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We’ve been watching social media chatter around the “big game” intensify over the past week – especially if you live in Indianapolis. But since Volkswagen first teased its teaser ad with the barking dogs (and garnered over 11 million views along with way), the ad community has slowly followed suit and rolled out their wares.

Consumers that wanted to gain clout (and Klout) passed it along as quickly as possible. But will two weeks of conversation or two minutes of 1.5 million tweets (like those amassed around Tim Tebow’s heroics this season) sway opinion, increase favorability or drive sales? Or are brands just trying to be “part of the conversation”? The answer to both is yes. continue reading

TIME Magazine’s person of the year in 2006 was “you,” paying tribute to the hundred millions of social media users who framed the information age with user-generated content. Conceived in 2006, Twitter, along with other “emerging platforms,” was evolving and looking for better ways to enable users to share content. Five years later, Twitter includes brand pages in efforts to expand its 100 million user base.

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While the majority of the social media world was getting excited a few weeks ago about the launch of brand pages on Google+ and the timeline feature rolling out on Facebook, last Thursday that other platform of the “Big Three,” aka Twitter, decided it would not be upstaged by the whales in the social ocean. In what’s being seen as a play to fend off Facebook and Google+, Twitter has given itself some new bells and whistles in a major reboot.

Twitter’s revamp comes at a time when they want to prevent their current user base at 100 million from eroding. The reboot consists of a major user experience overhaul of Twitter.com, updates to their mobile application (Twitter has had an explosive increase of 25% in new registrants in 2011 based solely on mobile usage) and an unveiling of two very large new features to help marketers. These include the debut of brand pages and embeddable tweets.

Some of the key takeaways on this revision are the following: continue reading

It has taken the whole weekend to completely digest all the amazing learnings we gathered last week at the WOMMA summit. The WOMMA tagline is “Creating Talkable Brands Next and Best Practices” and they totally delivered. Great learnings from great brands like Mattel, Sprint, Intel, Unilever and Sephora just to name a few. But the most talked about sessions were definitely the keynote addresses that carried four themes that will help us navigate the social media industry over the next year.

The summit opened with Sally Hogshead teaching us all what it means to Fascinate – the theme of her recently released book of the same name. One key theme was how brands need to stand out in our cluttered and noisy world. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best, if no one knows about it. And with an average attention span of only nine seconds, consumers will remember the brands that persuade them in the most social ways. The brands with the best word of mouth reputations will stand out and others will fade into the background. Later in the conference, there was a panel discussion of legal counsel from Coca-Cola and American Express, and I was reminded that both of those brands have been able to stand out with plenty of reason to be risk averse.“

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On October 27, I joined communications pros on Bulldog Reporter’s webinar “An Advance Look at Hot, New Google+: How It Will Impact PR Pros, Social Media Strategy and Your Customers.” Co-panelists were Jennifer Lashua, Global Social Media Strategist from Intel; Vidar Brekke, Chief Product Officer from Converseon; and Mark Traphagen, Internet Marketing Manager from Virante.

A lot of our value-add from Ogilvy comes from helping clients anticipate which platforms will win.  There are a million ways to optimize your social media presence, and spending more time on yet another social network is something many social media pros are not wont to do.  That said, despite social media fatigue, and despite the enhancements on Facebook released in the last few months, I’ve become more convinced that time spent on G+ is well spent.  The panelist laid out a compelling case.

“My friends aren’t in G+” is no excuse. We should never forget that Zuckerberg made a decision in establishing the “real identity” and “know in real life” folkways of Facebook.  Google+ doesn’t share these; in fact, panelists said that much of the value of Google+ comes from meeting new people around interests in the platform and having meaningful, thoughtful conversations.

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In the fury of learning about the new music platforms, we should also take a look at some of the lower-tech ways to make music work for brands.

Covers have long been a mainstay of YouTube content.  Two recent cover promotions are worth noting.

