360DigitalInfluence

**Image Pier Madonia for the International Red Cross**

One topic that I have written about extensively in this blog is consumer relationships with brands and, in special cases, Brands Worthy of a Weekend (BWOW).  When I started writing about BWOW, it was still a relatively lofty  bar - a brand for which you care so deeply that you would spend a weekend away from your family to connect with other people who feel the same way about this brand, learn more about the “inside” of the business, meet the people who make the magic happen, etc.   With the seismic shift in the blogosphere, however, brand “weekends” have become more and more common, but with a major difference - they are largely designed for influential voices versus passionate fans.   In the mom blogger space in particular, these events are happening in rapid fire succession with some players covering  multiple per month.  While these executions absolutely hold water as communications strategies - at least for the time being - they are no longer about “passion”.  I would argue it is very difficult to be truly passionate about more than a handful of things.

Enter compassion.  I’d never stopped to give compassion much thought, but having begun work on a project that centers on compassion, I am now hyperconscious of it in the world around me and there are a lot of business applications.  While we expect compassion in/from our fellow human beings, we don’t expect companies - with their one-size-fits-all policies and protocols for front line reps - to want or choose to show compassion.    But upon further reflection,  a lot of brand fan creation stories have an act of compassion at their core.  A couple of examples:

• This weekend, the waitress at Inside Park at St. Barts who came outside (where I was exiled with my toddler-gone-wild) to chat with me, suggest some places where I could entertain him, and take my order on the go made me a fan.
• My St. John Knit fan creation story is ALL about a VP of Customer Service reading my letter and breaking the rules to help a desperate bride (now customer for life).
• Every Twitter/online customer redemption listening story - from @comcastcares to the Dell outreach team or non-tech areas like the Vermont Teddy Bear Company reading a complaint I had made about some spam affiliate marketing and correcting the problem (that turned me into a supporter of their sister venture Pajamagram).

The first step in codifying compassion into your business or brand as witnessed above is listening.  You can not understand “the other” or “walk in their shoes” unless you pause to try to understand and consider an issue, opportunity or problem from their point of view.  In the examples above, “listening” took the forms of watching a situation visually, reading a letter from a customer, and blogosphere monitoring respectively (note: great post on active listening from John Bell here).

The second element is trusting those human beings who do represent your brand with the power to act.  Ritz Carlton famously gives front line reps a budget from which they can do whatever they need to do to correct any problems in a customer’s stay and send them away happy.  That not only creates customer evangelists, it proves that the brand trusts the human beings that they have selected to embody the brand.

So, next time something happens that turns you into a positive-WOM machine for a company or a brand, think about the role compassion plays and whether or not you are in turn entrusting your team with the power to pass it along to your own customers.

Thanks to Governor Sanford, the Appalachian Trail has received tremendous press this week as a great place to clear one’s head, recharge batteries, and get away from a stressful job.  Had Governor Sanford actually hiked the Appalachian Trail and done these things, he certainly would not be in the mess he’s in now.

While Sanford’s opponents stand the most to gain from his time not on the Appalachian Trail, the Sierra Club has seized the moment as well with a highly topical enewsletter sent yesterday morning from Greg Haegele, the deputy executive director:

We heard the governor of South Carolina had some trouble finding the Appalachian Trail last week.

We don’t want that to happen to anyone else, so now’s a perfect time to let you know about our new online community: Sierra Club Trails. Members of the community are adding trails from around the country, sharing spectacular photos, and discussing topics such as whether guns should be allowed in our national parks.

But so far only two sections of the Appalachian Trail have been added by our members. No wonder the governor got lost!

If you’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail, join the Sierra Club Trails community and add a stretch or two. Share your photos of the trail, too!

If you haven’t hiked that trail but have other favorites, we’d love you to share them on Trails as well.

Thanks for all that you do to protect the environment.
P.S. — Don’t forget your (moral) compass.

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Several weeks ago, what some might consider the most unlikely government agency to embrace social media decided to launch a blog. The FDA Transparency Blog was aimed at bringing a level of transparency to an agency that its own leader FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg recently described as a “black box that makes important decisions without explaining them.” Central to this effort for transparency was the creation of a “task force” of individuals that would examine the inner workings of the agency and provide recommendations on how to make it more transparent by the end of this year (2009).

