360DigitalInfluence

Happy Friday!

Yesterday in Lisbon at the Global Sabre Awards, Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team won the THE GLOBAL SABRE FOR OUTSTANDING DIGITAL/SOCIAL CONSULTANCY! Winning what we see as the top honor in the communications field is hugely uplifting to our team around the world. Receiving this honor from Paul Holmes organization means a lot to us. He is the one thought leader in the communications field that actually takes time to spend with all of the agencies out there to really learn what they are doing - year after year.

From day one (7 years ago) we focused our attention on being the best strategists and practitioners in social media not on blowing our own horn, so-to-speak. We wanted to develop creative and effective ways to solve real business problems via an emerging discipline. We also believe in the power of social media to transform marketing and communications organizations.  So, we applied that to our own organization.

We  focused our energy on growing the largest global network of social media strategists and practitioners. We see change all over the world albeit differently in every market. My recent posts on my own blog about Russia are a good example of that.

The true power of  social media comes through a fully integrated model. Not simply where we combine owned, earned and paid media for the compound effect it delivers but connecting new disciplines like shopper marketing, CRM, crisis management, and advertising with social media. This means breaking down the barriers between disciplines and forming new teams and new ways to work.

We are honored to win this award.

I’ve noticed something lately I can only describe as the Personality Paradox (mostly because I’m a big fan of alliteration).

It’s simple:  When it comes to engaging in social media, bigger brands (alliteration! OK, I’ll stop pointing it out.) tend to have smaller personalities.  This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.

In the case of a big brand there are myriad factors that can cause this Paradox.  First off, having a big personality takes a ton of effort and focus.  Add to that regulatory/compliance issues, organizational challenges, multiple marcom agencies, new management and a million other things, big and small.  Or worse, simply losing sight of the customers who got you there in the first place.

The perfect parallel is a rock band.  The unsigned band playing half-filled clubs is going to cherish every fan – no autograph unsigned, no photo request denied, no interview not granted, no Tweet unanswered.  But as that band gains a following and eventually breaks, the demands on their time and attention increase, forcing them to (1) triage inbound requests and (2) start speaking to their fanbase as a whole, rather than as individuals.  Oh, and as their egos inflate, they often quickly forget their most loyal base.

(photo courtesy of Arne Hendriks)
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Egyptian Women Harassed on International Women's Day 2011

Oscar Wilde once famously proclaimed, “One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.”

It goes without saying that at least once, if not several times in our lives, we have all experienced the negative backlash a spiteful rumor or an embarrassing truth can have, but it is often how we handle these imbroglios that truly define our reputations.

In 1997, according to Measures That Matter, The Center for Business Innovation (CBI), and Cap Gemini/Ernst & Young, about 35% of investment decisions were based on factors such as reputation and image.  Today, this percentage is considerably higher with the activity and immediacy of Facebook and Twitter.

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Who among us does not enjoy a good social experiment? As you have probably heard by now one of the themes rising out of this year’s SXSWi is the importance of game mechanics and how people engage when a game layer is added to community.

Seth Priebatsch of scvngr.com ended his presentation with a little social experiment that was a great illustration of how the game layer can bring people together. As we entered the auditorium everyone was handed one of two cards that were color coded.

One card was blue on one side and green on the other while the other card was gold on one side and orange on the other. As Seth wrapped up his presentation he announced he was launching a social experiment. The challenge: Without getting out of your seat, work with the people on your row to determine what color card your row was going to be and then negotiate from your seat to get the color card you needed. He gave us a time frame and if we made the time his company would donate $10,000 to a charity. He counted us down and the game began.

On my row and the rows around me, we had several empty seats and while you would think it made it easier to choose a color it was actually harder to communicate. As the game began, each person was created equal because each person in the auditorium was working toward their own goal as well as making their row or team reach their goal - celebrity status did not matter. Quickly, my row decided we would go green, and then the race was on to use our influence to negotiate with the rows and people around us to trade cards so that each person on my row had a green card. We quickly determined how many “greens” we needed and then went about making the necessary trades to secure green cards. The process was exhilarating and challenging and at the end of about 150 seconds, Seth called time and asked each row to hold up their cards.

Personally, I was concerned as I found myself wanting to win and for the charity to win. As we all held up our cards, much to I think everyone’s surprise, we (meaning the entire auditorium of 2,500 people) had accomplished the goal. Each row had come together and worked not just with the people on their row, but also the rows around them. It was quite a moment; 150 seconds and 2,500 people had come together and made the experiment a success.

