The biggest question that the entire process will raise is how to define the content, messages and conversations online that marketers should be held accountable by the FDA for. To answer this top question, we will be presenting our point of view through “The 3 C’s Rule” …

What do you think - does this “rule” go too far, or far enough towards helping define what messages marketers should be accountable for online? For more context, check our our full FDA presentations on Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/ogilvypharma

Ogilvy is among the organizations slated to speak at the hearings, and we have several activities planned around them beyond speaking - including hosting a “tweetup” the evening after the first hearing in our Washington DC office for anyone interested in coming and having an informal chat about how the day went and implications for our industry. In preparation for this moment, here are 5 things anyone in the industry should expect to come from the hearings, as well as some initial information you should know:

1. What is the format of the hearing? The entire hearing consists of short introductory remarks by the FDA followed by a series of 15 or 10 minute presentations by approved speakers. There are about 60 approved speakers and on Thursday they will all focus on answering the first four questions from the FDA hearing notice, and Friday morning will solely focus on “question #5′ which is about adverse event reporting online. Friday afternoon will continue general comments. Each presentation will be specifically cut off at the time alloted and the FDA panel hearing these presentations may choose to ask questions during a speaker’s alloted time.

2. What is the timeframe for the FDA to act on comments? The format of the hearings is that the FDA will begin by LISTENING to people from the industry and presumably take those voices into account in order to create guidelines for marketers to use the web and social media for promotion. By most estimates, these guidelines will not be finalized until the end of 2010 - so if you are expecting a magic fix or list of rules to come out of the meetings this week, you should reset your expectations.

3. Who will be speaking at the hearing? More than 50% of the 60+ speakers who will be participating in the hearings come from industry groups such as agencies (Ogilvy fits in this group) or consultants. Clearly we care because these discussions matter to our business, but we are also often the most directly involved parties in executing marketing activities that will be governed by the policies that the FDA determines, so this makes sense. There are a handful of us, however, who are planning to share our voice from industry WITHOUT forgetting about the patients and what they want. Though there may not be many patient advocacy groups, we happen to believe it is the role of responsible marketers and agencies to keep these patients (and healthcare professionals as well) at the center of thinking because they are the ultimate audience for these marketing activities. See an evolving list of links to presentations published ahead of time by speakers here >>

4. How can you participate/attend virtually? Over 800 people tried to RSVP to attend and only about 300 were selected based on a first come first serve basis. This means there is a lot of interest in the hearings beyond those who will be able to physically be in the room. To help, there are a number of ways that you can participate in the conversation virtually beyond just tuning into the live webcast. Ignite Health has created an online community that most participants of the hearing are part of at http://www.fdasm.com/. This will be frequently updated throughout the hearing and is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to track the conversation from the hearing in real time. Most content will include the keyword/hashtag “#fdasm.” I plan to be live tweeting and blogging from the hearing, as well as many other attendees.

5. What is Ogilvy’s point of view? Our point of view on a top level with regards to this hearing is that brands wanting to use the web and social media for promotion desperately need some guidance because without it they are constantly in a state of panic or ignorance about what they should and should not do. Both of our presentations address this fact, and the first introduces a new model that we believe in for how this could be tracked by the FDA. Our full slides are available on our team Slideshare account at http://www.slideshare.net/ogilvypharma and will be published on this blog shortly.

Based in study of the persistence of the Golden Rule across all religions and moral codes, the idea for the charter was born – a document to put compassion back at the center of religious and political life. The way it charter itself has come to be was on the back of social technology – soliciting input from around the globe using Kluster decision technology. The submissions from more than 100 countries were then reviewed by spiritual leaders from around the globe, and they then finalized the Charter.

The 360 Digital Influence team’s role in the project has been designing a way that this brief, but powerful co-created document will make its way around the world and inspire not just nodding approval, but serve as a call to affirm its contents and act compassionately. While we have been carefully planning to make the most of our network and tools (rolling out in the next 10 days on the site and Facebook group), we continue to be amazed by the creative efforts of those who have created their own ways to spark others to action.  It is some of these developments that make us think that Compassion may indeed be viral.  Check out the sample events on the site inspired by the Charter release or this video - created by Saravanan Sahadevan in Malaysia on the topic.

Charter For Compassion - Malaysian Chapter from Saravanan Sahadevan on Vimeo.

So, can compassion “go viral”?  In small ways, it already may be doing so.  The challenge will lie in effecting change in the long term.  A video of a skateboarding dog requires a few seconds of your time, to live compassionately and pursue understanding of those around you is a constant pursuit.  It is our hope that we’ll see social media being a powerful tool to both spread understanding and serve as a persistent reminder of the decision to travel a compassionate road.

