360DigitalInfluence

According to Comscore, over 25 million users accessed Facebook via a mobile phone in Jan 2010, a 112% year-over-year increase.

With its initial US-based rollout of Places location functionality on the 30+ million iPhone installed base, Facebook joins Twitter and others in embracing the growing use of smartphones for social networking.

Importantly, this change allows Facebook to expand users’ social graphs beyond such items as friends, product/service affinities and demographics to now include location.

Here are three thoughts on implications for marketers, agencies and social location startups:

Location checkins should help drive impulse and, to some extent, planned purchases. It’s clear that coupons, discounts and other promotions will be important for increasing share of wallet — particularly for the impulse purchases estimated to account for 20+% of consumer spending. Companies like Shopkick are already implementing functionality to enable this, and it’s clearly going to be of value in driving revenue for a wide range of companies.

Checkins will provide new opportunities to build relationships and better understand customers. Less promotional location-driven engagement will be helpful in increasing preference and loyalty. If a user must check into a location manually, they’re either doing so for convenience (e.g. to locate friends or offers nearby) or as self-expression. The latter provides an interesting opportunity for a brand to engage — for example, by providing messaging or advice that’s related to the type of location visited.  This also provides an opportunity for B2B brand engagement.

Social network partners may well provide more unique experiences for brands. Much as well-designed social games from companies like Zynga and Playdom have created a powerful draw for Facebook users (consuming ~40% of Facebook user minutes), startups like SCVNGR, Gowalla, Foursquare and Booyah will likely use Facebook graph + location data to create interesting experiences. They’ll have the added opportunity to integrate data across Facebook, Twitter and other non-Facebook smartphone users.

One of the biggest potential issues to consider is user privacy — the current implementation has some issues that have been widely written about. However, in the past Facebook has eventually responded with changes to enable users to manage their privacy in an acceptable way.

Read more about key steps for brands to start taking.

Photo credit: Graph, by Librarian by Day

Next month, the Digital Influence team will be partnering with others at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide to bring you an Ogilvy Exchange on Government. The working title of the event: How Social Media Tools are Shaping Government, the 2010 Elections and Issue Campaigns.

In 2008, the Obama administration swept into the White House in large part transported on the wings of the Netroots – the fundraising and voter mobilization of his online supporters was unprecedented. With this administration came the ideals of the Open Gov Directive and Gov 2.0: transparent, participatory government. Two years later we can’t help but ask the following questions:

What happened to the momentum?

Does it still exist?

How has it evolved?

Are these ideals being fulfilled in government?

What are some of the best, innovative case studies of what is possible in this space?

What does the future hold?

What do the Administration, the media and the campaign stakeholders think is next for 2010 and 2012?

How is the next generation of political advocates going to bring together social media to create a movement, to raise money, to organize locally, to fight opposition campaigns and to get out the vote?

Will the Republicans be able to capitalize on this power as well as the Democrats?

We realize that this topic is vast and one that will take several conversations to cover. Consequently, we are hopeful that this Ogilvy Exchange will be the first of many where we begin to discuss these questions. In parallel, the 360Di team is launching a series of blog posts on government that we hope to publish on a weekly basis to continue to explore this topic in a more thorough manner.

We are very excited to share that the following speakers have expressed an interest in participating in our Exchange: Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum; Ari Melber from the Nation and Politico; Mark Murray from NBC Universal; Lovisa Williams, Deputy Director from the State Department’s Office of Innovative Engagement. We will be providing more details as speakers are confirmed. We look forward to having you join us at this event!

For more details on the event and how to get involved you can reach me at Kety.Esquivel@OgilvyPR.com.

I came to Ogilvy 360 DI — and social media strategy — via a slightly different route than most of my colleagues. In short, I was a longtime blogger (and journo) who’d become frustrated at how poorly blog outreach was being handled by brands that, under any other circumstance, would’ve been impeccable with their approach. They’d finessed relationships with the press and customers, but when it came to bloggers, they ended up botching it completely (clunky outreach, poor planning, uneven execution) — and as a result, not capitalizing on all that blogs and social media could offer. Ogilvy was the first place I saw that truly got that blogger relationships were not a one-size-fits-all kind of endeavor. I signed on for the job.

Even though I’m now at Ogilvy, I’m still a blogger — my fashion blog, FashionisSpinach.com, has been tapped for a wide number of influencer campaigns for brands like Chanel and Gucci — and I’m still the target for many brands stepping into the social media sphere. Not a day goes by when I’m not completely amazed at how companies try to use clunky PR methods to reach out to bloggers like me.

Here are three of my most frequently seen pitfalls.

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What is “Facebook Stories”?

