360DigitalInfluence

Latinos and Hispanics in Web 2.0 are in the sweet spot. Over the course of the last few days, whether it be at Netroots Nation in Las Vegas, the Bridge Conference in the beltway or within Ogilvy’s own LatinRed professional network during an event in New York City, I have found myself in conversations with various folks talking about the opportunity found in engaging this demographic online here in the States.

So what is the opportunity?

At the end of last year and beginning of this year, I was thrilled to see a couple of recent studies that provided a quantitative backing to what I and others in the industry have been saying for years. Latinos are in Social Media.

According to a report released by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Internet & American Life Project in December of 2009, internet use among Latino adults rose by 10 percentage points from 54% to 64% between 2006- 2008. In comparison, the rates for whites rose four percentage points, and the rates for blacks rose only two percentage points during that time period.

A recent report published by AOL and Cheskin states that the number of Hispanics online has grown faster than the growth of the total US population. Two similarly striking findings of this report are that Latinos have more confidence in online product rating sites than their friends’ opinions (78%: 28%) and that they are earlier adopters of technology, more so than general market users.

Moreover, the AOL and Cheskin report found the percentage of bloggers in the Latino community to be at 21%.

So what does all this mean?

The numbers show that Latinos are:
-A significant presence in the Web 2.0 space and growing
-Content producers
-Early adopters
-Significantly influenced by online product ratings

Although two recent studies, “How Young Latinos Communicate with Friends in the Digital Age” and “The Latino Digital Divide: The Native Born versus The Foreign Born,” just released by Pew report that Latinos are still playing catch up to their non-Latino counterparts online, the reports also state that younger native-born Latinos are embracing the technology enthusiastically. According to the reports:

- 85 percent of native-born Latinos older than sixteen use the internet
- 80 percent of native-born Latinos between sixteen and twenty five use cellphones and
- 78 percent of native-born Latinos between sixteen and twenty five with internet access use social networking sites.

With one out of every four children being born in the US of Hispanic origin, the significance of these findings should not be lost on us as it relates to this market or the opportunity it presents in the private, nonprofit and political sectors.

To not realize on this opportunity would be foolish.

It’s like catching a baseball on the ’sweet spot’ of the bat. If you don’t swing, you can’t knock it out of the park. It’s time to swing and swing now!

Last week Facebook passed the 500 million users mark. That’s half a billion users.  When you consider that there are just under seven billion people on the planet it is pretty impressive stuff. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous nation after China and India.

Add to this each Facebook user has on average 130 friends and shares 70 pieces of information every month.  With 500 million users detailing their moods and passions online, Facebook is more than a social networking site. It’s a global phenomenon that’s shaping the way people communicate, across all aspects of their lives including the way they do business.

There are several well documented examples of B2B companies doing a great job on Facebook; Dell, Cisco and Salesforce to name but a few. They are building relationships with their community, engaging them in conversation and providing targeted mix of content, customer service, special offers and more. There is less questioning of why B2B brands should be on Facebook, more focus on how to do it for lead generation and customer retention.

Yet for every B2B brand doing a good job, it seems Facebook for business remains an area of confusion for others, who struggle with severe multiple personality disorders. A quick audit of several well known companies will quickly show scattered pages that have grown like wildflowers, scattered randomly as the wind takes them around the Facebook-y field (OK so a “corny” analogy but you get where I am going with this). How is it that some high profile companies have allowed their presence in this social setting to become so fragmented?

It could be the lack of an internal “face” on social media to oversee a cohesive Facebook strategy. Or a decentralized infrastructure with teams in different countries and territories creating their own public profile, or a  company that is simply not ready be open with its customers or listen to their feedback yet that others want to show an affinity for, official page or not.

So what if you find yourself in that group of B2B brands on Facebook? By the time you discover that you have six Facebook pages  around the world, focused on Widget X or user group in country Y,  is it too late to regain control?

The good news is all is not lost. The same quick audit can also give a rich snapshot of what is being said about a business and where. It can also highlight social media champions on the inside who could be tapped to continue to drive Facebook and community programs forward. Or a user group that could be further activated in company marketing or to drive others internally to participate. There is no harm in having multiple pages on Facebook; product development will likely have a very different focus to recruitment, or to sales. As long as there is an overarching strategy, why not empower different teams to speak authentically to the audiences that matter to them?

Done properly, appropriate Facebook use can be part of social media use to transform the way companies operate in all areas – from customer service, to corporate reputation, product development, and importantly, market research. It also does not have to happen overnight.  A gradual roll out of a Facebook strategy will result in a measured and authentic presence, and the antidote to scrambling to get in just because you think the other 500 million are ahead of you.

What are your best practices for B2B brands using Facebook?

If you have a pulse, you’ve probably heard about the new iPhone 4. After weeks of anticipation and swirling rumors of an abandoned iPhone 4 lost in a bar in Redwood City, CA in mid-April,  it’s. finally. here. With HD video recording, video chatting, and a multitude of sleek features,  it’s not surprising that industry experts are calling it Apple’s most successful launch to-date. The question remains whether the device will live up to the intense hype that surrounds it but one thing is for sure, it is likely to revolutionize the mobile commerce experience.