To do this, they have posed 6 big questions:

1. How can the agency better explain its operations, activities, processes and decision making?
2. What specific information should FDA provide about agency operations, activities, processes, and decision making, including enforcement actions, product approvals, recalls and other actions?
3. What tools, techniques, processes, or other mechanisms should FDA use to be more effective in providing useful and understandable information?
4. What, if any, legislative or regulatory changes are needed to improve FDA’s ability to provide useful and understandable information to the public?
5. As FDA becomes more transparent, what information should remain confidential in order to promote key internal and external policy goals, such as preserving patient privacy, and how, in these cases, should FDA explain the importance of confidentiality?
6. What metrics should FDA use to gauge the effectiveness of its transparency efforts?

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Earlier today John Bell and I formally introduced the Conversation Impact(TM) measurement model at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0.  Here’s a brief overview of the model, its goals and planned evolution.

The model was developed by our team to provide brands with a comprehensive, recognizable framework for tracking social media campaigns.   We relied heavily on our experience with a range of social media campaigns for both B2B and B2C clients, and considered the types of questions and reporting requests we receive with every new project or request for information.

We focus on simplicity and comparability across media - the latter, to help guide marketers with media allocation.  We categorize our metrics into 3 areas, corresponding roughly to objectives and “marketing funnel” stages; each is shown below, with representative metrics (the metrics are selected based on unique client needs).   Included are both familiar and new metrics.

Image courtesy of Crimson Hexagon

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Post 1 - Digital Influence on a College Entertainment Booking Agent

Students at an O.A.R. concert at Clemson University April 18, 2009. Photograph by Chris Newman.

This week I had a chance to sit down with Corey Ellis, an agent at the Auburn Moon Agency, to find out how digital media has influenced his profession. Auburn Moon specializes in booking entertainment for colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Corey is also the large-scale event specialist for the agency and coordinates sponsored tours.  Prior to joining Ogilvy PR I had the privilege of working with Corey on an artist management and development venture for the band FLOREZ. We still find time for weekly conversation and debate over the state of the music industry, trends within the college marketplace, new online resources and artists to watch. He’s undoubtedly a rising star in the music industry and I expect to see him among many 40 under 40 lists in the years to come. As a result I’ve decided to put him in the hot seat this week to answer a few questions about how digital and social media has impacted the way he does business.  

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As citizens are increasingly discussing and sharing content online, we decided to take a look with the European Centre for Public Affairs at digital discussion and debate in the weeks leading up to the European elections. Covering English, French, German, Greek and Polish language, we asked the following questions: Was there an EU debate or were conversations limited to national politics? What were the most popular themes and how did the rankings compare? Did online “buzz” translate into votes at the ballot box? We also examined the digital footprint of an MEP using social networks to see how effectively he communicated with voters. And we purposely chose an online seminar format to do share the results with a wider group.

Interestingly, those who used the internet to actively engage with citizens and communities online saw this translated into seats – the Greens and Sweden’s Pirate Party in particular. Yet volume of conversation online did not necessarily indicate votes, and vice versa: Libertas topped the monitoring charts but failed to reach the threshhold to secure a seat in the European Parliament, whilst the rise of far-right, nationalist parties seemed absent from online conversations.

So what did we conclude? Amongst other things, that European politicians are behind their US counterparts when  it comes to engaging with citizens online. That citizens are discussing issues online, but mostly at a national level. And that the European Parliament needs to start talking now with the online influentials if they want to engage voters in the next European elections.

The President Obama effect inspired many candidates in the EU elections. The thing is that as in art, inspiration does not meet all the time the publics you were expecting.

That’s probably also one of the main insights of the EU campaign : there’s a huge gap between pushing information and engaging conversation with citizens, whereas in a few months, according to this Microsoft study, Internet will be the most consumed media across Europe. Citizens need interactions, and that’s what they’re already doing together online. And if they can more and more talk directly with brands, why not with their representatives?

