360DigitalInfluence

Facebook often has the luxury of refining ideas that have been around a while and that is what I predict for payments over Facebook. People are already comfortable with entering their credit card info on websites so payments on Facebook won’t seem like a huge leap; here I will review a few of the most recent trends in currency and the opportunities for brands.

continue reading

This week, the Mayo Clinic announced the launch of its very own Center for Social Media – a first-of-its-kind social media center focused on health care. “Through this center we intend to lead the health care community in applying these revolutionary tools to spread knowledge and encourage collaboration among providers, improving health care quality everywhere” said Mayo Clinic president and CEO John Noseworthy, MD.

This announcement is a great step in the further acceptance and application of social media to advance patient health, and it got me thinking about the concept of leadership. continue reading

Recently we contributed to a report from Jeremiah Owyang and crew over at Altimeter. They just released it last week and we would like to share it here. They drew conclusions from a variety of sources to end up with the “8 Criteria” - most of which I agree with and find useful. They then go on to “grade” a couple of dozen brands in terms of their overall “maturity” in Facebook marketing.  Here are the 8 Criteria:

• Set Community Expectations
• Provide Cohesive Branding
• Be Up To Date
• Live Authenticity
• Participate in Dialog
• Enable Peer-to-Peer Interactions
• Foster Advocacy
• Solicit a Call-to-Action

Forget my knee-jerk objection to using what sounds like such paternalistic terms (”maturity,” ” infantile,” etc…)  there is some sense here…

continue reading

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel with some great folks from various agencies. The topic was on integration of channels and the role digital plays to compliment traditional marketing, advertising and PR. There were several excellent questions asked by our moderator Andrea Ehresman from The Coca-Cola Company.  Here are a few that stuck out for me.

The first one was: “How are ‘traditional’ channels digitizing?” the example I shared is the introduction of QR codes into physical space to augment reality. QR codes consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, links or rich media. We are seeing QR codes and augmented reality popping up all over the place. A great example of this was when Calvin Klein was forced to remove an edgy billboard. They replaced it with a large QR code where people could access additional content.

Another question that yielded a great deal of discussion was.   “What are some ways to augment a mostly traditional marketing program with digital initiatives? “ One thing I think we all as a panel agreed on is that just because of hype over a marketing tactic it does not mean you should jump in heads first. Getting back to the fundamentals of marketing and understanding who your customers are, where are they and how do they want to engage with you should inform your digital initiatives.

This topic of understanding customer preference spawned another discussion on the importance of experience planning when scripting multi-channel interactions. The example of not scripting an experience was mentioned by an attendee who worked for a large retailer. He described a situation where employees in their retail stores were totally unaware of a Foursquare promotion they were running, similar to the Starbucks incident. These experience scripts need to take into consideration the points in time your employees interact as well.

And finally no discussion these days would be complete without a question on location-based marketing. A question from crowd was “What is the future of location based marketing”. This question had everyone on the panel itching to answer. The gist was that when you combine the power of Facebook’s open graph for behavioral data, with location, push messaging overlaid with an opt in from the consumer you have reached a marketing Nirvana.  We are still a little ways from this but are inching our way there one check in at a time.

Thanks to my friends @RedDoor interactive for hosting me this morning it was a great discussion.

You’ve successfully passed through “phase 1″ of your company’s social media evolution where just a few expert voices represented your brand online.  Now you are handing over the keys to a larger, more representative group of speakers.  How can you make sure that this proliferation increases, not fragments, your impact online?  How do you prevent someone going off the reservation?  Through guardrails, governance, and training (oh my!).  Here’s a checklist from basic fundamental to advanced degree: continue reading

Last week Facebook passed the 500 million users mark. That’s half a billion users.  When you consider that there are just under seven billion people on the planet it is pretty impressive stuff. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous nation after China and India.

Add to this each Facebook user has on average 130 friends and shares 70 pieces of information every month.  With 500 million users detailing their moods and passions online, Facebook is more than a social networking site. It’s a global phenomenon that’s shaping the way people communicate, across all aspects of their lives including the way they do business.

continue reading

The Ad Council and Google DC recently held its latest Seminar Series briefing, Online Contests: A New Way to Raise Awareness and Engage Audiences! The content was pretty 101 for anyone who’s been a Facebook Page administrator but several panelists and attendees offered great tips for video contests; I’ve compiled them below with attribution.

continue reading

This week, Ogilvy is launching a new initiative to publish Red Papers of our thought leadership. Red Papers are Ogilvy-ized white papers meet books. I mean with the emergence of the iPad and even the iPhone as reading formats, I am having a hard time understanding what is a “paper” and what constitutes a “book.”  This one is a bit long - almost 8000 words - not there is valor in length.  I wanted to share some of my experiences in a practical way and therefore I get into some nuts and bolts for planning really effective social media.

What is it about?

For the past few years, we have been helping established and emerging brands apply social media in the most impactful way possible. That means getting beyond tactical and often token gestures at applying social media-based approaches. We work with enterprise to help them not just realize marcom programs but also change they way they interact with customers and organize themselves. While every brand is different, there are common experiences. My Red Paper outlines these and offers a foundation - practical and high-minded - that brands can apply to ensure their own approach is as strategic or as impactful to the business as possible.

Get it now

The Red paper is available for download now. It sits alongside another excellet read in Dimitri Maex’s Red Paper Learning to Read the River which is all about understanding the flood of data and metrics available to us as marketing experts.

This past weekend, the New York Times published an article, “Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?” in which author Miguel Helft weaved together the components of every great start-up story: a confident visionary, early doubters, copycat competition, eventual success, and the forward-looking, “What’s next?”

While I enjoyed reading his article and am pleased games are getting the attention they deserve, the information mainstream journalists present their readers on the topic can be misleading.  Often this is because they’re comparing apples to oranges, restating known facts, or asking extremely broad and generic questions.

In an effort to create a clearer picture, here are three points the reader should know:

continue reading

When it comes to accessing influence, Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Group measures a diverse set of criteria, including reach, engagement, social graph, frequency of social media contributions and more.

In an effort to stir up conversation and controversy among social media influencers, Fast Company and Mekanism collaborated to launch The Influence Project, a tool that challenges the notion that influence is based solely on reach and number of followers. While admittedly not a complete or holistic assessment of influence, the project calls out passive or dormant followers and makes a strong case that influence should be determined on the level of engagement and action of one’s social following.

We caught up with Jason Harris, President of Mekanism and one of the masterminds behind The Influence Project, to find out more about why social media influencers are buzzing about the collaboration.

What was Fast Company and Mekanism’s objective for launching the Influence Project?

Fast Company wanted to get people engaged with and talk about their brand. They were also intrigued by the concept of influence as it relates to the rapidly changing space of social media.
continue reading