<as referred to in this post, the TED Prize project the Charter for Compassion is an Ogilvy client>

2009 has been an interesting and dare I say it even a breakout year for hyperlocal thus far. The New York Times launched The Local a few months before it announced it was cutting 8% of it newsroom jobs, MSNBC bought Everyblock, and services like Patch.com are slowly but surely growing in popularity.  ESPN launched a series of local efforts this year too, and although they’re not what I would call truly hyperlocal yet, (rather local aggregations of mostly major league sports coverage), it’s another example of big media exploring the area.

If the ESPN sites do well the natural next step would be for them to broaden to true local interests like little league and highschool football community coverage. Post wiki updates from your son’s baseball game, or a pitchcount updated live from an AAA baseball game anyone? The numbers aren’t super impressive just yet: according to compete patch.com gets about 50k uniques a month and the ESPN sites are all doing under 60k a month, but they’re all trending up dramatically.

So why are so many major players interested in and investing in the space?  In part it has to do with the news industry searching for alternate revenue streams of course, but for me the more interesting reason is that hyperlocal services, whether news, reviews or plain old yellowpages style info, are and will always be at the very heart of community. If I, as a resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, have absolutely nothing else in common with my neighbor other than our shared geography, we would still both benefit from a service that gave us trusted local news and information.  If that information is created by or curated by or contributed to by people who live in my neighborhood (e.g. my neighbor who I’ve never met, but has just as vested an interest in, for example, crime levels in 10025), it is more relevant and interesting to me than if is created by an Atlanta newsroom, or even by the New York Times just a couple of miles south of me. More relevant and interesting = greater engagement = more opportunities to generate revenue (with apologies to the hyperlocal purists!).

It’s the ultimate in contextual thinking: give people information that is as relevant and targeted as possible. The kind of thinking that built Google into a powerhouse, and for me it’s an area that is poised to explode. As location based services improve and mobile broadband coverage and speeds increase, local generated reviews and content are only going to go from strength to strength: there are 307 million people in the US that care about some aspect of their local community. When somebody finds a model that scales without compromising the integrity of the content they’ll have a goldmine on their hands.

Years back we used to say that content was king. Now I would argue that hyperlocal is. Or at least that it will be soon.

Since the launch of Facebook brand pages, there has been confusion as to whether your brand or cause should set up a page or a group. As brand pages grew in popularity and were given more and more features, it seemed like discussion of groups dropped off. Finally, on Monday Facebook updated the look and function of Facebook groups and now that they dust has settled I think it’s worth revisiting the age old question, “Do I want a Facebook group or a brand page?”

Brand Pages

Brand pages are still the best choice for 99 percent of brands or campaigns. Facebook created them specifically for artists, public figures, and companies with the understanding that these are part of the landscape but different from a friend.

With a brand page, you can create a social media hub with photos, video, discussions, blogs, events, special offers, and updates all in one place. The advantages for fans is their ability to control how intrusive these brand pages are to their experience- becoming a fan is less commitment than joining a group and fans have more control over what correspondence they receive from each brand page.

For brands, the pages offer advantages such as:

• Personalized URLs
• Options to add fans via SMS
• Ability to post updates to all fans’ news feeds
• Administrator Facebook hub: you can buy advertising, check which brand activities have been popular with fans, and see a huge amount of demographic information on your fans

A major draw back is that you can’t invite anyone to your page; but you can let people know you’re out there by buying advertising or promoting the page through existing channels (put the URL on your business cards, add a Fan Box to your website, create signage at events prompting people to become fans via SMS). Lack of proper promotion is the biggest obstacle to a success brand page but that’s a post in its self…

Groups

Facebook groups are a special case because they are more intimate for the members than a brand page- and yes you can have both IF you have the time to maintain them. Facebook groups are like the email list serves of old except that they keep content and discussion chains housed in one place and (through privacy settings) allows others outside of the list serve to see it. As an administrator you can control whether members and administrators can post and who can see your activities. The main advantages that groups have over brand pages are:

• Privacy settings
• Ability to send group members messages
• Inviting friends to become members

As a brand page administrator you can only send Updates that live outside of the Facebook inbox and don’t notify the members via email. Facebook set this up so that Facebook inboxes wouldn’t become like email inboxes (I swear I’ve unsubscribed from J.Crew like ten times so why do I still get two emails a day?). Consequently Updates are less likely to be read that direct messages to group members.

To be effective, these groups need to be focused and have members who are really interested in what you have to say to the point that they don’t mind receiving messages in their inboxes. For campaigns, Facebook groups are a good tool to organize a group of brand enthusiasts or an advisory panel in a way that’s both convenient and open to many people on Facebook through search.

