However with busy work schedules, clients demands and a great deal of non-social business already to deliver it’s not always as easy as just saying ‘ get on the twitters: you’ll loves it’. So to engender a sense of fun and competition into the process we’ve worked with Andrew and Jodee at Kred to develop the Ogilvy Social Climbers leader board: http://london.kred.com/

The leader board uses Kred’s algorithm to assess the Influence and Outreach of the participating Ogilvy staffers relative to the rest of the participants. The person who improves their score the most over the year will attend SXSW Interactive 2013 as the social correspondent for Ogilvy London. Along the way we’ll be giving out monthly prizes for new entrants, high scores and epic acts of outreach.

Currently the scores are based exclusively in each participants twitter activity, however in the coming months we’ll also be adding Facebook and Linkedin.

At 61 participants as of Sunday March 4th we’re at about 5% penetration of the Ogilvy Group UK after only 2 weeks. My goal is to get it to 25% of the entire agency by the end of the year with an even spread across the operating companies and roles. I’ll post quarterly updates and let you know what strategies we’ve been using to drive involvement. I’d be delighted to hear of success you’ve had in your organisation, especially if I can share it here.

If you are an Ogilvy London employee and you’d like to participate just shoot your twitter handle to alex.budge@ogilvy.mail.com. And don’t be put off by the high scores of the likes of @Whatleydude and @Eb, the prize is for most improved, not highest score.

It was this post that finally exhorted me to go and watch them in their entirety. And while not earth shattering, they are significant, both for their content and their source: Coke’s Jonathan Mildenhall.*

It’s still very broadcast; “Brand stories create liquid and linked ideas” starts with the brand story rather than the audience or user interests or needs. Nonetheless  the consumer gets wrapped in along the way, its just that the Coke model is about reacting to the audience response once the brand has started the conversation.

And to be fair, Coke is talking about Storytelling, not conversation. So its not surprising that the language is still very much around broadcast modalities; “The development of incremental ideas that get dispersed systematically across multiple channels of conversation for the proposes of creating a unified and coordinated brand experience.” Does that sound a little but like a media plan to anyone else?

Where it gets more interesting for me is in the identification of the skill sets and processes the brand needs to get its head around in order to be a multi-platform, culturally disruptive story teller. Mildenhall identifies 5 skillsets

1. Serial story telling
2. Multi faceted storytelling
3. Spreadable storytelling
4. Immersion and discovery storytelling
5. Engagement through storytelling

I think this rightly lays down a number of challenges;

1. Really properly integrated: If you think about what this means for the agency model that’s required to support this its either incredibly small, tight and nimble or if its big, it’s hyper-integrated. But it’s certainly not  like a lot of what we see around us at the moment where integrated means the image still from the ad shoot is used on the in-store, the bus side and the display banners.

2. Understanding the explicit and implicit consumer voice: Like lots of people at  the moment, Mildenhall is very enthusiastic about data (although…’data whisperers’…?) which is the implicit voice of the consumer, and about the literal or explicit voice of the consumer, at minute 6:47, where the consumer is flagged as one of the collaborators who will enable big fat fertile spaces for ideas to be developed.

In video Two ‘Content’ is actually defined as ‘The Creation of Stories that are to be expressed through EVERY possible connection”. To my mind the last three words imply functionality as well as the more reductive view of content as images / text / video. This also sets up challenges for the agency world to be able to assemble a team that can tell a story not without regard for the channels, but rather with the deep knowledge of those channels that enables finesse and élan.

The way that Coke is acheiving this expression is through collaborative, adaptive and continuous models of development. And while we may have heard these kinds of claims before Mildenhall then rolls out the ways they are doing it;

• Working directly with creative talent
• Working with Brand Fans
• New Creative Industry Collaborators (although I’m not quite sure what this means, it clearly doesn’t mean a large WPP /Omnicom agency)
• And a single Rock Star agency

So challenge 3: what’s the non-rock-star agency role in all of this? Booking flights?

Challenge 4 (and possibly the role of the agency redefined as tutor, mentor sensei and guide) is to embrace these 5 principles of co-creation which Milden hall reckons applies to each of the development models;

1. Inspire participation amongst the very best
2. Connect these creative minds
3. Share the results of our efforts
4. Continue development
5. Measure success

And the same could be said for what he defines as the requirements of managing the development of a Liquid Idea

1. Govern its flow: define the North Star: how will this (idea) make a significant impact on popular culture
2. Encourage behaviours; Bravery, creativity, play, clear thinking, risk taking
3. Incubate creative ideas and create a culture of creativity
4. Use conflict constructively

{As a planner, that (optimistically?) sounds to me very much like the combined role of a planer and creative director}.

