360DigitalInfluence

Along with a group of 11 diverse consumer tech influencers, Ogilvy PR worked with our client Intel recently to host a day-long visit to the company’s Santa Clara headquarters that included conversations about the digital divide, the latest in mobile technology, eco-computing, and more. The “Upgrade Your Life” event participants, who are prolific gadget and performance content creators, talked with Intel’s executive leadership about ways that technology is improving the lives of women and girls globally.

Photo by Intel’s Ken Kaplan.

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The first full day of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco opened with an insightful conversation about the benefits and potential improvements of the application programming interfaces (APIs) released by National Public Radio and Current in the past year. NPR’s Director and Chief of Technical Strategy Zach Brand explained the process of making 13 years of broadcast content available for sharing as a “brand and release” approach, while Current’s VP of Strategy Robin Sloan described his joy at the cable and satellite network’s decision to make its video content available in a structured way.

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Being a newbie to the sphere of employee communications, I knew I was in good company at a session OPR hosted last night about the importance of clear messaging within organizations when I saw the following note on each table: “Employees are on the front line of brand and reputation creation. What they tell their friends and families and post on YouTube and Facebook can define a company more quickly and more surely than anything the CEO tells The Wall Street Journal.”

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The films are great at this year’s Sundance Festival, of course. Filmmakers and fans come to Park City knowing that they should be given the rigorous selection process for dramas, documentaries, and short films. What I am most impressed by, however, is the emphasis on social media from attendees and organizers alike. I’m not just talking about the #sundance hashtag; text update alerts, cohesive blog coverage and multimedia commentary about the challenges the industry faces have been integral in differentiating this week from past festivals.

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I knew I was on board with Josh Warner, the president of video syndication shop Feed Company, when he told a crowd at the WOMMA Summit that it’s time to kill the word “viral” as a prefix for “video.” My San Francisco teammates are probably tired of hearing me make the plea not to describe short videos as viral until online viewers have deemed them so. It’s a word that should be limited to describing branded entertainment after the fact, not in proposed scopes of work.

In his session about the myths of using online video to create word of mouth, Warner described lessons learned while generating attention for Ray Ban’s “Guy catches glasses with face” and Levi’s “Guys backflip into jeans”–two videos that generated massive attention from viewers and media alike. His words of wisdom on making entertaining content work harder included:

• Realize that the viral videos your clients are clamoring for may be a fad. The piece that will stick around, however, is engagement with potential customers that generates two-way dialogue.
• Plan multiple messages for different audiences. Customizing short notes with reasons why bloggers and reporters representing different categories should care isn’t just smart—it’s imperative.
• It’s important to leave enough time to strategize video rollout. After weeks and often months of production, it’s easy to limit the window of time to post and distribute video and send it out at random. Advance planning and treating the rollout with the same care can make the difference between 100 views and 100,000.

Transparency and subtlety of brand links were major focuses of WOMMA attendees’ questions. Warner said that his company creates YouTube channel names that don’t include the client’s brand name, such as “Unzipped Productions” for the Levi’s video. A Gatorade entertainment lead at the session mentioned that the company created two versions of its ball girl catch video: the subtle version that took off and featured only a bottle of Gatorade at the girl’s feet, as well as a more branded version that was ready if the first didn’t spread virally. No matter the overt branding (and I lean toward more in the name of transparency), timing and close monitoring are crucially important when it comes to the launch and reveal.

Warner’s plea to “move beyond the view” and consider metrics outside a single number to live and die by was much appreciated. YouTube search results, feature placement, mainstream news mentions, and forum threads are all important additional considerations. Because, as Warner and his audience agree, audience engagement is just beginning to realize its potential.

It hasn’t been easy to get self-described “independent thought leader” Charlene Li on the line lately. Now that her company Altimeter Group has opened its doors, she’s got a range of prospective clients asking her advice about using online and mobile technologies. She has a steady stream of speaking engagements about emerging tech trends with the Social Media Marketing Summit and the like. And then there’s her work promoting “Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies,” the book she co-authored with Josh Bernoff when she was also a principal analyst at Forrester Research, since it was published by Harvard Business Press earlier this year.

Li and Bernoff created the book and its corresponding blog to get individuals thinking about the advantages, not just the pitfalls, of working with the groundswell, “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies.” Li, who started her career in newspaper publishing in small towns, said she’s always advocated for technology’s capacity to bring communities together and support them.

I agree with her that the initial work in convincing organizations to start engaging those communities can be the most challenging. Li said that when she explains the technologies that are powering the groundswell, including RSS feeds, widgets, and tags, the one that is most challenging for most companies to comprehend and adopt is Twitter. “Why on earth would anyone care?” is a frequently asked question about the microblogging platform and one that extends to the rationale behind employing other social media tools as well.

“But who in my company would blog?” has long been a common first reaction from companies presented with the opportunity to post their thoughts and news.   In “Groundswell,” Li suggests taking a step back to consider goals for tapping into these tools, including how relationships with customers would ideally change and how users might help deliver messages to one another. Instead of allowing trends and hot new applications to dictate a company’s priorities, answers to these longer term questions need to direct strategies for creating or improving online presences.

When asked who she sees leading the digital charge inside Web-shy organizations, Li points to the “revolutionaries” who call for more widespread use of tools they’ve been trying under the radar. “I still very much see an evangelist role for someone who proposes wider engagement to the whole group,” she said. It seems that part of the role of her new consultancy and its social media wiki is to help companies recognize the value of those people’s ideas in navigating a constantly changing and initially confusing space.

As someone who winced at the sight of my first blank blog post two years ago, I liked a recommendation on the discussion community for the book that you can’t understand some of these social media applications—much less recommend them to your larger organization–until you try them yourself. Beyond reading the book, the first tip that Li gives to clients who want to influence their audience and industry is to listen and learn. “Do a blog search on your company and its products. Understand how people are spreading the word about your work,” she recommends. “And most companies find that they can’t help but act after they start listening.”