Thanks to Flowtown for this infographic.

continue reading

When SXSW, one of the largest gatherings of minds and enthusiasts in the digital world, didn’t feature more than a handful of panels on the intersection between health and social media - an “unconference” event called SXSH sprung up to fill the void. Yesterday that event came together in Austin and included speakers and pioneers in using social media to communicate for health issues in regional hospitals, government agencies, health insurers, nonprofits, epatients and pharma companies. Just about every part of the healthcare world had some sort of voice in the discussion as everyone gathered to share ideas on how the industry as a whole might use social media more effectively by building greater trust.

The day long discussion featured many highlights, starting with a talk from Doug Ulman, CEO of Livestrong about the power of health based communities online and how important real time information is to improving healthcare and the patient experience. Greg Matthews from Humana shared how a health insurer can innovate internally and use that to improve patient relationships and Jenn Texada from MD Anderson shared how she and her communications team use social media tools to interact directly with patients for customer service. David Hale from the National Library of Medicine presented an innovative new database to help identify unknown pills called Pillbox and Fabio Gratton shared how to build a movement through a case study of the success of the #FDASM movement in November of last year around the FDA hearings. In the “unconference” part of the day, companies such as ReachMD and WEGO Health talked about their communities and content and how they help bridge the gaps between patients, doctors and healthcare providers.
continue reading

Day 2 of TED2010 covered everything from suspended animation in humans to the need for better democratic argument in our society.  What continues to be top of mind, however, are issues of id and identity.  These were touched on in some way by 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole, game designer Jan McGonigal, and multiple demos from both Google and MSFT.

4chan is an insanely popular and prolific anonymous imageboard that has no memory or archive - threads are deleted after a few days.  While I don’t know what the causal relationship is, obscenity, porn, and rage run rampant in the environment of anonymity and inpermanence.  Is it a collective online id?  If you could say or post whatever makes you feel good regardless of how it will make you look or impact reputation, who would you be online? Maybe, but its not entirely bad - the community has come together and organized to do everything from protest scientology to using online tools to find and punish a board member who uploaded a video of abusing his cat.  The community even organized to game Time.com’s voting system for 100 most influential people and got their founder a #1 berth. Now, “moot” is afraid that the coming specter of universal online identity will make havens like 4chan an endangered species.
continue reading

We often get questions about if and when brands can edit a Wikipedia article and I’d like to provide some background on Wikipedia’s format and clarify what is and is not an acceptable edit. I am not morally against brands editing Wikipedia articles and there are no rules against it but the acceptable instances are few and any edits should be done transparently and by someone educated in the format and citation process of Wikipedia. continue reading

Neatly six months after the feds officially dropped the “Swine Flu” term in favor of the scientifically-grounded “H1N1″, web users are finally showing signs of following suit as evidenced by recent shifts in keyword searches.

According to Google’s Insights for Search tool, worldwide searchers for the first time since the outbreak have searched for “H1N1″ in greater numbers than “Swine Flu.”

The data shows that while “H1N1″ never received the surge of search queries earned by “Swine Flu” during the height of outbreak, the science-based strain term has slowly climbed atop the level of swine searches.



So what does this mean for brands?

continue reading

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.

continue reading

A really interesting example of aggregation launched recently in the academic world. Fururity.org is a no nonsense aggregator, pulling the latest research from North America’s leading research universities, compiling the finding in an easy-to-digest interface complete with a by topic architecture spanning across major research disciplines.

continue reading

By now it is certainly not news to note that YouTube is already the largest on-demand broadcast medium for anyone with an internet connection, boasting over 71 million unique users each month and the 6th largest audience on the Internet. 75% of all Americans have watched at least one video clip online in the last month. These staggering numbers coupled with the rise of broadband adoption in the US (over 80% of Internet users in the US have broadband as of March 2009) mean that online video is no longer a niche activity and has squarely hit the mainstream.

When you consider the opportunities from a Pharma marketing point of view, YouTube is certainly tempting. The FDA has yet to create significant regulations governing YouTube and there have been many marketing efforts in the Pharma space over the past several years which have seen fairly good results. Novartis’ FluFlix video contest from 2007, for example, had nearly 800,000 views of the intro video. In 2008, Sanofi-Aventis launched their GoInsulin campaign video channel which now has more than 300,000 views. More recently, earlier this year AstraZeneca saw success with their branded MyAsthmaStory video campaign sharing real stories of Symbicort patients and how the product had transformed their lives.

Concurrently, many pharma brands including Johnson & Johnson, Boehringer Ingelheim and Novartis (to name a few) have launched their own branded official YouTube channels to share a compilation of videos about various products, patient testimonials, research and development highlights and other corporate produced information. These channels represent an ongoing commitment to the YouTube channel and signal an intention to make this a longer term part of their overall corporate communications.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? continue reading