360DigitalInfluence

Recently, I’ve been involved in helping a client launch a new Twitter feed. This will be their sixth or seventh account on Twitter, all the previous of which are still active and serving specific functions. The process has sparked several discussions among the team — not for the first time — about a question we’ve all encountered: how many different Twitter feeds should a brand really have?
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The new era of consumerism is one in which each and every consumer has a powerful voice. It is one that touches brands across the spectrum, from the families of food, beverage and personal care brands within multinational CPGs all the way to modern B2B technology companies who are in turn focusing on the new voice of the consumer and how this affects their lead generation and sales cycles.

As marketers working with social platforms we focus a lot on influencers and building influencer relationships. However this new social consumerism means that we need to turn our attention to looking at the empowered customer as the new powerhouse that must be considered and included in any advocacy program. This does not need to be a huge expensive operation and can start with something as simple as a thank you.

Here follows five easy things any company or brand can do today in taking the first step to growing a new breed of influential and empowered customer advocates, both on and offline:

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Personal branding has taken kind of a bad rap over the past few years. As the overglorified “social media rockstar” label has been brought to life by people skilled in hype and little else, the idea of building a personal brand can seem inherently egotistical. Yet what if someone were to suggest that only egotistical companies need to worry about building a brand? Of course that would be silly, yet there is a double standard when it comes to individuals.

In many cases, there is good reason for this. Most companies are afraid to get employees who are not dedicated to doing their job, but rather focused on self promotion to their own ends. Yet the companies that manage to create an atmosphere where employees can build their personal brand and explore their interests are the ones who will win in the long term because they will have the employees that everyone wants to work with - and be better able to hold on to their best people and not drive them away to look for jobs elsewhere.

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Has mobile planning been little more than an afterthought for your brand’s or your client’s overall communications strategy? Or, does mobile live as a silo, distinct from your larger communications and outreach plans?  In 2011, mobile reached a point of critical mass with over 75 million of U.S. consumers owning smart phones - and the number continues to grow rapidly. We have passed the point in the industry where mobile can be put on the back burner, to be sprinkled on like magic fairy dust in the form of an afterthought app, and have entered the era when mobile needs to be top of mind.

As part of our “Brand Planning 2012″ series this week, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence sat down with Martin Lange, Executive Marketing Director of Mobile@Ogilvy and learned, among other insights,  his top five steps for brands to integrate mobile into their marketing and communications strategies.

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With those summer whites put away, most brands are now in the midst of planning for 2012. As well as brainstorming big ideas, this involves looking at which marketing activities worked well and those that were not so effective to decide the exact mix for the next year. Which for many includes looking social media. 2011 has certainly been a break out year for social as brands continue to move up the social media adoption curve from the late adopters to brands where social is being applied across programs and being operationalized regionally.

Our series of posts this week casts a gaze ahead for those planning the next 12 months and look at where social media fits in the mix. We aim to provide practical takeaways as well as predictions for the platforms that should feature in your  planning, starting with 5 key considerations for social media when in those ideas meetings over the next few weeks.

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On November 23, 1787 James Madison wrote:
“A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.”

When he wrote those words, social media was nowhere on the horizon, nor was the telephone. At that time, getting messages out in a timely manner was much more challenging than it is today… significantly more challenging. The smaller the society, the easier it was to make sure everyone was informed. Today’s technologies make reaching thousands of people in real time no challenge at all.

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I’ll admit it: I don’t think about the “future” of music that often. I’ve been listening to a steady rotation of musical soundtracks, country music, and late-90s soft rock ever since late-90s soft rock was current, and while I’ve made the switch from CDs to iTunes, I haven’t been more creative than that. However, the subject keeps bubbling back to the surface with the launch of new platforms like Spotify and Google Music, the rise of mobile applications, and even the changing needs of radio (as discussed at a recent client event I attended hosted by Ford Motor Company). Finally, when this infographic showing 30 years of music sales from Digital Music News was circulated last week, I took note:

There are some quick takeaways on where music sales have been and where they’re headed:

• Never again will any source of music dominate the way CD sales once did. CDs accounted for 95.5% of music sales in 2002 and we’re moving to a model with even more options, not fewer.
• The whole is likely not greater than the sum of its parts. Single sales both digitally and on CDs/vinyl are a significant piece of sales when, in the past, we looked for an entire album. This changes both the sales model AND the approach of artists who no longer need to have 12 songs ready to release new music.
• Cassettes haven’t reached the retro cool point yet. Vinyl sales as full records and singles are making a comeback, but not cassettes.