Finally and this is the bit that got the blogosphere excited, Mildenhall unveiled an investment model; “3:11: Chapter 7; applying the 70 /20 / 10 investment principles”
In the future Coke will invest in content according to this breakdown;

• 70% Low risk content that ‘pays the rent’ and consumes only 50% of time
• 20% innovate off what already works, engaging more deeply with a more specific audience but still with broad scale
• 10% high risk content, brand new ideas that will become tomorrow’s 20 or 70.

Which reminds me of Google’s 80 / 20 rule for driving innovation by allowing engineers to spend 80% other time on something that interests them personally.

The upshot of this is that Coke is no longer relying on agencies to bring them culturally disruptive ideas, they are going out to the bazaar and peering into all kinds of tents. This can only be a good thing for shaking up agencies, but also for rewarding different models of creation and innovation and spreading the investment pot into some less frequented corners of the market place.

*Coke is an Ogilvy client

For the past couple of months I’ve been talking to the people across the Ogilvy Group who are involved in Listening and understanding the different reasons and ways that they do it.

The upshot is that every one of the ten agencies is doing it, but for all kinds of reasons which can largely be put into two buckets;

1. One-off snapshots used ahead of planning to gain insights, identify topics of conversation and to identify key influencers in conversations. Each agency uses this information in different ways specific to their needs; from placement of in-bound links for SEO to determining content strategies around topics and audiences through to deriving audience insights for offline marketing.

2. On-going monitoring to observe changes in the conversation to

• Track the impact of marketing, both online and offline
• Track brand reputation by levels of conversation and the sentiment of those conversations
• Monitor and manage crises
• Manage conversations with influencers and communities

So on Monday we’re getting the 30-something planners and analysts who are actively engaged in Listening at Ogilvy along with a fair selection of the business partners who access it and holding an internal conference; “Listening@Ogilvy”.

I need to be a little coy about some of what we’re discussing, but here’s a few publicly acceptable items from the agenda;

Nick Brackenbury: Introduction to the 360 DI Listening Centre; The Wall of Ears

Irfan Kamal: case studies from the 360 DI Team in Washington DC

Kohlben Vodden: Ogilvy One: Listening for Clues

Matt Gierhart: Ogilvy Action: Listening for Insight

Michael Darragh: Ogilvy PR 360 DI: Listening for Crisis

At the end of the afternoon we’re going to open the floor and get into where all of this is heading: Listening 2.0 (c’mon - I hadda)

We’ll be tweeting out on #Listening@Ogilvy and the lovely Jez Kay from NowHouse will be capturing it all on video so we”ll stick some highlights up on the Ogilvy Vids channel.

I have in the past, made grandiose promises to blog regularly. Only to be mocked by my friends and revealed to be a hollow braggart by history.

So I am going to try a new approach (s).

• I am  a great admirer of Katy Lindeman’s Week Notes. So there’s a template to copy.
• And I find that I often do a bit of structured thinking in emails. So that’s another source.
• And finally I get on certain jags about things and start collecting them in delicious. So I could always look back at that and see if there’s a nascent post lurking.
• And sometimes I give talks and write articles for other people. So surely the elements of that should provide all kinds of blog-posty goodness.

Yes indeed there is no shortage of opportunities to collate a bit of knowledge and experinece and stick it on the internet.

So why don’t I?

Not Enough Bloody Time. Or at least a perception that there is Not Enough Bloody Time.

But that’s a bit like collecting all of the things I need to make a meal, but never actually cooking. Not that blogging is the ultimate output of my reading, thinking and working. Rather structured ideas and increased knowledge are. And there is nothing like structuring a post, thinking through the links and imaging the critique of a few select audience members to sharpen up an idea or approach to something.

I was supposed to be in Paris all of next week for an internal Ogilvy conference and then Le Web. Instead I recently learned that I need to come back for a meeting on Thursday afternoon. The net result being that I have a meeting on Thursday and my diary on Friday is completely empty. As I went to go and fill it with internal meetings and vendor chats and reviews of one thing and another I stopped. I stopped and realised that I had gifted myself a day of free time.

So that day is going to be spent organsing myself so that I can have a regular day of free time.

