360DigitalInfluence

This week, we turned our weekly DI staff meeting into a digital show and tell. Our DC team of designers, developers, strategists, art directors and producers shared some of the videos, websites, digital experiences and apps outside of our own work that we think are cool, cutting-edge, inspiring or just fun to watch. So, take a break from online holiday shopping working and enjoy our Best of the Web picks.

Israeli rocker Yoni Bloch’s “choose-your-own-adventure” music video is a must-watch. Viewers can interact with the video, seamlessly changing the course of events as the song continues. Yoni’s  a rock star off the stage too. He’s the founder of Interlude, the interactive video technology company behind this video and may others.

For a little more music to your ears, Philips partnered with the Metropole Orchestra on an interactive campaign to showcase their audio products. Viewers can single out individual musicians, hearing each note in a track played by the entire orchestra.

Cute kids, pets, people that take awkward to a new level… We love a good montage of the year’s best viral videos.  79 all wrapped into one great restrospective.

If you’re in the mood for a more serious look back at 2011, watch this Google Zeitgeist year in review video. From natural disasters to political uprisings, see the events and people that shaped our year. (You might need a tissue. Just sayin…)

Indie band Arcade Fire wowed us last year with The Wilderness Downtown, a personalized music video experience that used HTML5 and Google Maps. This year, they have us dancing at our desks with Sprawl II. We enjoyed the sweet moves of one of our creative directors, as he demoed how the computer camera detects movement and incorporates it into the video.

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The Google+ Hangout is one of the most notable differences between Google+ and Facebook. Hangouts offer brands an entirely new communication tool and make brands more accessible than ever before. Finding what works best for brands and their audiences is an important part of designing a Hangout session and a handful of brands have already started experimenting with this feature. With a concrete strategy and direction, Hangouts can be leveraged in a variety of fun, interactive and informative ways.

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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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Search Engine Strategies Conference returns to Chicago November 14 – 18. Marketers and SEO professionals will gather to discuss all topics related to search, social media and more. Interested in checking out the conference? Use priority code “OGV20” at registration for a special discount.

I recently had the privilege to interview Eric Ward, president, EricWard.com. Eric is an expert on content linking strategies and has been involved in online marketing since 1993. Eric has helped a countless number of companies create and execute linking strategies to increase the awareness of their web content.

Eric is on a panel at SES Chicago, “Social Media Linking and Promotion,” where he’ll discuss how social media usage has created opportunities (and frenzy) among link building and promotion. Here is an excerpt of what Eric had to say about social media linking and promotion:





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Now that we’re four weeks into the new fall television schedule and the hype has died down (and baseball is getting in the way of Glee), it would be interesting to know how much attention network executives are paying to Trending Topics on Twitter compared to Nielsen ratings. My guess is that one is becoming as important as the other.

People do all sorts of things when they watch TV, according to a recent report from Ericsson, like eat, talk to people in the room, and work. Rarely is television the only screen in the room.

Despite all the DVRs and Hulus and time shifting, Americans still have favorite television shows and wouldn’t dare miss them. It used to be imperative otherwise someone would spoil the surprises at the proverbial water cooler the next morning. But now, it can be spoiled in real time on social networks. In fact, some programs actually prompt viewers to tweet both subtly by showing small hashtags in the corner of the screen and obtrusively with live hosts begging “tweet me.” Twitter actually reported in May that “across networks and genres, when TV shows bring Twitter elements into the broadcast, there’s a direct and immediate increase in engagement on Twitter: anywhere from two to ten times more Tweets created while the shows air.” Ask and you shall receive.

And it’s not just Twitter driving the television viewers to talk. There are two fairly well known apps that try to make television more social by enabling you to share what you’re watching (both with horrible names). GetGlue is an app that basically serves as FourSquare for television shows. IntoNow from Yahoo! (which just launched a partnership with Facebook) has much fancier technology that uses your phone to listen to your television and then reports what you are watching. Like GetGlue, it has a check in feature but it also makes recommendations for similar shows that you might like based on what you’re watching. That’s cool, but it still requires me to go looking rather than disrupting what I’m doing like most social media platforms in general.