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Remember the excitement you felt when your website finally went live? All the design, development, revisions, and debugging were finally completed. And with a click of a button, you launched your brand presence.

Getting a brand.com or corporate.com website off the ground can require a massive team effort. It can be so challenging that the mantra becomes, “Let’s just get through Phase 1.” For the moment, that makes sense.

However, content (and keeping it up to date) is as critical to the life of your website as the launch that excited you so much.

But when was the last time you reviewed and updated the content on your website? If you haven’t touched your site since the “let’s get through Phase 1” launch, you’re not alone. And if it has been more than six months, you may want to surf to the dot.com featured in your email signature and check things out.
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With all the talk of Google+ over the past few weeks, one bit of news from another social platform managed to grab some headlines. Twitter formally announced a “Promoted Tweet” ad program. This allows brands you already follow to be at the top of your feed on Twitter.com (surprisingly 78% of users access the platform through the site) instead of in the stream. It’s like getting a fast pass at Disneyworld or maybe the first spot in a television pod. Two thoughts came to mind immediately: 1. I thought that already existed and 2. How do you buy that?

Yes, this did exist. Twitter tried “Promoted Tweets” in a beta form with HootSuite last October though under a slightly different model. The first foray allowed brands to target anyone rather than just their current followers as in the new program. That move was smart because it allows Twitter to sell more ads using their “Promoted Account” option which helps brands find consumers to follow them, then they can send them more messages [preferably at the top of the feed for a fee].

Not many people in the business were very surprised by the announcement, but the media loved it. In fact, although Twitter isn’t the largest social network, hardly has any money, and has lost its founders to other ventures [though both remain marginally involved], it clearly is a media darling. It was Twitter, not Facebook, that got credit for helping achieve a debt ceiling agreement this weekend (although news of President Obama losing 38K followers was also noted). Twitter was also the main means of communication in Egypt when the Internet was shut down (via mobile phone text updates) during the crisis in January. And it is Twitter that gets credit for influencing the stock market.

So with all that attention, a growing usage base (over 200MM now), and now an ad platform, why is Google+ being viewed as competition more for Facebook instead of Twitter? I actually think the media is driving that more than Google. In fact, I’m sure Google would love to supplant both of them.

Twitter’s differentiation is the real time delivery and access to people and companies you don’t really know. Although Facebook updates in real time, the amount of updates per minute is much lower than that of Twitter. And Google+ just doesn’t have the user base to have that effect yet. Ultimately, Google+, like Facebook can bring together everyone you know - though notably in a much easier to use, segmented manner. But it’s going to be hard to provide access to all those that you want to know (or want to watch). We’ll all just have to wait for Justin Bieber to start a circle to find out what the possibilities are.

Now that Twitter appears to have a revenue plan in place with their new and existing ad features (the going rate for a Promoted Trend is reported to be over $100K/day), a plan that Facebook started strongly utilizing a few years ago, Google+ is under even more pressure to showcase how brands can get involved. They will surely use their Adwords technology to deliver text ads just like they do in Gmail (hopefully with more relevance), but the rest of their plan is likely still being developed. In the meantime, Twitter will hopefully open access to Promoted Tweets, mobilize their new sales staff and take marketer’s budgets off their hands. One thing I think we can count on from Twitter is better analytics than Facebook has ever offered, although nothing close to what Google+ surely will offer.

So how can you buy those “Promoted Tweets”? Well you can’t – yet. The official Twitter statement is that they are currently partnering with several charter advertisers and will notify me when it is available which is estimated at “about two months”. “Promoted Trends” is also only listed as a beta opportunity not currently available. You can, however, secure a “Promoted Account” today – and as mentioned before, that’s a great place to start if building your follower base is the goal.

Show of hands time. Have you been asked in the past month  “So what are we doing with Google+?”

And did you know how to answer?

Fear not, there is a Strategy For That. And one that is already in market that you can easily adapt. This is the Five Platform Social Media Strategy.

Today many brands are executing across multiple social platforms because they understand their consumers are also engaging across multiple platforms. They also know that the nature of how these consumers engage with each other in social spaces continues to evolve. They know they need to fish where the fish are, and this might mean casting a line into multiple ponds.

So What Has This To Do With Google+?

Well, the June 28th launch of Google+ meant there is another platform we will soon need to include in this framework. So consider this a guide to being ready to integrate G+ into your Five Platform Strategy framework when the time is right.

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