip of the iceberg in terms of how we will get healthier.  I also believe we have yet to see the fullest integration of game mechanics into everyday behaviors. What about a family healthy eating scorecard displayed on the refrigerator door (remember the screens that were integrated in high-end refrigerators?). Or community billboards of Basis Band data to pit neighbor against neighbor, so-to-speak.

The Digital Health Summit within CES 2013 will feature sessions that cover these devices but also how big data can be used to affect health behaviors, whether sharing can affect outcomes and how pervasive wireless devices can connect those with chronic health issues to health care maintenance that makes sense.

 

Appy Hour

If toaster ovens and VCRs answered what will we do with this great OS called ‘electricity’, then applications answer the question of what do we do with this great platform called pervasive computing.

At CES 2013, the Appy Hour will pit 25 teams against each other to develop a winning app and win the $25k prize. You can watch and hear CEA President Gary Shapiro @garyshapiro discuss the upcoming show with Mashable here. 

 

Eureka Park

It’s just as interesting who is forgoing their big exhibitor floor presence. No Microsoft. No HP. No Dell. No Apple. But clearly there are many more there including this year’s Eureka Park – a space dedicated to small startups. If part of the purpose of attending CES 2013 is to gauge possible trends, you are juts as likely to glimpse the seeds of one in Eureka Park as with the established companies still banging out size variations on tablets.

 

Celebrities

Clearly the most impressive draw (serious draw) is Vinton Cerf.  Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. While I would love to see Lemmy from Motorhead who is there on behalf of Krussel (cases for electronics), I could pass on Snooki and some of the other celebs there just for booth draw.

(IMAGES respectfully taken from the CES Instagram feed)

Two Different Types of Mobile Businesses

Nothing appears more certain nor more elusive to marketers than how to fully leverage the biggest behavior change since the mass adoption of automobiles. Yes, I am talking mobile access to communications, data and our social graph.  

The explosion of mobile phone, smart phone and, now, tablet use has led to some interesting innovations. MPesa mobile currency, Flipboard content display, Instagram photography communities and personal GPS are just a few examples of how mobile changes how we do things. Just look at Mary Meekers Internet Trends 2012 presentation and many of the "reimagined" business examples include mobile as a key part.

Still, it seems as marketers we are still struggling to “go full mobile.” I would guess that some of that is due to the “Curse of the Channel Mindset” where, too often, we look at mobile as just another marcom channel to deliver messages through. I blame this ‘curse” on the advertising planning community and the powerful economic strength of media buying companies.

Meanwhile entrepreneurs unconstrained by that channel mentality and empowered with the innovators sideways manner of looking at things are making new interesting business or applications of mobile.

Two innovations should make us think differently. 

Mobile Grilled Cheese 

The Melt is a grilled cheese restaurant designed around mobile payment. Founded by Jonathan Kaplan who brought us the Flip Video Camera (now a collectors item), the Melt is getting ready to deliver a restaurant experience where users can order via device and use simple QR codes to jump through the fast lane and pick up their warm, melted goodness of a gourmand grilled cheese.

Instead of just adding mobile payments as a cash register alternate on top of cash, credit, debit, chip-card or whatever, they are designing the transaction experience around the mobile user. How you pick up a food is as much a part of the experience as the food, itself. Now, I don't know if their innovation will add up to a smash success. So far, they only have stores in the SF and Silicon Valley areas. But when you consider that service is the number one reason for return visits to restaurants and that service innovations that cut down on process (make things simpler) tend to be the drivers of loyalty, I give these guys a better than even chance of getting somewhere. (Thanks to Social Commerce Today for the heads up on The melt)

I love grilled cheese. I love great service. If it were in DC, I would buy.  

Mobile Close-Ties Network 

We practice “mobile first” design within our team (actually “SoMo First” – but that’s a different post). That means that we design a user experience first for the mobile display (often the smartphone and tablet, simultaneously). Once that is great, we design the desktop experience.

Path is a recent entrant into the social network space and is only available as a mobile experience. (see a good explanation from Satish Dharmaraj, managing director at Redpoint Ventures LLC (investors))The service is designed to connect each of us with only our closest ties.  Not thousands of friends. It tops out at 150 friends. Think you and your wife (or whomever), your closest friends and some family. 

Whether or not this dedicated channel of intimacy works for you, pay attention that it was designed as mobile –only. The founders felt that the close-ties relationships it is trying to support favors the intimate, always-connected utility of mobile.  More businesses will be doing this going into the future. They will consider how their business can serve new behaviors and needs developing out of our mobile and connected lives.

 Two very different examples how mobile is interpreted as a core part of the experience not an additional channel or touchpoint. Two good examples of disruptive design that could easily lead to big, long lasting innovations. 

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.