360DigitalInfluence

The new reality for brands is people are consuming and creating more content in more ways than ever before. Eric Schmidt said we now generate as much information every two days as was generated from the beginning of time to 2003. Next time you stand in line at your local Starbucks notice how everyone is staring at their smart phone sending emails, updating Facebook status or reading the headlines.

This combination of consumption and creation has opened new opportunities for brands who want to get into the content game. Many brands are getting into the content game, According to AdAge 51% of marketing executives said they were already investing bigger marketing budgets.

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While at the consumer electronics show I attended sessions focused on kids and technology. It was great to see so many companies focused on using technology to educate kids. One of the common themes was developing apps for tablet based devices and video iPhones. A interesting stat is that 60% of the top selling children’s apps in app store are for children under 4.

For those of us with kids that love to play games on the iPhone don’t feel to bad about handing it over. In a presentation from PBS kids they described a test where they sent out pre loaded iPod video with learning games. PBS saw learning gains on content and skills from both dpps they created. The highest gains on verbal vocabulary averaged an increase 20% on both the short and comprehensive vocabulary assessments. Here is an excellent slide share on the research and its results.

Another interesting observation from the PBS research is one we have all seen with our kids. When a kid gets a new toy the love affair is intense for the first few weeks then it starts to wane. Content is king even for the little ones. The appetite for fresh content will certainly fuel the growth of new apps, devices and even new app market places .

We should not forget about the companies who have been developing educational products for kids long before the Ipad. This week at the toy fair in NYC several manufacturers introduced tablets for for kids.

The question this raises for me is which platform will emerge as the leader. Will it be one of the mobile platforms, gaming systems or toy companies.

Last week i had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop on developing a social customer care strategy at the annual conference for SOCAP the association for customer care professionals. Many of the conversations took me back to a past life where I worked on a reservations knowledge management solution for a large air line.

A key dilemma customer care professionals face is that good service and bad service generate word of mouth. It just spreads farther and faster via social channels. To illustrate this point i ran a quick report. On one extreme I used “awesome customer service” and on the other “customer service sucks”. As you can see it was nearly split down the middle.

So what does this mean. Well according to Forrester “good customer service experiences boost repurchase probability and long-term loyalty,” while bad experiences lead to defections and negative word of mouth.

To make the conversation a little more lively and get a pulse of the room we did a real time poll. “Who should own the social media strategy”.

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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.

People are broadcasting their whereabouts thru a variety of location-based platforms. With the emergence of any new consumer behavior brands quickly follow and seek news ways to engage. We are seeing brands and media companies tagging locations within Foursquare and serving up nuggets of information for their followers.

If you are thinking about integrating location-based interactions into a customer engagement strategy here are three options for getting started.

1. Leave content that can be discovered via location platforms:
This simplest way to get started is by partnering with one of the location-based platforms to create branded messages at specific locations. A good example is The History Channel. They will use foursquare to promote America the Story of Us. Foursquare users who check in at select locations across the United States that are associated with American history will receive “Fun Fact Pop Up” messages with historical information about that location.

2. Create a custom layer on Augmented Reality browser:
Layar is an Augmented reality browser that allows people to point their phone’s camera toward location and it can tell you the latest check-in’s who is the mayor and any display branded content. The good thing about a layer is that you are able to overlay images as well as text.  Recently Walt Disney launched the augmented reality outdoor campaign for the new ‘Prince of Persia’ movie. As you get closer to one of the ‘Prince of Persia’ outdoor posters and open the layer, the movie-character Tamina speaks to you and explains that you should watch the trailer and enter the augmented reality game to answer 3 questions.

3. Build a custom app on top of location platform:
Brands can take advantage of the location platform API’s opening up by creating a branded experience. Dick’s Sporting Goods launched RunnersUnite which lets you find popular running spots in your area, and see where people are running near you right now.

Each of these options has varying degrees complexity but before picking any path here are a few things to consider.

• Does your audience even engage in this activity?
• What portion will be brand generated content versus CGM?
• What is the purpose of the app? (Entertainment, Utility)
• Why will people keep using it?

Since everyone is talking about location let’s extend the conversation Sophia started in her post “Geo-Location Is Truly Everywhere“.

It seems we are at an interesting point in location based content. On one hand you have the early pioneers of this new land Foursquare and Gowalla (I will leave Mytown on its own because of the amazing gaming experience) who are consistently gaining new users. But what happens to Foursquare and the likes when people start tapping into the API for Twitters geo location data and when Facebook checkin gains critical mass ?

The openness of API’s means all platforms can technically benefit because there is more geo tagged content. For example if Foursquare pulled in places data which was actually tagged via a tweet it would only enhance the experience consumers have while trying to oust their others as the “Mayor”.

The flip side is that the critical mass of Twitter and Facebook could mean doom for the little guys. Kind of like when the big box retailer moves into to small town America.

The advantage I see Facebook having in this space is the amount of behavioral data it collects both implicit and explicitly. This could translate into highly targeted content and very relevant offers. If there was a way to opt in for specials or useful content delivered to my mobile device from my favorite brands I would do it. The challenge with the current models is that they are only location based and not preference. This may feel like spam to some.