Tools that I currently have but don’t use properly and guides to using them better.

Info management

Google mail: become a Gmail Ninja

Google Reader: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/get-more-out-of-google-reader.html

Delicious: Specifically using Stacks like this one I made of these links

Evernote: Random things to do with Evernote and a more introductory ‘Getting Started’ post. Oh, and a really basic intro YouTube video with an awesome voice over!

Task Management

Omni focus: http://www.asianefficiency.com/omnifocus/

Network management

Linkedin: From Guy Kawasaki

Facebook: the new features

And finally Twitter, especially lists.

And my One Tool to Rule Them All: Hootsuite

From @jkrums twitpic: http://twitpic.com/135xa

The report opens with a reassertion of the importance social media of social media as a destination (In January 2011, social networks accounted for 12.4% of all UK Internet visits) and the role of news and media (6.1%). And because of the real time nature of both there is a natural fit: want to know about breaking news, head to twitter (see Michael Jackson’s death, the Hudson River crash and the Icelandic ash cloud as examples of stories that broke in social before hitting the mainstream media).

Cross breed these two and you have an opportunity to respond to the news cycle in social media that can result in increased awareness and the establishment of trusted relationships.

While the connection with Al Jazeera is obvious, I didn’t quite get the Lonely Planet connection. Lonely Planet has a huge audience spread across the globe, sincluding Egypt. Taking advantage of their heavily engaged membership Lonely Planet set up a forum and asked their members to post real time updates of what was happening on the ground, which DOUBLED traffic to their site.

It’s worth noting that while Al Jazeera is an obvious choice when searching for news in the middle east, 20% of their traffic came through their dedicated social channels as they shared video and live blogging updates as well as through Facebook and news links through twitter.

The other example in the Hitwise paper is closer to the more quotidian concerns of a consumer brand: BA providing real time updates during the December 2010 snow storms, again using twitter and increasing traffic to their site 25% over any other airline and trebling positive sentiment towards the brand.

Great: increased traffic, new users, lots of inbound SEO friendly links and an enhanced reputation and brand sentiment.

Is this something other brands can emulate? Find out after the jump…

Let’s look at the common elements to these examples;

• Each had a unique opportunity: access to information that had a degree of exclusivity
• They all used social media in a timely and transparent way
• They established or already had appropriate social channels for this kind of activity
• They were responding to a real need and interest of the online community
• All of these combined in a way that they were actually adding value to the online community

So what are the challenges?

• Is what we have to say unique enough? Why are we talking about this, why should the audience expect us to have an authoritative or informed point of view?
• Can we use social media in a timely and transparent way? If this communication is being handled by an agency, do they have access to the right sources of internal information and the mandate to cover it? If its being handled internally do the company representatives have the internal authority to communicate in this way, and if not what’s the approval process? In constantly evolving news situations timely means real time. Like…Now. And now. And then now again, in ten minutes time.
• Not all social channels are created equal: its probably not appropriate to use a Facebook page dedicated to vouchers and discounts to discuss the health concerns around a product category health scare. So are we prepared to start a new presence and do we have a plan for its ongoing maintenance or its graceful retirement?
• Are we in a situation to respond to a real need? Lots of brands and many aspects of brands and their marketing are not important in users’ lives. Interesting, possibly entertaining, but not vitally useful and important. But dig away and there in the heart of the brand is something that responds to an audience need, otherwise they wouldn’t exist, right?. So the job is to find out what it is that your brand that actually matters to users and when that might occur in the news cycle?
• Adding value: If we’re going to weigh in on a topic of importance are we able to add value? Are we prepared to put aside the valid but in this context inappropriate marketing concerns we have so that we can deliver real and timely information that is of use? (remember and learn from Habitat). We need to ask ourselves; are we marketing or are we communicating? Is this message or activity designed to benefit us the brand or them, the users?

So while the benefits of responding to the news cycle in social are real, so are the challenges. Oh yes, and the news cycle isn’t preplanned. So brands need to anticipate scenarios and forward plan what out any concrete knowledge of what exactly is going to happen.

Ford Sync Dash User Interface (from Jalopnik)

Since I have started working at Ogilvy 360 on social media for Ford, I thought it worth going back and digging up my notes from the SXSW Interactive session back in March earlier this year; “Dude, this is my car” on Day 1: Friday March 12: 2.00: #SXSW #dudethisismycar

It was my first SXSW session and I was suffering little from jet-lag but here is some of what I gleaned;

Both of the session’s panelists were from Ford US;  Paddy Srinivasan and TJ Giuli (interviewed here) and here’s some of what they covered;

The reason Ford were presenting at an interactive conference is because of Ford’s approach to technology in the car with includes developing software platforms that allow for external apps to be developed. The exemplar being the Ford and Microsoft partnership to develop Sync: an in-car technology platform.

