360DigitalInfluence

Have you ever had one of those moments where you’re walking down the street or driving in your car and the perfect song comes on?  The beat matches your mood, the lyrics apply perfectly to your own life, and you start boppin’ along?  For me, that’s why music is great – because it connects to something in your own life and resonates with your mood, your mindset, the situation – whatever, really.  Those songs become your life’s own soundtrack, and it’s crazy to me that you weren’t always able to listen to the perfect music track at the perfect time.

The concept of setting music to experiences is not very new - before movies and television shows incorporated soundtracks, there were plays, musicals, and operas.  We’ve been setting life experiences to music and vice versa for hundreds of years.   It’s just that now we can control when we bring that concept into our own personal lives at a level that did not quite exist before.  And, in the wonderful way that social media is ultimately an expression of vanity, we can make our every day experiences into art by soundtracking them as if they were movies.

This usually isn’t a unique process.  There are hundreds of thousands of millions of songs in the world, and one of them can usually fit an experience pretty well.  But, what about, for certain situations, where one song just can’t cut it? - When only pieces of certain songs will do?  That, my friends, is the beauty of music mashups.  continue reading

Do you follow Santa on Twitter? I don’t, but I imagine him tweeting his way across a city’s rooftops on December 24th like so many metropolitan food trucks. He could use foursquare to check-in for valuable chimney-descending tips or to know what kinds of cookies to expect, but that might ruin the element of surprise.

Regardless, Santa is no different than most of us – save a red jumpsuit and diminutive slave labor – in that he has been changed by social media. If the millennium-old character can keep up with the times, clearly there’s an opportunity for most organizations’ communications to evolve. In fact, savvy Santa – or, if you prefer, Rudolph (@RudolphHoHo) or the horrifying Krampus (@MisterKrampus) – can teach us an important lesson about enrichment through social media.

Enrichment, in this context, is a concept that organizations can add communications dimensions through providing entertainment, information, and other value-adding layers. Enrichment could entail a number of techniques, and @santaNORAD demonstrated how social media can be used in a unique way to enrich a folkloric figure.

Santa tweeted from the rooftops in 2010 with help from NORAD

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We wear a mask that grins and lies
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes
This debt we pay to human guile
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

- Paul Lawrence Dunbar

It begins when we are children. As Steve Hein of EQI.org points out, “Children start out emotionally honest. They express their true feelings freely and spontaneously. But the training to be emotionally dishonest begins at an early age. The child is told to smile when actually she is sad. She is told to apologize when she feels no regret. She may be told to kiss people good night when she would never do so voluntarily.” In short, she will slowly be influenced to conform to a social structure that attempts to control what feels true.

But what does emotional honesty have to do with WikiLeaks and Digital Influence, you ask?

It’s simple really. We are still struggling – as individuals and as countries - to break down the walls of ‘protection’ that we have been brought up to believe we must build. We have not yet replaced those walls with the bridges necessary to fully transform society.

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If you could have put all the people working in marketing at pharmaceutical companies together in a room today, you might have heard a collective sigh of disappointment. As many suspected for weeks or even months now, the FDA quietly confirmed that the long awaited guidelines for how to use social media for which they held a hearing in late 2009 won’t be coming this year and to expect them (perhaps) in Q1 of 2011. Earlier this month, however, the FDA did release a sweeping document that received much less fanfare from marketers - even though the implications of it may change the world of pharmaceutical marketing for the next half decade at least.

That document focused on the FDA’s “Strategic Priorities: 2011 - 2015″ and offers nearly 50 pages of insights into the future direction of the FDA and offers many hidden insights that everyone who is considering doing any marketing or communications for a drug, medical device, healthcare organization or biomedical research organization should pay attention to. Here are a few of the most noteworthy passages in that document along with thoughts from our Ogilvy Digital Healthcare team on their significance.

“FDA’s primary responsibility is to protect the American people from unsafe or mislabeled food, drugs, and other medical products and to make sure consumers have access to accurate, science-based information about the products they need and rely on every day.”

1. What It Means: Despite Lots Of Hope From The Industry, Social Media Guidance Isn’t A Priority For The FDA
There is only one point in the entire 48 page document of strategic priorities where social media is even mentioned, and much of the document focuses on the much bigger challenges and scope of the FDA. When you work in Pharma, you tend to underestimate the scope of the FDA’s mission. As this document spells out, issuing social media guidance is nowhere near a priority for the FDA - and despite what anyone working in this area may want to see happen, it is unlikely that this will change in the near future. continue reading

My healthcare background was very limited when I started focusing on it as it relates to social media but I found a great deal of resources that have helped me understand the hype that is this healthcare social media space. The most valuable thing I’ve learned is that if you want to enter the space you better be able to “walk the walk” and “talk the talk”. That is why I’ve highlighted 11 social media blogs and resources (in no particular order) that have, in my opinion, not only walked the walk but have helped shaped this space in the past year and most likely will moving into 2011.