Assuming the start ups can extend their platforms and keep a fun gaming experience with a proper balance of rewards extending beyond a badge there is plenty of shelf space available.

Only time will tell how this will shake out but either way location based content and marketing has made great progress. It is proving to be a unique way for brands to engage and reward their most loyal customers with special offers based on frequency or prospective customers who happen to be “nearby”.

How do you think this will play out? Will there be a “winner” or Will everyone win because of broader adoption?

There has been no shortage of dialog over the privacy concerns with Facebook’s recent announcements to make any site “Instantly Social”. What this means is that Facebook is opening up much of the common wall type functionality to anyone who runs a site. The same way you can “Like” something your brother shares on Facebook is now able to be deployed on brand sites. According to the Facebook developers blog it has already been deployed on 100k sites.

While this simple feature sounds fairly innocuous it stores this connection of what you like to your profile. The idea is that it will allow Facebook to better monetize its platform by delivering extremely targeted advertising based on what you like and who you are connected to. The user benefits have not been as clearly expressed by Facebook. To me the benefits are about increasing relevance in a very noisy world that has become social media.

Ok, so what’s new. Aren’t they already doing this with their ads? Yes they do this already within the walls of the Facebook experience but now this same data can be used on external sites. How you ask? Have you ever used your Facebook profile to log in to a site? This will now take on a whole new meaning since they also lifted their previous policy of only allowing a brand to cache personal information from 24 hours to indefinite.

Besides lowering the friction of a log in process and seeing that 3 friends “liked” the same article might not be enough to avoid users skepticism.

The uber strategy is Facebook’s open graph. The open graph  is truly transformational for combining interest networks, and allowing new context to be created based on a persons digital trail. The simple idea is that the open graph will aggregate and integrate personal interest across social and media networks.  So if you like a band and a restaurant why keep these two interest mutually exclusive. Finding the intersection across social graphs can uncover a wealth of behaviorial/attiudinal never available in the history of marketing. This too has people up in arms.

Take the example of Pandora. They were one of the first to integrate the open graph into their music player. The use case here is simple; when a song from Radiohead comes on you can see that someone in your network also likes it.  No big deal most would say. The issue that many I have spoken have is that they simply did not know this information was being shared and if it is being shared here where else is it?

The new open graph API is an extremely simple interface to access data from. All you have to do it go to Http://graph.facebook.com and use some simple search logic and you can get access to almost anything that is public ranging from recent wall post, likes and events attending and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).

We have entered a new frontier when planning experiences that can deliver high levels of relevance based on consumers intent, interest and connections. But brands should be open with what is being collected and how it will be used.

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.

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.

Live events play a critical role to engage consumers with a brand or product thru out the life of a campaign. The challenge with events is they are usually bound by geography, size of venue and of course cost. Many brands use social media to extend the reach of events with roving reporters who are live tweeting, creating hashtags for people to follow and posting twitpics.

All of these are great ways to extend the event but why not take coverage to the next level with a live broadcast? Creating a live show from an event is a great way to engage consumers and maximize your reach.

Solutions from Livestream and Ustream allow mobile broadcast stations to be set up from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection. No Internet access? No problem. The Livepack from Livestream is a turnkey hardware solution for wireless live streaming at HD quality. This makes man on street coverage much easier as you can literally point the camera and go.

Recently we live broadcasted from an event. The concept was a behind the scenes sneak peak of a show with exclusive interviews from campaign spokes people and attendees. Our goal was to create new ways to extend reach of the event, engage with consumers not able to attend and drive action by getting people to tune in.

The results were excellent by comparison. The brand micro-site saw its single largest traffic day since it launched in November of 2009. Visitors tuned in for an average of 10 minutes, which is five times longer than an average day.

Not only did people tune into the broadcast from over 20 countries, 70% of them explored at least three additional pages within the site. The live coverage of the event coupled with active monitoring and engagement on twitter proved to be a great recipe for extending the event experience.

Before plugging your camera in and going live here are some tips for a successful live broadcast.

• Create a “Show” not a stream: Fully develop the story you want to tell with a mixture of live coverage and pre-recorded video. This requires more up front planning, pre recording of videos and more tightly incorporating segways to pre-recorded video.
• Promote across channels to build awareness of the show: Using email, social channels and engaging with online influencers played a huge role in the success of this online event.
• Encourage viewer participation by bringing them into the “show”: Another way to engage viewers in the live broadcast is to in create points of interaction with event goers and online viewers via twitter, Facebook or chat. A simple example of this would be a Q&A with attendees.
• No wifi – No show: In situations where you rely on a wifi connection it is essential to test each physical location the broadcast will air from. This will ensure there are no dead spots. For venues that do no provide wifi/wired capabilities you can also have lines dropped or secure a rental of the LiveStream Livepack.
• Poor lighting and sound can ruin a great effort: Having the right equipment can make or break the experience for your viewers. Plan ahead and be prepared to bring additional lighting especially if you are broadcasting indoors. The use of microphones will also significantly increase the audio quality for those tuning in.

Live broadcast are certainly not for every situation but can be a great way to maximize the investment in offline events.