A.V. Club Undercover (Starbucks)

They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba
This promotion is now over a year old; Starbucks re-upped.  The premise was fairly simple; the folks at A.V. (the straight man music site affiliated with the Onion) made a list of 25 nostalgic indie songs and threw it out to 25 bands.  Each band picked a song to perform in the site’s Chicago office.  The longer the band waited, the smaller the list got.  This nice, simple game mechanism encouraged bands to record songs early and added an extra layer of drama for those of us watching the promotion.

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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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If you own an iPhone or take a general interest in mobile applications, it can probably be assumed that you have heard and may likely use Instagram, a simple mobile application that allows users to snap a photo (or choose from an existing one within their albums), apply one of 11 different filters and quickly share across the social space. To say that this application is growing in popularity is an understatement. According to Mashable, within the first week, the iPhone-only app garnered 100,000 registrations and by week 10, 1 million users had signed up for the service. At present, the platform has over 2 million registered users, who upload around 290,000 photos per day.

Why it’s so popular:

-People love photos! Whether capturing or browsing through them, photos are easy on the eye, quick and fun to skim through and can provide stimulating visual content.

-The filter function is just plain fun. These filters allow users to transform the color, mood, border and tonality of their photos. Within few seconds, you can turn your mobile image into an electrifyingly bright photo by using Lomo-fi filter.

- This is not just a photo app. In addition to sharing photos through Instagram’s network, users can instantly upload their pictures to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, and Tumblr.

- Simplicity: Let’s take a look at the recent apps that have gone viral - Cut the Rope, Angry Bird, Bubble Ball, and Instagram. The common denominator here is that they are simple. These apps do not have fancy features and  none of them require users to go through a tedious tutorial.

- And the most important of all: it’s free.

In January, Instagram introduced a new hashtag feature that allows app users to add #hashtags to their own photos. The introduction of this feature opened doors for brands to incorporate Instagram into their own social media campaigns. In fact, several brands have already jumped on the bandwagon and are experiencing success.

Starbucks

Of course, Starbucks, one of the most social media savvy brands, would not take a backseat to this new trend. Through the brand profile, users are able to view unique photos from “exclusive” content such as coffee tasting sessions in boardrooms, a new logo launch, and product promotions. Currently Starbucks maintains over 9,000 followers and actively uses Instagram to engage with their fans. The ability for fans to view behind the scenes of a large conglomerate allows for a personalized social experience and helps maintain further brand loyalty.

MTV

MTV is another example of a big name utilizing a hot social media trend. Instead of solely sharing photos from their MTV headquarters, MTV utilized Instagram for live coverage at the Grammys. Grammy fans were able to get a first hand look at the red carpet traffic and shots of behind the stage activities. Instagram users just had to follow MTV’s Instagram account or search for #MTV.

As a complement to all of the consumer-friendly changes on Facebook, it is nice to see the love shared to the marketer’s utilizing the platform.  Gone are the days of written approvals and minimum ad buys, paving the road for faster turnaround and lower budgets for future campaigns. (Official Facebook Promotion Policy Changes)

So how does this affect your next promotion?

1. The process is simplified–making the overall planning less daunting

 

2. For brands that have had concerns on sunk costs, this should offer some financial relief

 

3. There is a decreased need to host contests/sweepstakes off the platform on a microsite

 

4. You are still required to use a third-party vendor to host a promotions application, but  the new policies should allow you greater control over customization

 

5. Gives the little guy  a chance–in the past some brands could only dream of playing host to an engaging contest on Facebook, but now the world is their oyster

Please note that I do not want to dumb down the process; planning and executing an engaging promotion on Facebook will still take insight into your target consumer and strategic planning.  But now you have a few less steps to worry about and possibly more money to spend. So what are you waiting for? Start planning those 2011 promotions!

Grab your Cracker Jacks. Get your peanuts. The Fall Classic is right around the corner. It’s playoff time in Major League Baseball. Whether you’re an American League or National League fan, baseball fever is among us. While watching the games yesterday, I came up with the following five social media lessons brands can learn from watching baseball.

1) Best-of-series ─ Division series are best-of-five series and League Championship Series are best-of-seven series. Strategy is important. Managers will look at pitching match-ups and which players are hot. Brands, just like baseball teams, need to strategize. Brands should study their competitors. Don’t only track your results, track the competition too.

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