Facebook’s newest announcement gave group pages a facelift (no pun intended) to look more like brand pages and to make members’ interactions with the brand page available in the news feed to friends who are also group members (NOT to friends who aren’t in the group). The group pages now have tabs like brand pages do, giving administrators full use of any applications such as events, videos, blog feeds, games, etc.

For more about brand pages, groups, and Facebook trends check out my Facebook Trends Series and the Facebook Bootcamp for PR that started it all.

Thanks to Flickr user striatic for the photo used here.

Don’t live in D.C.? Don’t worry! You can still participate by tuning into the live stream of the event right here.

Streaming .TV shows by Ustream

Gary has quickly grown to become a well recognized business leader in the wine industry for his strategic approach to branding and strong entrepreneurial skills after he was able to exponentially grow his family’s wine business from a $4 million business to $45 million business within a 5 year period.

Don’t miss this chance to hear Gary talk about entrepreneurship first hand and learn how he tapped the power of social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his popular video blog about wine tasting which receives more than 80,000 viewers per day.  In a recent Businessweek interview, Gary explained “It’s insane to me to ask anybody to be what they’re not. Know what you know the best, love the most. That’s always going to be the answer to the thing that you have the best shot at winning at.” Gary’s will also be highlighting his new book, “Crush It!”, which focuses on his business secrets and how he applied social media and passion to build his brand.

A panel discussion led by John Bell and Q&A session as well as small reception will follow Gary’s remarks.

The event will take place from 7:30 pm - 9 pm EST on 10/14 in the Ward Circle Building Room 2 of American University. The event is free and is free but you must RSVP here. The first 100 people to register as a GUEST will receive a copy of  “Crush It” and there are still a few spots left, so hurry!! Books must be picked up at the event on 10/14  in person.

Also, remember to use #AUCrush on Twitter to submit questions to Gary on the day of event and for updates.

Click through the “more” break to view table of consolidated lessons shared in an internal discussion of 360 DI strategists across the network.

An additional follow up consideration for all, especially for complex programs, is Social Influencer Relationship Management.

If you have some experience designing or participating in these brand events, please throw in your $.02.  I think it could benefit all parties to avoid the pitfalls in mistaking participants invited due to their audience and influence for people who are already passionate about everything your brand does.

As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to make it to a lot of events and many of them are focused on such niche topics as the future of social media and how Twitter is changing business. I expected, after receiving the invite to WBF, that it would be illuminating in a completely different way about the world that we all work in. My hope was that it would offer a chance to contemplate a future of business in which social media was just one piece of the puzzle and not the whole story. In that respect, the first day of WBF certainly delivered.

The speaker lineup for today included Harvard Management Guru (and bestselling author) Bill George, T. Boone Pickens, Jeffrey Sachs, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts and filmmaker George Lucas. Reading the stream of tweets from the dedicated bloggers at the event (hashtag/keyword #wbf09), it was clear that there were a lot of great soundbites coming out of the event. As I wasn’t able to be at the event for the whole day, these tweets were the method by which I could partake in the live pulse of the event and as I read them it struck me at the “bloggers” the event had invited to cover it were largely choosing to do so through the real time 140 character limited tool of Twitter.

As a result of these many tweets, as an outside reader piecing together the story of the event through these short bursts, it occurred to me that for my recap post from Day one, I would focus on what I felt was a trend that had emerged from all of these micro-observations: the importance of passion. Passion isn’t necessarily a word that we typically equate with business. Yet listening to the stories of each of the leaders - passion was a common thread in how they approached their careers and achievements. Passion, to a degree, was what made them great at what they did … and what they looked for in the next generation of people they hired.

Each of the men presenting today (and yes, unfortunately it was all men) - recounted as part of their point of view their own story of how their personal passion has driven them to do more. George Lucas shared his passion for storytelling. Kevin Roberts on his passion for creating something that people can’t help but sharing. Even David Rubenstein (by far the most pessimistic in the group with his sobering presentation about the recession economy) preached being passionate about what you do and choosing something you love.

In the surround-sound media environment of today, there is no shortage of places you can go to see an expert’s view of business and where it is headed. What I took from the first day of the World Business Forum, however, was just how important passion is as a common thread in the people (and their organizations) who are accomplishing something. The future of business isn’t about leveraging Twitter or weathering the storm, or even finding the next great groundbreaking product. The ones who really change our world for the better will be the ones most passionate about doing it.

Note: This blog post is republished from Rohit’s personal blog, Influential Marketing.