360DigitalInfluence

Sunrise over Marathon, Greece.

Even after the jetlag has subsided and you’ve had a few days to reflect, it’s nearly impossible to justly capture the sense of creativity, openness, innovation and playfulness you experience at WPP Digital’s Stream 2011 ‘unconference’.

An avante-garde mix of WPP agencies (think Ogilvy, Mindshare, Hill & Knowlton, Blue State Digital) and clients (think Ford, IBM, Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola), communications thought leaders (think Sir Martin Sorrell, Ze Frank, Rory Sutherland) and technological innovators (think Facebook, Google, Spotify, Yoni Bloch, Innovid), the event was a shorts-and-flip-flop discussion of everything ranging from the malpractice of Dr. Google to the miner (Chilean) Twitter parody.

I had the chance to meet folks from Facebook and Google and was pleased to hear that they’re not only thinking about how to work with marketers, but also how to work with marketers in ways that make sense to their customers. The major social platforms are now putting greater resources into collaborating with agencies who they see as partners in unleashing the full potential of their platforms - not just on the media side, but now on the creative design side.

As Facebook’s Patrick Harris and Sarah Personette expressed it, Facebook is primarily a technology company - not a content company. Thus, they see agencies as the “evangelists, designers and curators” of effective social media marketing and integration.

And as we all anticipate what the Google+ platform will offer brands, Chris DiBona says they’re structuring the platform for smart, sensible, segment-able marketing that makes sense to consumers. (I swear it was just a coincidence he used one of my favorite clients, Ford, as an example.)

And because I’d love to tell you more about Stream 2011, but don’t have the time or space, here are some great recaps:

• Five-part series in the Huffington Post penned by the likes WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, txteagle’s Nathan Eagle, SoundCloud’s Caroline Drucker, Ford’s Alex Hultgren and Y&R’s David Sable.
• TechCrunch video interview with Sir Martin Sorrell on content valuation and the “dreadful mistakes” we’ve made in giving it away for free.
• H&K’s (and die-hard Stream-er) Candace Kuss’ amazing Storify curation of #stream11 tweets.
• WPP Stream’s YouTube channel. Especially check out the Ignite playlist. Everyone should try to do a presentation with 20 slides that advance every 15 seconds for a total of exactly 5 minutes. My favorite: Esther Dyson on paying attention.

A couple weeks ago, we started talking about what we’re excited about and what’s on our minds when it comes to Gov 2.0. We’ve had the chance to attend the Gov 2.0 Summit last week here in DC, to share our musings on Gov 2.0, and to ask for your insights. Now, we are less than two weeks out from our Ogilvy Exchange event on Monday, September 27th and are excited to invite you to join us.

We’ve gathered a dynamic panel of thinkers, writers and communicators who’ll discuss “How Social Media Tools are Shaping the Government, the 2010 Elections, and Issue Campaigns”. With the upcoming mid-term elections — and today’s DC primary (don’t forget to vote!) — we thought it’d be a great opportunity to take the pulse of the Obama Administration Gov 2.0 successes and failures and talk about how we see the role of social media affecting the upcoming elections.

The Exchange will take place on September 27, 2010 from 8:00 am – 10:00 am at our offices in Washington, DC. You can visit this link for more information and to RSVP. We’d love it if you would help spread the word.

Our panel includes:

- Alexander Howard, O’Reilly Media
- Gwynne Kostin, U.S. General Services Administration
- Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum
- Ari Melber, The Nation
- Mark Murray, NBC News

Some of the questions we hope to address are….

• Does the Gov 2.0 momentum from 2008 still exist, and what does the future hold?
• Are the ideals of transparent, participatory democracy being fulfilled in government?
• What are some of the best, innovative case studies of what is possible in this space?
• What do the Administration, the media and the campaign stakeholders think is next for 2010 and 2012?
• How is the next generation of political advocates going to bring together social media to create a movement, to raise money, to organize locally, to fight opposition campaigns and to get out the vote?
• Will the Republicans be able to capitalize on this power as well as the Democrats?

…However, we’d love to open it up to you to submit questions you’d like the panel to answer and discuss. Leave a comment to post your question here or use our hashtag #ogilvy360di to tweet it. We’ll also be using the hashtag #gov20 in order to engage the Gov 2.0 community. We’ll see what the hot topics and burning questions are and open up the panel for we expect will be an informative and thought-provoking discussion.

Hope to see you there!

I love popURLs (www.popurls.com) because sometimes it’s fun to be a Web 2.0 voyeur.   Maybe I don’t want to view and forward the latest, snarkiest YouTube video to my friends and colleagues, but I’ll always want to know what YouTube videos are the most watched.  

As a busy mother whose dinner prep involves mid-commute  speed-dialing  Vace Italian Deli for  wood-fired Neapolitan pizza, I appreciate it when someone else has done the hard but thoughtful work for me.   I find myself  a little too busy to visit — or even add  to  my RSS reader — all the cool sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Del.icio.us, ifilm, Wired, BoingBoing, StumbleUpon and Twitter.  I love being able to visit a single page that’s my dashboard for a quick glance at what’s happening. I love popURLs so much that I visit it before my own collection of RSS feeds.    

PopURLs is the mother of all aggregators: it gathers the most popular content from the most popular social sites and displays the info on one nifty page.   According to popURLs founder Thomas Marben, the site is now one of the top 50 sites bookmarked in Del.icio.us.  

I think the interface is fairly elegant – although if you visit the About page you’ll read dozens of impassioned pleas to change the white-on-black background. Yes, the one page is a bit long and requires a good deal of scrolling. However, in as little as 5 minutes I can get through the toplines from 20 or so sites.   The popURLs interface lets  me mouse over the headlines to bring up a small box of additional text.   One more click and it opens the original item in the filter.

Enjoy watching the hive mind. Oh, and check out the Quickies.