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!

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel with some great folks from various agencies. The topic was on integration of channels and the role digital plays to compliment traditional marketing, advertising and PR. There were several excellent questions asked by our moderator Andrea Ehresman from The Coca-Cola Company.  Here are a few that stuck out for me.

The first one was: “How are ‘traditional’ channels digitizing?” the example I shared is the introduction of QR codes into physical space to augment reality. QR codes consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, links or rich media. We are seeing QR codes and augmented reality popping up all over the place. A great example of this was when Calvin Klein was forced to remove an edgy billboard. They replaced it with a large QR code where people could access additional content.

Another question that yielded a great deal of discussion was.   “What are some ways to augment a mostly traditional marketing program with digital initiatives? “ One thing I think we all as a panel agreed on is that just because of hype over a marketing tactic it does not mean you should jump in heads first. Getting back to the fundamentals of marketing and understanding who your customers are, where are they and how do they want to engage with you should inform your digital initiatives.

This topic of understanding customer preference spawned another discussion on the importance of experience planning when scripting multi-channel interactions. The example of not scripting an experience was mentioned by an attendee who worked for a large retailer. He described a situation where employees in their retail stores were totally unaware of a Foursquare promotion they were running, similar to the Starbucks incident. These experience scripts need to take into consideration the points in time your employees interact as well.

And finally no discussion these days would be complete without a question on location-based marketing. A question from crowd was “What is the future of location based marketing”. This question had everyone on the panel itching to answer. The gist was that when you combine the power of Facebook’s open graph for behavioral data, with location, push messaging overlaid with an opt in from the consumer you have reached a marketing Nirvana.  We are still a little ways from this but are inching our way there one check in at a time.

Thanks to my friends @RedDoor interactive for hosting me this morning it was a great discussion.

This past week, Ogilvy PR of Washington DC had the treat of hosting a discussion with DC-based Facebook representatives Adam Connor and Andrew Noyes. Among the topics discussed was the new Facebook community page feature, which Ogilvy blogged about in April.

Facebook Community Pages 101

For those unfamiliar, a Facebook community page is a separate page that groups users around a common interest. Users opt into the page automatically when they list the interest on their profile.

For example, when I click on my interest in “yoga,” I am taken to a Facebook yoga community page. Here, I can see all of my friends who also like yoga. I learn that my friend Erin “really needs some yoga in her life,” and that my favorite yoga teacher is hosting his next rooftop yoga class at the W Hotel. I can also see status updates from people and companies who would not otherwise show up in my newsfeed: yoga studio events, a yoga apparel company’s new product, what yoga DVDs are for sale. I have a whole yoga community at my fingertips, with current and future connections… all in what appears to be an informative, authentic, non-commercial space.

4 Ways Community Pages Boost Brands

Now, there is ample opinion about why brands need to tread slowly with community pages, and how such pages are harmful to brands (see this post by our Global Managing Director, John Bell). Though I would likewise advise brands to proceed with caution, I also see some silver linings to the Facebook community pages. Here are four ways Facebook community pages can boost brands:

1) Attract new brand followers. Think of the Facebook community page as a crowded expo, with a self-selecting base of consumers who are there to see what’s new. Your brand’s page is one among the many booths competing for attention. By posting engaging updates, you can lure users to your “booth.” If users are inspired by your content, they can easily like your page, and know where to find you in the future. Bonus – this grows your online fan base at no added cost to you. In that sense, these pages are more desirable than paid-for ad space.

2) Create more authentic consumer connections. In an ideal world, brands would do the impossible and create real, face-to-face relationships with consumers. In many ways, Facebook is the next best thing to face-to-face interactions, and community pages help further target the people with whom you need to be connecting. That is, because these community pages allow consumers to find your brand based on what it represents, it creates somewhat of a more authentic brand-consumer relationship.

3) Glean Useful Consumer Intelligence. Facebook community pages can offer some useful quantitative insights on consumers. Sticking with my yoga example from earlier, let’s pretend that you are a running apparel company considering expanding into the yoga market. On the yoga community page, you can tell at a glance that there are 500,000 yoga fans, about a third of the amount of proclaimed running fans. This supports your suspicion that the yoga market may be worth your investment (and considering the 400 million+ Facebook users worldwide, this is no sample size at which to sneeze!).

4) Monitor What People Are Saying About Your Brand. By clicking on a community page, you can also monitor what kinds of conversations are occurring around your brand outside of your page… for better or for worse. This can help you learn qualitative information you might not easily find elsewhere about your potential consumers.

