360DigitalInfluence

The Facebook Friday is dedicated to the friends and family members who forwarded me petitions to “STOP Facebook Selling our Information!” and other misconceptions about what Facebook is calling the Instant Personalization Pilot Program.

Actually, I’m loving this new plugin: I get to find my uber-trendy friend’s music on Pandora and I get to see what my friends in international relations jobs think about a Washington Post oped on Iran. It’s awesome. But in case others prefer to turn it off or are looking for a basic guide on Privacy and Account settings I created this PowerPoint and put it on SlideShare for the world. continue reading

Earlier this week I had the chance to present at one of the largest annual meetings of customer care professionals in the world, the SOCAP International Symposium. SOCAP stands for the Society of Customer Care Professionals, and among other things, its members include the folks in charge of running call centers, managing customer response teams and sometimes branching into running loyalty programs as well. If marketing is all about the outward appearance of a brand and perception, then customer care (more than any other group) is focused on the reality of what your brand actually is.

This battle between perception and reality, interestingly, is where the divide between customer care and marketing usually arises. The larger the company, the more divorced these two disciplines seem to be - often only meeting at the last stages of planning a marketing campaign to finally discuss coordinating. Not surprisingly, a key theme I quickly saw during the SOCAP event was that the communication between marketing and customer care needs to get stronger across the board. In particular, there were 5 themes that emerged for me (as a marketer) that define what customer care people would love to see from us more frequently (continue after the jump to read): continue reading

As I mentioned in the last post “Making content move across the web” knowing what people are looking for, where they are looking for it and how well they find it is at the heart of understanding consumer intent. But how well does your content align to what consumers want?

The first step is to assess where you are today. At a high level you are looking to answer a few questions:
• Who’s the audience for the content?
• What are they looking for?
• Are we helping them find what they are looking for?
• How does it support business objectives?

Lets take a look at some ways to answer these questions and conduct a current state analysis of your brands content landscape.

Who’s the audience?
Sounds like a simple question until you start peeling back the layers and discover that your segments may be entirely to broad. Just stating our target is “mom’s” or people with a certain view on an issue is to broad for segmentation which leads to content that is to watered down to make an emotional connection. Revisit those persona’s and take a deeper look at the customer segmentation work that has already been done. These insights will help to guide they type of content created, it’s format and where it goes.

What are they looking for?
Now that your audience is front and center it is time to get a better idea of what they are looking for. A quick way to do this is to dive into the keyword research tools from Google. Enter keywords that are relevant to your brand or categories you want to “own”. The results will provide tremendous insight into what keywords are popular with consumers in your market. You can tell what is popular by the monthly search volume.

Now enter your URL and let Google crawl your site and make key word recommendations based on existing content. If you compare what consumers are looking for with the keyword list how well do you stack up? These results will give a good perspective on how well your content is aligning and areas of opportunity for optimization.

How do they find it?
Assuming you are optimized from the search engine perspective. How well do consumers find what they are looking for? This can be uncovered by spending some time looking at content metrics, conversion rates and how well you perform against the top keywords in your market.

With the proliferation of channels we are seeing today another useful activity is to map out the customer journey. When they are looking for something as it relates to your brand what are all the places they go and how many times are branded properties in the mix. In many cases it will be necessary optimize how content is tagged and described across social media outpost.

Whats the impact to business objectives?
Once you have insights into the audiences, their goals and how you help them accomplish its time to align to business goals and create a set of baselines. Establishing a good set of baselines will you to understand how adjustments to your content strategy are impacting business objectives.

At Ogilvy we use our conversation impact model to establish baselines. We categorize 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).

After answering these questions you should have a good foundation and understanding of how well content is supporting business objectives.

When I first read about a new work-around to add Google Analytics to Facebook Pages I was set to geek out and asked recent FBML experts Mike Mangi and Jay Marrow to help me set it up.  I added it to our 360 DI Facebook Page and let it run for about five days.

Verdict: Nice to have but not need to have. Not worth the trouble for basic Pages but an easy lift to add to a custom Tab for campaign tracking. Details after the jump. continue reading

Content strategy has long been the corner stone to effectively delivering “The right content at the right time to the right person.” While this sounds a bit cliché brands will have a hard time achieving this simple premise with out a plan that is guided by consumer intent. Knowing what people are looking for, where they are looking for it and how well they find it is at the heart of understanding consumer intent.

Lets start with a simple definition of what content strategy is.

Content Strategy is an actionable plan for creating, managing & optimizing content align consumer intent with business goals. The important part of this statement is the alignment of what the consumer wants, with what the brand hopes to get in return.

Developing a content strategy is not as simple as it used to be in the early days of digital marketing. We now face an ever-growing landscape of places where consumers interact with content and a variety of new devices it is consumed on. Think about the last time you were researching for something new to buy. It is likely you started by searching Google, watched a video on Youtube, read a consumer review and did a quick poll of your friends on Facebook.