So why am I so energized by this experiment? I think there are several reasons:

-    While Seth’s presentation was interesting I think his point was made stronger through the “game.”
-    The experiential side of this exercise made it more powerful; this was experiential learning at its best. One of the guys sitting next to me commented that he never thought he would fall for game mechanics but as soon as the challenge was on – he was all in to win.
-    Your influence comes with accountability and responsibility and you never know when you will need to exercise it. Someone sitting in front of me had a minor kerfuffle and I noticed as we started the experiment it took his row longer to embrace him. I could not help but find myself wondering if he was wishing he had made different choices about how he joined that row.

In the end, I think Seth did a great job of proving his point that a game layer not only breeds participation but that it can breed cooperation. However, I also find it troubling that the game layer is what motivates people to come together. I’ll admit the gaming made it more fun but is that what we are becoming as a community? Do we need a game to work together?

Disclaimer:  Due to several conflicts (including children, work, wife, The Office, Jersey Shore and sleep) I had to  schedule this post 12 hours in advance of it going live; meaning I might not have the latest information on the talks between the concerned parties.  However, that has no material impact on my main points.  Trust me, I’m a journalist.

With that out of the way …

By the time you read this the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between NFL owners and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) will most likely (see disclaimer; and even if there is a 24-hour extension of the CBA, as reported Thursday afternoon, this thing will eventually come to blows) have expired, leaving the two sides without a labor agreement and the 2011 football season - or at least part of it -  in serious jeopardy.

As a sports fan, I’m totally turned off.  As many people will tell you, this is billionaires fighting with millionaires over sums of money unfathomable to the vast majority of fans (Charlie Sheen excluded, of course #winning!).

As a marketer, and one who currently focuses on social media, I’m keen to keep a close eye on how the dispute plays out in public, particularly in social media.  This is the first pro-sports labor dispute of the social media era (the last being the National Hockey League during the 2004-5 season, when MySpace was hardly a hotbed of sports discussion and Facebook was just blooming as a place for Zuckerberg to exact revenge on a girl who slighted him - at least that’s how the movie goes).

It’s 2011 (you’re welcome for that nugget) and I can’t help but imagine the stream of opinions flowing effortlessly from the Twitter feeds of NFL players, owners, media and fans as the dispute moves into the grind-it-out-let’s-pretend-we’re-all-working-towards-the-same-goal-when-really-we’re-just-interested-in-protecting-no-actually-growing-our-pile-of-money phase.   In fact my crack research staff tells me that between February 15-28 there were 11,000 Tweets mentioning “NFL and lockout.”  Just since March 1 there have been the same amount.

The NFL is a public relations juggernaut, second only (in my opinion) to the NBA.  And it’s worth noting that basketball faces this very same situation next year; though as many sports writers have noted, the NBA actually needs a battle like this to realign a really broken compensation scheme; whereas football seems to be in pretty good shape.  In any case, I’m sure commissioner Stern is paying very close attention to the public sentiment as owners prep for battle with the NBA players union.  In fact I bet this post makes his morning clip pack (#DavidStern #Stern #DStern #NBA #TallAndRich #TheDecision #GoBulls).

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AOL just announced it is paying $315 million to buy the liberal news commentary site The Huffington Post; a move coming not long after forking out $25 million to buy TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley technology news blog.

Founder Arianna Huffington’s decision to fold her ground breaking community-based news site into one of the web’s struggling legacy Internet companies came as a surprise to many, in the same way Michael Arrington’s Big Announcement at TechCrunch Disrupt last year managed to upstage all the start ups at the event.

Why the Huffington Post?  It has been wildly successful due to several factors, including its ability to find stories across the Web, couple them with well-created headlines and ensure a strong audience sees them. It is also popular as a progressive American news website.Yet the main factor that attracted AOL could in fact be the Huffington Post’s community.

In addition to columns by Arianna Huffington and a core group of contributors the site has over 3,000 bloggers. These range from politicians and celebrities to academics and policy experts to Digital Influence’s Kety Esquivel — all of whom contribute in real time, on a wide-range of topics.

In any vibrant community, online or off, people connect with each other because:

1. They can do so easily and confidently
2. They keep coming back because they satisfy certain needs or wants by taking part
3. They feel their contributions are valued and can identify with the wider community group and its goals

All factors which until now, have been prevalent at the Huffington Post during its five-plus years of existence, with over one million comments made on the site each month. However, it is this community management which is exactly where new owner AOL is walking a fine line.

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The message has been deleted, but the damage is done.

Social Media users are in an uproar about the Tweet posted in poor taste by Kenneth Cole yesterday. While this may not be the first time the designer has rubbed people the wrong way, this IS the first time it won’t be so easy to move on and forget about it.

Posted on the brand Twitter channel, “KC” inappropriately referenced the situation in Cairo to promote the new spring line. Even though he followed up with another Tweet aimed to ensure followers that he was not trying to “make light of a serious situation”, the damage was already done.

