This is a “blog platform” - a collaborative group blog authored by 360° Digital Influence Blog team members throughout Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. This is a conversation we invite our colleagues, clients and anyone interested in the strategic use of social media, word of mouth marketing and digital innovation to join.
More Than a Blog
It’s more than a group blog. We actually aggregate our Twitter feeds, video and pics, blog network, portfolio of best practices, the events we will attend and job openings here. It’s our platform - a jumping off place - our homebase for conversation.
We are a global network of social media marketing and communications experts. We deliver strategy, measureable programs, and enterprise change for clients who need a disciplined approach to applying social media to their business.
Our services break down into four categories:
We engage influencers and grassroots consumers to spread word of mouth about the brands and issues they care about. We use an integrated approach to social media marketing to scale a new form of “earned media:” word of mouth - the most trusted source for purchase decision and opinion.
Clients need help building capacity within their organizations to apply social media today. We have delivered enterprise social media services for Ford, Vodafone, Time Warner Cable, DuPont and others.
We plan and deliver:
While our programs are custom planned for each client, we have developed a Social Media Engagement Framework to deliver the most impactful, integrated programs. All begin with a Digital Influence Strategy – the blueprint that breaks down any program into 5 parts:

Listen
All of our programs start by listening to what people are saying about a brand, an issue or a set of brand-related topics in blogs, message boards, social networks and review sites online. This intelligence is key to deploying any program online and can provide invaluable insight into how consumers think and talk about brands and issues. We use listening programs for 5 key reasons:
We have three basic listening programs:
Plan
Like the tradition of strategic planning in communications firms and connections planning in advertising agencies, we have a process for planning influencer and word of mouth programs. Based upon listening to conversations online, we plan an engagement strategy – how we can authentically involve people online so they will “care to share” with their peers and spread word of mouth.
There are three primary ways we drive influence online:

The biggest step in the planning process is our Influencer Map. These identify the people and the communities with the most potential influence for our engagement program. These can be high profile bloggers, individual mom bloggers somewhere in the world, or proam (part professional, part amateur) experts in a B2B market. Anyone can be an influencer given certain context. We look well beyond the obvious.
Activating
We want to activate people to advocate in some way for a brand, product or cause. Almost anything an influencer can do online via social media is some form of word of mouth. Whether writing a blog post, sending a link to a friend, tweeting or “liking” a Facebook post, each action comes with an implicit or explicit endorsement of that influencer and is potentially a more trusted communication. To activate we must engage. “Engagement” describes our ability to hold a conversation with people, invite them to participate with a brand or issue, motivate them to co-create a product, service or experience. It’s what sparks sustained word of mouth.
To activate our social grassroots base, we have a model of Conversation Management based upon a core Conversation Calendar. This model tells us what we are doing each day via remarkable moments and everyday engagement to earn the word of mouth from our communities and influencers, alike.

Some engagement programs solicit and make use of consumer generated media (cgm). Many require the development of a Web 2.0 web experience specifically designed to be shareable and encourage participation (vs. simply deliver content).
The best engagement programs are based upon our overall digital influence strategy to meet a stated communication goal or business objective.
Amplify
To add scale to any program, we can plan and execute paid media programs that can deliver a burst of awareness or fan acquisition. We specialize in engagement advertising where social content ro interaction is delivered via the ad channel.
To get the biggest reach for our “owned” content activation, we distribute content via brand web sites, social web sites, partners and other third parties. We want our content to travel as far as possible.
And extended digital media relations helps us get the message out to a growing list of relevant influencers who share an interest in our brand, product or cause.
Manage
Once programs are launched, the hard work begins. Our Conversation Management, approach to Social IRM, and use of content are all benchmarked via our measurement model. We track performance and listen to feedback to make real-time adjustments in our programs.
Our social Web design and build team creates custom social applications and manages the development and service of 5 key social software platforms:
We measure performance of a program to optimize our tactics and to report success. We have developed Conversation Impact™, our funnel-based measurement model to make it easy to understand the impact of any program.
We measure and report against three key marcom drivers:
Contact John Bell, Global Managing Director, for more information:
Twitter: jbell99
Phone: 202.729.4166
Interview with Twitter Fail Whale Designer