360DigitalInfluence

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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Nielsen released a report last week detailing the consumer market share of smartphone manufacturers in the US. Android, iOS, and Blackberry lead the pack with 29%, 27% and 27% share respectively. The remaining share was split between Windows Phone 7, Symbian, and HP/Palm WebOS devices.

What’s clear about these results is that the fight between the phone manufacturers is tough, and consumers are the winners with a wealth of devices to choose from. And they are choosing, with an estimated 40 million smartphone users in February of 2010, and an expected 80 million users sometime this year.

While majority of the excitement in the mobile marketplace generally surrounds native apps, mobile sites are a cost-effective standard for any brand hoping to reach potential consumers. Here are a few design and development considerations to take when stating a mobile site project.

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So we go running off the edge to jump back in (with memories of the hot summer day, the swimming hole and the cool, yet not cold, clear water - nice thoughts in the dead of winter) 

Blogs matter. They are a foundation of the social media phenomena that will not pass in the night like CB Radios or printed ezines. While we add Twitter, Friendfeed, Tweetbacks, iPhone apps and more to our digital lives, blogs remain the relevant platform for sharing opinions, insights and knowledge that require more than a 140 characters or a smartphone interaction.

Our blog has just relaunched with a new design that will continue to evolve. We have been blogging and applying social media to our lives for years now - this is just the next iteration of our “blog platform.” This is our team’s “homebase” on the Internet. Our 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy PR, uses this platform to share knowledge with our global team, our clients and anyone interested in the strategic use of social media in marketing and public relations. We have a lot of smart, insightful people so we created the tools and the channel to share those points of view.

It is more than blog posts
We use this platform to aggregate more of our digital activity and to create that homebase of social media for our team. Here’s what you will find and what you can expect in the future (near as we can tell - remember, it’s evolving….)

• Multimedia-rich blog posts: we have integrated our YouTube and Flickr channels here and simplified our own publishing interface to help us tell richer stories
• Aggregate Twitter feed: we have pulled together our twitter streams into one to make it easy for us  to stay tuned to our team.
• Our Blog Network Feed: we have a lot of blogs hosted by Ogilvy thought leaders in Public Affairs, Technology and globally. Now we can all see a composite feed and get to those platforms quickly.
• Events calendar: we speak, host, attend and pay attention to real-world events in our space an now we will be able to list them in a more accessible place. You can also know where we will be this year and which events we feel are more relevant than others.
• Careers as a Digital Strategist: okay “careers” is not the right label but we are looking for new team members and we wanted to simplify how we could let people know about these jobs.
• Our portfolio of client work: rather than drive people to another web site just to see best practice cases, we will put them all here over time. The format will evolve too as we do more “How-to” content and try to share our experiences as learning and skills-building cases not simply “look at the great work we did” cases

Our blog is a our own town square (with a swimming hole), a place to launch a thousand ideas and conversations. Many of us will maintain our own personal blogs while remaining members of this community platform, as well. Personally, I believe one of the biggest benefits of our blog platform is encouraging the voices of everyone in the team to come through. We have a deep, global bench.

• Hearing Kristin Foster’s ideas on using Twitter for business
• Brian Giesen’s interviews with Search Engine Strategies leaders or coverage of our Government 2.0 event
• Laura Halsch’s coverage on the WOMMA Summit
• Sarah Marchetti’s thoughts on the Motrin episode
• John Stauffer’s point of view on Change.gov
  

And so much more.

Join in the conversation here - the water is fine - or wherever the links take you.