It’s also likely your customer will not be accessing content in a browser at their desk. Instead they will be using GPS enabled devices that deliver content based on their location. This can be game changing for a number of reasons.

The first use of location-based content we think of is the ability to deliver offers and promotions based on proximity to a person’s location. This has long been a dream of marketers. What I find much more interesting is when location based thinking goes beyond a simple direct response model to placing content in context of activities and interest.

Imagine if an outdoor store provided a mobile app allowing people to leave photos and suggestions along hiking trails across the country. Add the capability to log in with a Facebook account and now suddenly you can share your experience with friends in your network. The opportunity for the outdoor store to engage would be by providing useful tips for cooking on the trail, food to pack with promotions for products that will make future trips even better.

As our content becomes more distributed so do the tools for measuring effectiveness. Measuring consumption, favorability and sharing across channels is essential to make decisions on how to optimize the mix of places content goes and what content is developed.

As you can see there are a number of moving parts that must be considered when developing a content strategy. As you begin to develop your plan ask your self a few questions: Are consumer’s goals and business goals aligning? Does the content your creating have a purpose? How will you know if you content is working for you.

If you have been around the Internet for some time and saw the acronym “P2P” - that might conjure up images of Napster and the whole illegal peer-to-peer file downloading movement mostly focused on music. In the healthcare context, however, P2P may represent the next big wave of opportunity for organizations who can think beyond the traditional sales rep model for pharma brands or trade and direct marketing for others. But what is P2P marketing in a healthcare context? Two things:

Physician to Physician Marketing
Patient to Patient Marketing

Logically, this makes perfect sense. The one truth that most organizations already know is that word of mouth is king in all things related to healthcare. Doctors ask one another for advice and refer patients, and patients (even before the Internet) look to one another for advice and support as well. Once you add the Web and social networking into the mix, this truth becomes even more paramount.
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One of the best sessions at the #140 Conference yesterday was by David Carr @carr2n, a brilliant writer and blogger for The New York Times.  In 10 minutes he gave one of the funniest, most spot on presentations I’ve seen on “why Twitter will endure.”  I do it barely any justice…

• Momentum – Despite some slowing growth of the user base there are more than 50MM tweets posted per day.  Besides, the metrics aren’t the most important thing to focus on “look at MySpace.”
• Twitter is Joyful – Nothing gives the deep joy of Twitter, and the ability to see into the skulls of some of the best writers in the country.
• Utility – If forced to pick between listening on Twitter and broadcasting, he’d pick listening on Twitter every time.  Twitter is human enabled RSS – you can scoop in a cup and find out what’s happening right now.
• Simple/Easy UI – Simple is hard, and Twitter does it well.
• Starbucks – Twitter makes waiting in line at Starbucks tolerable, and calms you the baristas appear to be moving underwater.
• Hook Ups – We never give up hope that we’ll somehow meet and have serendipitous interaction with other humans, and  Twitter - or mindcasting - is one of the best indications of who you are.
• Pipes – Twitter is infrastructure.  continue reading
  

360 DI Black Belt Summit, Darlington House, by Joeywan

Great things happen. At this weekend’s 360 Digital Influence Black Belt Summit in Washington, D.C., 50+ strategists from N. America, the UK and France convened to discuss the latest trends shaping social media marketing and communications.

After two intense days of brainstorming, redstorming and thunderstorming, we all left a bit pooped. Chris Graves, Ogilvy PR global CEO, helped uplift the crowd with a thought piece on influence.

As a social media marketer, I spend day and night thinking about influence. How to inspire a group of consumers to learn about a product? Share a post with a friend? Write a positive review? Conducting business is contingent on the ability to influence potential customers. It’s no surprise influence lies at the center of any social media program.

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I recently came across an interesting study that declared mobile web will be the leading trend in 2015. This is a pretty bold statement but believe it or not there is truth to it. This year we’ve witnessed an explosion in mobile and location based content with cool location based social applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, and BrightKite. Location based services are one of the most powerful ways to personalize one’s mobile experience which can be even more amplified with the integration of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.  An increasing number of brands are experimenting and trying out mobile marketing strategies as a result. Last month, Gowalla partnered with Travel Channel to integrate some of its dining content from the show Food Wars.  When Gowalla users check in to venues visited in Food Wars, they will be able to read show-related information about the restaurant and collect passport-stamp rewards. This is a great way to engage fans and build strong brand awareness and loyalty. Gowalla says users have checked in at 600,000 locations in more than 165 countries to-date.

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Now that 70 percent of Facebook are non-US and the network serves 70 different languages, multinational brands are asking for more geo-targeting capabilities and dealing with questions about how to manage a multinational fan base. I’m confident that Facebook will be have expanding options over the next six months but until then here are several tips and tools for running a multinational Facebook presence.

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