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Do you follow Santa on Twitter? I don’t, but I imagine him tweeting his way across a city’s rooftops on December 24th like so many metropolitan food trucks. He could use foursquare to check-in for valuable chimney-descending tips or to know what kinds of cookies to expect, but that might ruin the element of surprise.

Regardless, Santa is no different than most of us – save a red jumpsuit and diminutive slave labor – in that he has been changed by social media. If the millennium-old character can keep up with the times, clearly there’s an opportunity for most organizations’ communications to evolve. In fact, savvy Santa – or, if you prefer, Rudolph (@RudolphHoHo) or the horrifying Krampus (@MisterKrampus) – can teach us an important lesson about enrichment through social media.

Enrichment, in this context, is a concept that organizations can add communications dimensions through providing entertainment, information, and other value-adding layers. Enrichment could entail a number of techniques, and @santaNORAD demonstrated how social media can be used in a unique way to enrich a folkloric figure.

Santa tweeted from the rooftops in 2010 with help from NORAD

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For many of us, the holidays bring more than decorations, parties and presents - they bring stories – everything from the classics like: The Christmas Story, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to the stories our families pass down through the years. About this time every year, my niece and nephews start asking us to tell them stories about holiday traditions and their parents, grandparents and others when they were their age. And the stories that are replayed or continue to be passed down from generation to generation are usually the ones that are told in a way that is compelling and entertaining.  It’s not just the story, or the ‘what’, it’s the way in which that story is told, the ‘how’ that makes it memorable and interesting.

As the year closes out many communicators find themselves planning engagement and even conversation strategies for the new year. This season is a great time to reflect on your brand story or the story you want to tell. The ‘what’ or the content is just as important as the ‘how’ or the way in which the story is told. Does your story resonate with the audience you are trying to reach? Is it more than a laundry list of features and benefits? Is your story or message easy to tell both online and offline?

In the digital world, a good story is not enough anymore to bring engagement and the plethora of likes we all desire; the ‘how’ a story is unveiled and the details are what breed engagement. So as you begin to think about your communication plans for 2011:

1. Stop and consider all the mediums that are available to you and use them to build wider reach.
2. Engage your advocates and invite them to participate in your programs - embrace their content.
3. Remind and invite your audience to spread your message both online and offline.
4. Participate in discussions about your brand generated by the community - not just the conversations you start.

So, whether you are planning for 2011, the next quarter or the next month, take a minute to reflect on your engagement strategies. Are you telling a story that is worth telling?

What I am about to say is going to be confronting to some of you. To others this may be obvious, common sense. The days of total control over message are over. If these days ever existed, they are no more. Social media has created a world where a brand no longer gets to push out its message on a passive audience. Instead, through social media folks are engaging in conversations about brands with and without the brand.

The question then becomes: Is a brand present in the conversations that are happening about it and therefore able to share its point of view? When a brand is not present, there is a much slimmer chance that their point of view will be heard. This is true of social media in general and I hope to explore the impact of this in different spaces in the weeks and months to come. However, today I wanted to explore the question of how this relates to governments and Wikipedia.

Earlier this year, the European government found itself in a conundrum. A newspaper published a story which quoted the European Commission Vice-President Antonio Tajani as saying that tourism is a human right. Shortly thereafter, Wikipedia picked up this third party information and stated it as a truth. When his team tried to correct the information on Wikipedia by adding the text of his speech, the page moderators blocked them. Given Wikipedia’s construct, the third party information was considered more reliable than the original source. Thus the conundrum. The information was incorrect. However, Wikipedia strongly discourages organizations from editing organization-related articles, citing conflict of interest.

If there are factual errors, organizations are asked to:
a. Leave a note on the article’s talk page
b. Post a comment on the help desk
c. Contact Wikipedia via email

If an organization insists on editing an article directly, the organization must declare their interests on their user page(s) and on the talk page of the article they edit. The conflict of interest guidelines must also be adhered to, as must the neutral point of view and verifiability. As it relates to verifiability, the changes must be backed by reliable sources, which in the Wikipedia world means third-party sources. That is why in this case the original speech was not considered a reliable source whereas the newspaper article was.

What then is the solution? In my opinion, the solution is as follows:

1- Establish long-term relationships with a grassroots community who will contribute the missing positive information to the article.

2- If an organization is very keen on immediately changing information that is not factually correct said organization could leave a note on the article’s talk page. They could also post a comment on the help desk and they could contact Wikipedia via email.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a grassroots tool that collects information from reliable, impartial sources. In theory, if a brand has invested time engaging folks and having conversations about its win with the grassroots, this community in turn will be posting said information onto platforms like Wikipedia.

Is this a silver bullet?

No.

However, in this modern age of online WOM I truly believe that this is the best way to ensure that social media tools like Wikipedia reflect the brand’s point of view. A brand, government or otherwise, is in effect present in the conversation about it by engaging the community, making a long term investment in it and ultimately handing over control.