Clearly this list is not comprehensive and omits the glaring pitfalls… like the loss of brand control on user-generated brand pages. Merely, I aim to offer an optimistic alternative to some of the fears surrounding the new feature.

What are your thoughts on the new Facebook community pages? We would love to hear your opinion in the comments below.

The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, is quickly approaching. Starting June 11^th, 32 teams representing different countries from around the world will compete for the soccer title that has been given every four years since 1930 (with an exception of 1942 and 1946 due to WWII). But 2010 is a particularly special and relevant year. Why, you ask? Because of social media!

Social Media as we know it did not exist during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Twitter did not launch until July 2006. Facebook didn’t become public until September 2006. YouTube existed but videos looked like this #6 most popular YouTube video of 2006. Now, only 4 years later, Facebook has over 400 million members and more than 50 million tweets are sent each day. These platforms, which were infants during the last World Cup, are now globally available and hugely popular.

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Join me and others today for a teleconference produced by Bulldog reporter. The full title is: New FTC, FDA and SEC Social Media Rules: How to Manage Web 2.0 in Regulated Industries.

We will be sharing the latest status on both FTC (can you say ‘Ann Taylor?’) and the FDA’s road towards guidelines (how many pharmas submitted comments to the FDA?) and more importantly, how we are applying best-practice guidelines in our work here at Ogilvy. Real-world application.

You can get more information and register here.

The teleconference starts at 1:00pm ET Today

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is holding it’s big brand marketer training event in Chicago - The School of WOM -  and we are taking a bunch of our team out there both to teach and learn. While there are basic sessions, we go for the advanced material and learning from the other brand marketers in the room.

As you consider where you will spend your professional development time and money this year, here are three reasons that you might want to join us:

1. If you already are engaged with social media and word of mouth marketing from either the communications or marketing POV and want to learn from other strategists and practitioners with experience - you should come. This is not all about a motivational keynote (although we have Dan Heath and Jeffrey Hayzlett (Kodak) which I am looking forward to). This is about real learnings from the trenches.

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It was only a matter of time before we went from using our phones to call or text friends and plan to meet in a certain location to using our smartphones when we’re in a certain location to find out which of our friends are already there.  Social networking, while already popular online, is one of the fastest-growing activities among mobile users.  In fact, eMarketer predicts that by 2013, 43% of global mobile Internet users will be accessing social networks from their mobile devices and 45% of the US mobile Internet population will be on social networks from their mobile devices.  It seems that even when we’re socializing in real life, we want access to our online networks.  continue reading

This Friday, Piers Fawkes is having his PFSK Conference in NYC. Its not your usual social media or marketing confab. This is an event that will challenge you, inspire you and likely leaving you better at your job (for those who need that concrete ROI reason to attend). You will see so many folks including the chap who made this awesome graphic above from his personal infographic annual report - Nick Felton.

I interviewed Piers here. More importantly, you can get into the conference with a nice Ogilvy discount by clicking here.

There is a fraternity of communicators at big brands who are pushing their organizations into adopt more social media, and it is a growing list. Our team is often part of their struggle, and we try to play the role of adviser and cheerleader as they fight the internal battles to do new and more engaging work. As many experiences as we get to have, though, there is no real substitute for the lessons that social media evangelists within large organizations can share with one another. When brand marketers get together to talk about social media then real learning usually happens.

On June 15th and 16th in New York City, we are proudly participating in the Corporate Social Media Summit in New York - a gathering of some of the best minds in making social media work within organizations. Here is a list of nearly 20 of the all-corporate lineup of speakers who are already confirmed for the event:

• Whole Foods Market - Bill Tolany - Head of Social Media
• Adidas - Chris Barbour - Head of Digital Marketing, adidas Originals
• PepsiCo - Josh Karpf - Senior Manager, Digital Media Communications
• Amy Powell - Head of Interactive Marketing and Social Media - Paramount Pictures continue reading
  

This year’s SXSWi was a cacophony of parties, cowboy hatted street teams and networking with a few panels and prepared speakers tucked in between. My extreme desire to sift logic from chaos and the peace of a few hours of distance has left me mulling the following 4 takeaways:

Content Creators Must Get Paid – If you braved the distraction of a fire alarm and came back into the building, you were privy to an educated man’s verbal smackdown the likes of which I had not previously seen in public – Marc Cuban vs. Boxee’s Avner Ronen. continue reading