So does television need to become more disruptive? Not for me. Does it need to be more social? Maybe. Secretly, I would like to know what my friends are watching. That’s a connection and something to talk about. It’s fun to say: “I love that show too!” The Media Lab at MIT has been working on a cool remote control that could show that. If a brand could bring it to me, I’d take it too. In the meantime I’m fine using Twitter to find out what Snooki is doing. I should be working anyway.

Last week, Google+ announced changes 91-107 for the platform many of which are strong indicators of a site that is listening to its users and thinking thoughtfully about use cases. Unfortunately for a fledgling social media site, the very next day at f8, Facebook shared its latest and greatest rollouts with developers and the public.

Amid Andy Sandberg appearances, Spotify integration, and a sweeping UI change called Timeline (all of which are well recapped by my colleague, John Stauffer, in his post), it was tough for Google+’s more functional changes to stand out in conversation.

In fact, if you look at online conversation about the two, Facebook conversation eclipses Google+ conversation ten to one the last two weeks.

Volume of Social Media Conversation about Facebook and Google+ from 9/14/11-9/28/11

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Sunrise over Marathon, Greece.

Even after the jetlag has subsided and you’ve had a few days to reflect, it’s nearly impossible to justly capture the sense of creativity, openness, innovation and playfulness you experience at WPP Digital’s Stream 2011 ‘unconference’.

An avante-garde mix of WPP agencies (think Ogilvy, Mindshare, Hill & Knowlton, Blue State Digital) and clients (think Ford, IBM, Unilever, P&G, Coca-Cola), communications thought leaders (think Sir Martin Sorrell, Ze Frank, Rory Sutherland) and technological innovators (think Facebook, Google, Spotify, Yoni Bloch, Innovid), the event was a shorts-and-flip-flop discussion of everything ranging from the malpractice of Dr. Google to the miner (Chilean) Twitter parody.

I had the chance to meet folks from Facebook and Google and was pleased to hear that they’re not only thinking about how to work with marketers, but also how to work with marketers in ways that make sense to their customers. The major social platforms are now putting greater resources into collaborating with agencies who they see as partners in unleashing the full potential of their platforms - not just on the media side, but now on the creative design side.

As Facebook’s Patrick Harris and Sarah Personette expressed it, Facebook is primarily a technology company - not a content company. Thus, they see agencies as the “evangelists, designers and curators” of effective social media marketing and integration.

And as we all anticipate what the Google+ platform will offer brands, Chris DiBona says they’re structuring the platform for smart, sensible, segment-able marketing that makes sense to consumers. (I swear it was just a coincidence he used one of my favorite clients, Ford, as an example.)

And because I’d love to tell you more about Stream 2011, but don’t have the time or space, here are some great recaps:

• Five-part series in the Huffington Post penned by the likes WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell, txteagle’s Nathan Eagle, SoundCloud’s Caroline Drucker, Ford’s Alex Hultgren and Y&R’s David Sable.
• TechCrunch video interview with Sir Martin Sorrell on content valuation and the “dreadful mistakes” we’ve made in giving it away for free.
• H&K’s (and die-hard Stream-er) Candace Kuss’ amazing Storify curation of #stream11 tweets.
• WPP Stream’s YouTube channel. Especially check out the Ignite playlist. Everyone should try to do a presentation with 20 slides that advance every 15 seconds for a total of exactly 5 minutes. My favorite: Esther Dyson on paying attention.

Facebook is always making minor tweaks to its platform to enhance users’ experience and last week introduced three functionality changes that may impact the way both you and your favorite brands use the social network.

View Shares on Your Profile or Fan Page

Facebook users can now view shares from public-facing status updates on their page, friend’s pages, or fan pages. It’s important to note that you can only view who shares a status update if the post was shared publicly by a user or by one of your friends.

Now you can easily see which of your friends shared your public updates, but how will this affect your favorite brand?

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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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To echo the thoughts of my colleague Claire: the concept of content sharing happens in more places than simply the online world. Intuitively, we are all constantly creating and sharing things that define who we are. That form of creation can take many forms: a drawing on a refrigerator, an Instagram snapshot, even a simple status update on Facebook or Twitter.

Never before have we had more mediums to express ourselves—yet never before has it been harder to be heard, seen or to generate feedback around the very morsels of content we try to share with the very people we want to see it.

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