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.

About 360° Digital Influence

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:

• Enterprise Social Media Services – we work with clients across disciplines to build their capacity to use social media.
• Program Social Media Services – we design and execute the most effective social media marketing and communications programs
• Platforms – our design and build team has developed a suite of social platforms that make it easy and effective for brands to engage online
• Measurement – every marcom program we deliver is measured for effectiveness. This discipline ensures all of our work is strategic

What do we do for clients?

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.

Enterprise Social Media Services

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:

• Consulting
• Training
• Organizational Modeling
• Social Media Governance and Guidelines

Program Social Media Services

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:

• Marcom insight
• Measurement benchmarking
• Rapid response
• Product and service development
• Inform advertising development

We have three basic listening programs:

• Conversation Map – a report on what people are saying via cgm
• Consumer Intent Modeling – a look at what people are searching for
• Listening Post – an ongoing effort to listen and track opinion

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:

• Social Influencer Relationship Management (Social IRM) – identifying and engaging with high-influence individuals online
• Social Grassroots – building a mass base of followers or fans to spread word of mouth via their social graph
• Content Activation – creating and distributing highly optimized and targeted “owned” content

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.

Platforms

Our social Web design and build team creates custom social applications and manages the development and service of 5 key social software platforms:

• Insider Circle: A scalable social platform for managing influencers and fans
• Social Media Room + Release: The next-generation press room and social media release in app form
• Conversation Amplifier: A moderated, social media aggregator
• Blog Plus: Web 2.0 publishing platform
• Brand Intelligence Dashboard: An always-on aggregator designed for brand managers to monitor cgm

Measurement

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:

• Reach & Awareness
• Preference
• Action

Contact John Bell, Global Managing Director,  for more information:

john.bell@ogilvypr.com

Twitter: jbell99

Phone: 202.729.4166