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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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.

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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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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Google. Facebook. Groupon. Yelp. LivingSocial. Amazon.

It’s a lineup of online juggernauts — all executing thrusts and parries to build an empire in the group buying space. In case you can’t keep up — and who could — Google is testing Google Offers in Portland, Amazon is playing around with AmazonLocal in Boise, ID, and Yelp continues to dodge cable cars in San Francisco and keep its Deals afloat.

Oh, and there’s this little company valued at $15 to $30 billion, a smaller, but emerging competitor in LivingSocial, Bloomspot, KGB Deals, Buy With Me, EverSave — ad infinitum. All of these socially-driven deals add up to an estimated 2,670,000,000 clams and growth rates continue to be astounding.

Yowza! The number of offers published has nearly doubled in the last quarter.

Logic would say — with the space’s proliferation — restaurants, bars, and yoga studios must be praising the day Andrew Mason and co. decided to bring cut-rate organic spray tans to the masses. Logic would say that, but it’s up for debate.

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Unless you are on a Wi-Fi-less tropical island (and if you are, my invite must be lost in the mail), you have probably seen or played with Google’s latest doodle honoring musician and inventor Les Paul. Maybe you are even one the talented folks successfully recording classics such as, “Stairway to Heaven” and “Hey Jude”. The doodle has enhanced user engagement by allowing visitors to record their own tracks and share a unique link featuring their tracks with friends.

Since its launch on June 8^th, the Les Paul doodle has gained serious traction in the social media space. According to Radian6, there have been more than 76,000 mentions of the Les Paul doodle on Twitter alone spanning the past two days. According to Steven Musil from CNET, there were nearly 4,000 musical recordings posted to YouTube by Thursday night. The Les Paul doodle has been such a hit that Google decided to extend the doodle through Friday.

The quirky nature and at some points seemingly random occurrence of the doodles (i.e. the 119th Anniversary of the First Documented Ice Cream Sundae) continues to entertain and/or distract online audiences, but also strengthen a brand that is already a global household name. Google has managed to further brand awareness, ignite online conversation, all while staying true to their brand identity. As a PR and word-of-mouth marketing practitioner, the Google doodles stand out as an example of an out-of-the-box, yet brand appropriate idea. What do you think of the Google Doodles? Do they catch your attention or are you indifferent?

In the meantime, check out some of the top Google Doodles.

Follow me on Twitter: @MollyKeyes

This past winter was one the snowiest on record in the Lake Tahoe region of California, which was great for skiing but horrible for keeping cars on the road. I skied 28 days in a four months with a full time job in San Francisco — basically, every Friday night I was driving up to Tahoe in a blizzard.  And every Friday night I was glued to Google Buzz for real time updates about accidents and road closures — the results came in about a half hour to an hour before California Highways did. I also was checking for backroads ways around these road closures. Google Buzz saved anywhere from 2 to 12 hours of time each weekend; that’s a lot of precious hours on the snow when you add that up across a ski season.

Each time I used the mobile app portion of Google Buzz on Google Maps, I shared an experience with people normally separated by their cars. Google Buzz, to be just a bit sentimental, brought us together. And we weren’t talking about what we ate for lunch or some random Internet meme but about something actually — sorry Triffle — useful.

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