Our hypothesis was that this lack of transmission is one of the reasons for the record low turnout. And this lack of transmission has now several explanations:

• except some groups (like Europe Ecologie in France), the campaign started very late. How to create a great attention around a deep topic like Europe in only few weeks ?
• low level of interaction between politicians and citizens in social media. A great majority of direct questions or quotes in microblogging platforms like Twitter ended with no answer. Why promote the fact that you’re closer to European people if they don’t “feel” it and get the information they’re looking for ? The word-of-mouth could not propagate in a wider extent because of this very low dynamic
• low maturity in social media : the majority of groups used social media to only diffuse information in a very vertical way. So that just after the elections, on a lot of official groups or politicans’ twitter accounts, you could not see any updated content. Maybe a disappointing proof that it was not an authentic and faithful long-term relationship…
• the diversity of languages across Europe is a strong limit to interaction. In order to share your views, you need to be able to communicate in several languages. It seems that it’s extremely complicated for citizens to talk together, first because speaking an international communication language like English is not possible for everybody, and second because there was not an identified European platform of discussion

Finally, this lack of European digital public space does not mean there’s not a common interest for the European issues. Why not shape a European platform centralizing diverse points of views that are happening online and moderated by citizens in diverse languages?

Post written by:

Natalie Todd, Public Relations Director, Ogilvy Group, Belgium

Laurent François, head of 360° Digital influence hub, France

Karine Jazra, Digital influence analyst, France

With the growing popularity of Twitter in mainstream, and recent studies out by Harvard, we’ve developed our next edition of our Twitter for Business: 6 Ways to Use Twitter to Impact Your Brand.

For more on this and the Step-by-Step Twitter for Business Guide, check out our presentations on SlideShare.net, and be sure to follow the 140 Conference at which John Bell will be speaking. #140conf.

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A year ago this month, Intel (an Ogilvy PR client) launched the Intel Insiders, a social media advisory board of 10 highly engaged, influential thought leaders in technology and new media.

This diverse group of prolific content creators and tech-setters includes:
-Brian Solis of Bub.blicio.us and PR 2.0
-Cathy Brooks of Other Than That
-Sarah Austin of Pop17
-Justine Ezarik, iJustine
-JD Lasica, author of Darknet and publisher of SocialMedia.biz
-Adriana Gascoigne of Girls in Tech
-Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV
-Frank Gruber of Somewhat Frank
-Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher
-Christian Perry of SF Beta and Snap Summit

Since the launch of the program, we’ve collaborated with the Insiders on a number of fun projects that’s helped Intel extend their reach and build key relationships with the online tech community. Highlights from the first year of our program have included a range of activities from hosting the Intel CES Kick-off Blogger Party, inside looks and visits to Intel’s FAB in Portland, Oregon and attendance at multiple industry and Intel events such as Computex, SxSW, ISEF and Intel Developer Forum (IDF). continue reading

There is lots of excitement about the step Facebook is taking to let folks establish a vanity url starting tomorrow at 12:01am. Facebook parties are launching everywhere to create a social event around grabbing urls at midnight. We asked Facebook whether brands should worry about losing their vanity urls to crafty squatters juiced up on Redbull tonight.

The short story is don’t worry…too much. You should be prepared to approach the urls like, well, regular urls. That means that you may have to explore all of the different ways your brand name may appear beyond the single rights protected way it is normally written. You have almost no chance losing facebook.com/yourbrand. But you need to consider whether you grab adjacent real estate to avoid encroachers ( facebook.com/your.brand; facebook.com/yrbrand; etc…). Update: keep in mind that you can only have one url per page. Update 2: From our good buddy Julio at GSI: facebook doesn’t distinguish between yourname and your.name - you get one, you got both.

Here is the scoop straight from Facebook:

“…More information can be found here:
 
FAQ: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900
Blog Post: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=90316352130

Starting Saturday, you can go into the system and choose your own names for both Pages & Profiles via this link: http://www.facebook.com/username/

If you find that the user name has already been taken and you hold the copyright, you can report infringement here: http://www.facebook.com/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1

If you/your client holds the rights to a name and wants to protect it from being taken by another user or business, you can enter the trademarked name and information here: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights “

Don’t worry. But still throw a party tonight and grab some gold! (Just don’t aggravate the problem of squatters)

Today at 1 PM EST in the Ogilvy PR offices in New York, two business executives, a well-known blogger, and an expert in IT virtualization are gathering for a live webcast event. The webcast, Real Life Virtualization Stories: Business executives share how they saved time and money, will be simulcast over business and IT blogs and the discussion will come from the perspective of IT executives, not technology vendors. As the more traditional business-to-business clients expand their social media arsenal, we wanted to share part of our team’s experience working with IBM on in the next step in the evolution of the old-school IT web event. continue reading