360DigitalInfluence

I’m pretty sure my name has been passed around on a “parents of young children = sucker for personalized gifts” list.  This Christmas, my home and inbox have been deluged with offers for personalized stationery, Christmas cards, coasters, ornaments, dog bowls, you name it - anything that will hold still long enough to be emblazoned with my child’s image.  While the targeting is great and I’ve found most quite enticing, when its come time to actually order, I’ve discovered that many of these companies have forgotten to take care of the core of their online customer experience - their web sites. <cue Carrie Bradshaw voiceover>  Have videos, fan pages, and Twitter strategies become the dessert that we can’t wait to eat first?  Did we skip the marcom meat and potatoes this year?
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Can a concept with nothing new about it - doing unto others as you would have them do to you - be shareworthy?  Can we make the pursuit of understanding “the other” and acting with that knowledge an idea that spreads from person to person?  We know social media is amazing for brief, instant flares of information, but what role can it play in something as fundamental and long-term as behaving compassionately?  These are some of the questions that have been occupying Ogilvy teams around the world as we approach the November 12 launch of the TED Prize project granting Karen Armstrong’s wish to change the world: the Charter For Compassion.

Based in study of the persistence of the Golden Rule across all religions and moral codes, the idea for the charter was born – a document to put compassion back at the center of religious and political life. The way it charter itself has come to be was on the back of social technology – soliciting input from around the globe using Kluster decision technology. The submissions from more than 100 countries were then reviewed by spiritual leaders from around the globe, and they then finalized the Charter.

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For a few years at this point, I’ve written about Brands Worth of a Weekend - where the weekend in question is a one for enthusiasts to come together and bond with the people behind their passion brands.  Meanwhile, Influencer Events - where influentual bloggers/tweeters and the like are invited to spend a day or two having a brand experience - have exploded in frequency.  While each may be classified as events for content creators and there are some best practice similarities (make personal connections, send a thank you, be clear about where and how content can be tagged), I would argue that there are even more differences.

Click through the “more” break to view table of consolidated lessons shared in an internal discussion of 360 DI strategists across the network.

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Today marks Day 2 of the LIVESTRONG Global Cancer Summit taking place in Dublin.  In attendance are cancer advocates and survivors from 65 countries who can truly represent and discuss the complex issues comprising the global cancer burden.

Can’t attend? Never fear, there are plenty of ways to not only learn, but participate and make your voice heard and opinion counted from wherever you might be:

• Summit LIVE - Sessions are live Ustreaming from AND the LIVE tab of the very robust LIVESTRONG Facebook fan page or from livestrongblog.org (which also includes aggregation of tweets from the floor).
• Follow @livestrong on Twitter for interesting tidbits of data as they are released live on stage of the summit and opportunities to respond to Twitpolls.
• Visit LIVESTRONGAction to sign the World Cancer Declaration and have your name included on the list of those demanding that cancer be a global priority that will be presented at the close to the summit.

<Disclosure: client>

We are 10 days away from PR Blackout Week - a week for mom bloggers to get back to the basics of blogging and temporarily ignore PR folks and brands - being organized by mom blog aggregator MomDot.  Opinions have varied as to  whether or not this is necessary or is a PR tactic in its own right. Regardless of your position, it is a wonderful invitation to discuss the state of union and give current practices a good sniff test. continue reading

**Image Pier Madonia for the International Red Cross**

One topic that I have written about extensively in this blog is consumer relationships with brands and, in special cases, Brands Worthy of a Weekend (BWOW).  When I started writing about BWOW, it was still a relatively lofty  bar - a brand for which you care so deeply that you would spend a weekend away from your family to connect with other people who feel the same way about this brand, learn more about the “inside” of the business, meet the people who make the magic happen, etc.   With the seismic shift in the blogosphere, however, brand “weekends” have become more and more common, but with a major difference - they are largely designed for influential voices versus passionate fans.   In the mom blogger space in particular, these events are happening in rapid fire succession with some players covering  multiple per month.  While these executions absolutely hold water as communications strategies - at least for the time being - they are no longer about “passion”.  I would argue it is very difficult to be truly passionate about more than a handful of things.

