360DigitalInfluence

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. continue reading

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

Creating successful promotional giveaways for your franchise client

Happy National Doughnut Day! To celebrate, Krispy Kreme will be giving each customer a free doughnut, no purchase necessary.*

Dunkin Donuts is offering customers a free doughnut with the purchase of any beverage—limit one per customer.*

*At participating locations only.

There has been a flurry of giveaway promotions put on by franchised brands recently.We’ve all heard about national chain efforts, such as Denny’s Grand Slam Giveaway, the Quiznos Million Sub Giveaway, UnFry Day, KFC’s grilled chicken giveaway, and National Doughnut Day promotions put on by both Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts. But, smaller chains also have gotten into the act, giving away among other things, free pretzels, free ice cream and free tacos. Some campaigns have been more successful than others; though, the definition of success seems to depend on who is asking and who is answering. continue reading