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For many of us, the holidays bring more than decorations, parties and presents - they bring stories – everything from the classics like: The Christmas Story, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to the stories our families pass down through the years. About this time every year, my niece and nephews start asking us to tell them stories about holiday traditions and their parents, grandparents and others when they were their age. And the stories that are replayed or continue to be passed down from generation to generation are usually the ones that are told in a way that is compelling and entertaining.  It’s not just the story, or the ‘what’, it’s the way in which that story is told, the ‘how’ that makes it memorable and interesting.

As the year closes out many communicators find themselves planning engagement and even conversation strategies for the new year. This season is a great time to reflect on your brand story or the story you want to tell. The ‘what’ or the content is just as important as the ‘how’ or the way in which the story is told. Does your story resonate with the audience you are trying to reach? Is it more than a laundry list of features and benefits? Is your story or message easy to tell both online and offline?

In the digital world, a good story is not enough anymore to bring engagement and the plethora of likes we all desire; the ‘how’ a story is unveiled and the details are what breed engagement. So as you begin to think about your communication plans for 2011:

1. Stop and consider all the mediums that are available to you and use them to build wider reach.
2. Engage your advocates and invite them to participate in your programs - embrace their content.
3. Remind and invite your audience to spread your message both online and offline.
4. Participate in discussions about your brand generated by the community - not just the conversations you start.

So, whether you are planning for 2011, the next quarter or the next month, take a minute to reflect on your engagement strategies. Are you telling a story that is worth telling?

As a complement to all of the consumer-friendly changes on Facebook, it is nice to see the love shared to the marketer’s utilizing the platform.  Gone are the days of written approvals and minimum ad buys, paving the road for faster turnaround and lower budgets for future campaigns. (Official Facebook Promotion Policy Changes)

So how does this affect your next promotion?

1. The process is simplified–making the overall planning less daunting

 

2. For brands that have had concerns on sunk costs, this should offer some financial relief

 

3. There is a decreased need to host contests/sweepstakes off the platform on a microsite

 

4. You are still required to use a third-party vendor to host a promotions application, but  the new policies should allow you greater control over customization

 

5. Gives the little guy  a chance–in the past some brands could only dream of playing host to an engaging contest on Facebook, but now the world is their oyster

Please note that I do not want to dumb down the process; planning and executing an engaging promotion on Facebook will still take insight into your target consumer and strategic planning.  But now you have a few less steps to worry about and possibly more money to spend. So what are you waiting for? Start planning those 2011 promotions!

From the new Groups functionality to the ability to “see relationships” and the $250 million sFund, the folks at Facebook are telling us one thing: people value their social network, and so should we.

On Oct. 6 at a live press conference, Zuckerberg announced that he’d found the solution to “the biggest problem in social networking.” Thus was born the new age of Facebook Groups, spawned from the idea that we all communicate differently within different social circles. Now, you can communicate differently with your 72-year-old grandparents than with your buddies from college. You can even treat it as a virtual business meeting with the functionality of editing common docs and group chat. This feature also reminds us – users value their friends, and we should too. Facebook isn’t about the “face-value”, right? It’s about growing and sustaining relationships, in their proper places.

On top of the Groups announcement, that same day Facebook developers introduced the Data Download function that allows users to “take home” their data. This reminds us that digital relationships are real. They’re not just an entity found in the digital space. Users can now take their tagged photos and status updates off of the platform. Facebook developers recognized the societal need to feel a relationship and spanned the divide between digital and reality (which is how it started in the first place.) Isn’t that what social media marketing is all about?

The new Facebook profile layout that rolled out on Sunday attests to the fact that Facebook is continually attempting to mimic the natural, in-person relationship.

The new layout highlights photos first. Call me crazy, but isn’t this similar to a real life relationship? Step one: see potential new friend. Step two: get to know friend. Step three: build relationship. Facebook is obviously mimicking the natural way in which humans create, nurture, and sustain relationships. This just shows us that the value placed on the digital relationship is higher than ever.

Now, does this mean that Facebook is the bible of social media? No. Does this mean that Facebook’s trends are the only to follow? Absolutely not. It means that if Facebook finds something important, we should keep our eye on it.

After all, they do have 500 million users.

People love to rant and rave on Twitter. Brands and organizations love to engage with current and potential influencers. The combination is perfect. It allows Twitter to be used in increasingly creative ways and tweets to be shared in the most unexpected places. The following are five creative ways real-time opinion from Twitter is being shared:

1) Retail Stores – Last week I was at a Las Vegas mall when I passed Metropark, a men’s and women’s store that had a live in-store Tweet stream running on multiple television screens in the store as well as in the front window. It was very interesting to see as a consumer that I could walk by the store and read what people were discussing about @MetroparkUSA in real time.

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It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies had a lot of regulatory issues to consider when marketing – and no marketing channel is more hotly discussed right now than the internet. From the highly anticipated guidelines on social media usage to the FTC’s proposed do-not-track list, there’s definitely a lot to keep track of these days.

Below are three regulatory issues that we here at 360 DI are monitoring closely. continue reading