This July, Facebook announced that it had passed the 500 million user milestone. Along with this announcement, Facebook also rolled out a new application, “Facebook Stories,” to celebrate its achievement.  As the largest social network in the world, stories of how people are interacting with others on Facebook happen every day. However, these stories usually end up only on Facebook Status Updates and News Feed, where limited users (i.e.friends) can access.

By launching Facebook Stories, users are able to share their unique stories in a collective environment, and all users can read these stories searchable by location or theme. Themes cover a variety of topics such as education, relationships, reunions, love etc. and after reading a couple stories, I would add some are quite inspiring and mind-opening. While various people use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends, others have clearly allowed Facebook to become a part of their lives.

How Brands use Facebook Stories Tab

In addition to the Facebook Stories site, Facebook is currently partnering with 31 fan pages, which associates a certain brand to many of the Facebook Stories tabs. LIVESTRONG, for instance, highlights health-related stories on its Facebook fan page; The Knot, a leading wedding service company, highlights Facebook users’ love stories. While these stories do not relate to the brand itself, they do represent a philosophy behind it, or the mission of its particular cause. Through these stories, content on fan pages become more engaging and fans are more likely to spend more time thinking about or visiting the brand. At the same time, these Facebook Stories allows the brand to see a glimpse of what stories people like to share. In turn, the brand may tailor its engagement plan to cross promote its page and Facebook Stories.

Since Facebook Stories is now available to any developer, I believe that more brand pages will link up with this new application to establish greater consumer engagement and brand awareness.

So, what is your story?

Of the sectors throwing caution to the wind and making social media integral to long-term communications plans, I perceive higher education as dragging its feet. Fresh off graduation, I can still smell the ink drying on hastily-minted digital plans for universities of all sizes and ilk. That’s why I was surprised after a recent finding from the Society for New Communications Research: higher education is outpacing the Fortune 500 in social media adoption by more than 2 to 1.

We must consider such inferences carefully. The deeper one digs into the study, the more context must be added. In one instance, researchers found 95% of schools use at least one platform to recruit. While the for-profit equivalent of recruiting is acquiring new customers, social media serve many more functions in both sectors. In education, uses include informing current students, communicating with alumni, and promoting curricula, courses, and extracurriculars internally, among countless others.

The study’s broad statements must be examined carefully and, while the rate of adoption may be high, it may not translate to effectiveness. Social media shouldn’t be drooled over solely for external promotion and recruiting, but also for opportunities to create an enriching stakeholder experience. For example, Harvard University has been an early adopter in its use of social platforms to welcome guests with campus tips on foursquare, serve diverse audiences on Twitter, and provide students resources to get involved via Facebook.

“Well, that’s freakin’ Harvard!” one might say. Sure, but it could be any university with the strategic insight to serve disparate audiences through social media. While not every institution can offer a custom foursquare badge to visitors, it can bring a campus, its students, and the community to life with a fuller interactive, multimedia presence. Obviously it’s no cakewalk and schools must address four fundamental uncertainties that inhibit effective use of social media in higher education:

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This past winter was one the snowiest on record in the Lake Tahoe region of California, which was great for skiing but horrible for keeping cars on the road. I skied 28 days in a four months with a full time job in San Francisco — basically, every Friday night I was driving up to Tahoe in a blizzard.  And every Friday night I was glued to Google Buzz for real time updates about accidents and road closures — the results came in about a half hour to an hour before California Highways did. I also was checking for backroads ways around these road closures. Google Buzz saved anywhere from 2 to 12 hours of time each weekend; that’s a lot of precious hours on the snow when you add that up across a ski season.

Each time I used the mobile app portion of Google Buzz on Google Maps, I shared an experience with people normally separated by their cars. Google Buzz, to be just a bit sentimental, brought us together. And we weren’t talking about what we ate for lunch or some random Internet meme but about something actually — sorry Triffle — useful.

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In my 7+ years working with professional services firms and B2B brands, I’ve experienced first-hand, the conservative nature of these companies and their marketing practices. So imagine my surprise in 2009, when these generally risk-averse companies began flooding my inbox with requests for counsel on the implementation of social media programs.

B2B marketers, long considered by some to be two-steps behind their B2C counterparts, are beginning to dip their toes in the unfamiliar waters of social media, as they quickly realize how they can pinpoint buyers, generate leads, and provide more accurate program measurement.

Even as social media use in B2B marketing continues to grow—57% of B2B marketers are currently using some form of social media in their business, up from 15% in 2007¹–many in the C-suite continue to have their doubts. For the past two years I’ve heard from clients, “social media is only for young people,” “my customers aren’t reading blogs,” “my clients aren’t engaging in social media,” “it’s not worth the risk,” “I can’t measure it,” and my personal favorite, “social media doesn’t apply to B2B.”

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