Enter compassion.  I’d never stopped to give compassion much thought, but having begun work on a project that centers on compassion, I am now hyperconscious of it in the world around me and there are a lot of business applications.  While we expect compassion in/from our fellow human beings, we don’t expect companies - with their one-size-fits-all policies and protocols for front line reps - to want or choose to show compassion.    But upon further reflection,  a lot of brand fan creation stories have an act of compassion at their core.  A couple of examples:

• This weekend, the waitress at Inside Park at St. Barts who came outside (where I was exiled with my toddler-gone-wild) to chat with me, suggest some places where I could entertain him, and take my order on the go made me a fan.
• My St. John Knit fan creation story is ALL about a VP of Customer Service reading my letter and breaking the rules to help a desperate bride (now customer for life).
• Every Twitter/online customer redemption listening story - from @comcastcares to the Dell outreach team or non-tech areas like the Vermont Teddy Bear Company reading a complaint I had made about some spam affiliate marketing and correcting the problem (that turned me into a supporter of their sister venture Pajamagram).

The first step in codifying compassion into your business or brand as witnessed above is listening.  You can not understand “the other” or “walk in their shoes” unless you pause to try to understand and consider an issue, opportunity or problem from their point of view.  In the examples above, “listening” took the forms of watching a situation visually, reading a letter from a customer, and blogosphere monitoring respectively (note: great post on active listening from John Bell here).

The second element is trusting those human beings who do represent your brand with the power to act.  Ritz Carlton famously gives front line reps a budget from which they can do whatever they need to do to correct any problems in a customer’s stay and send them away happy.  That not only creates customer evangelists, it proves that the brand trusts the human beings that they have selected to embody the brand.

So, next time something happens that turns you into a positive-WOM machine for a company or a brand, think about the role compassion plays and whether or not you are in turn entrusting your team with the power to pass it along to your own customers.

Recently, some of us around the 360 DI team have spent some serious quality time with the  international advocacy-movement building experts at Purpose Campaigns.  Inspired by one of his Australian quotable quotes, I asked co-founder Jeremy Heimans to answer a few questions for the Fresh Influence blog.

VM: I recently heard you say that “newsletters are the enemy” for building advocacy movements.  Given that you have built a number of global  movements from the ground up (Global MoveOn compliment  Avaaz (pictured above), anti-nuclear Global Zero, and GetUp Australia to name a few), can you share a few core tenets of designing and maintaining a truly “action”-oriented brand? continue reading

[updated with new title as official WHO flu title as of May 1, 2009]

[updated with new posts from around the global Ogilvy network as of May 4, 1:00pm EST]

Today, we executed our first Ogilvy PR Blog “roadblock” and invited all Ogilvy PR blogs - across regions and practice areas - to share their unique perspectives on the current flu outbreak and its impact on many aspects of business.

This fast moving issue has already stirred up controversy about where and how we get our health information, the Obama administration’s response to the crisis, and inspired renewed commitment to mitigating impact through prevention and early intervention.

We invite you to take a moment to explore these expert views from around the network and share your thoughts with us as well. continue reading

I am excited to be in planning mode with my co-presenters for an upcoming workshop at WeMedia ‘09 next week in Miami. BlogTalkRadio’s John Havens, Divine Caroline’s Suha Araj, the Washington Times‘ Chuck DeFeo and I will be leading a workshop on growing community in a variety of different business contexts. While prepping for this, I started thinking more about Mack Collier’s thoughts about Why Your Community Building Efforts Aren’t Working. In this post, he hits on the disconnect between what most companies want (to market) and what their customers do not want from a community (to be marketed to).

So what is a brand marketer, digital strategist, or even a brand FAN to do to cross this chasm? continue reading