What was really sexy about this was that earlier at CES it was announced that this platform would also allow smartphone apps to be accessed…so alongside the Apple App store, Android’s Marketplace, Nokia’s Ovi and Blackberry, Palm and Samsung et al it looks like we we could now have one for Ford’s sync. (Note: Since SXSW things have obviously moved on and there are now moves at Ford to get this off the ground; reg here for updates)

The issue with having an apps eco-system is that it needs to be populated. You only need to look at Apple’s iPhone advertising to see that they rely heavily on the content and functionality provided by the apps to attract an audience. (Link to adverts). So one of the things Ford is doing is making their apps software development packages (SDK’s) available to students.

Ford is doing this by developing Fiestaware. In a partnership with the Uni of Michigan and others they are encouraging students to create apps for the new Fiesta. And as befits a student audience, there is a big focus on social apps with integration with FourSquare, twitter and Facebook. The apps are enabled by a 3G mobile broadband internet connection.

More about this program can be read here and also here in this Wired article.

Srinivasan and Giuli also talked about other Ford app environments such as the Smartguage on the Ford Fusion which allows drivers to choose how much data and what data to display on the dash in four modes;
Inform: Fuel level and battery charge status
Enlighten: Adds electric vehicle mode indicator and tachometer
Engage: Adds engine output power and battery output power
Empower: Adds power to wheels, engine pull-up threshold and accessory power consumption

There is some more detail on this here on Jalopnik.

In terms of where this could go the panelists were interested in exploring more of the social opportunities this data could provide;

They gave the example of performance enthusiasts at a track day who could record their car’s telemetry outputs and then share those results with other drivers from the same day or track and compare results. It seems a pretty niche application until you think about the increased interest that a lot of drivers are going to have in driving more cost efficiently or more environmentally responsibly. The ability to track, store and compare your telemetry in this instances might have a wider appeal.

The other example they talked through would certainly have wide appeal;  driver’s would be able to reach out to the cloud and bring in data about their location that is personalised to their interests; the notable architecture they are passing, what happened here in history in this area and of course nearby restaurants. Instead of the grinding boredom of two hour I-spy sessions, a holiday trip in the car could become a moving history lesson, a Mastermind quiz and yet another opportunity for sibling rivalry. A whole layer of augmented reality apps could transform the process of A to B into really immersive, and actually interesting experiences. I must admit, as a new parent, the prospect of eliminating the age-old whine of “when do we get there” is pretty tantalising. Not to mention the prospect of a running commentary of what follies are near by.

The session ended with questions from the floor which started off with a lot of the inevitable safety queries. Given the tech start-up audience it was pretty disappointing that this was the tack they took, rather then exploring some of the possibilities of the latest and truly mobile app store. So it was at this point that I lost interest and wandered off to see Douglas Rushkoff.

What makes these tasty?

I have just been asked “what makes effective digital marketing?”

And I think the answer is the same as the answer to the question; “What is effective marketing?”

It depends on what objectives you are trying to acheive.

A further question might then be “Well okay, but how can I tell if its effective digital marketing?”

In this case I think a simple way to expose the objective achieving possibilities of digital is to break down the objectives into three measurable areas like this;

1. Coverage: who saw it where and in what numbers; Because awareness is frequently a factor and we are still addicted to numbers as a result of our junkie-like usage of broadcast media
2. Engagement: once exposed, what did they do with it; click on it, share it, embed it, comment on it, forward it in an email etc.; What is measured here is very tactically specific; a video on you tube will have different engagement metrics to a banner advert, a PPC advert or a search optimised landing page
3. Conversion: what business or marketing objective did it acheive in what numbers and at what cost; Often referred to as ROI, but if taken in isolation can lead to short term tactical activity that doesn’t grow the audience for the brand or their relationship with it

And then there is a bonus set of metrics if the activity results in user ratings, reviews or even online conversation around the activity;

4. Sentiment: what did those who were exposed, engaged or converted by the activity think of the activity, the brand, its products and services?; Clients are very familiar with this from services like Milward Brown’s brand tracking, the difference here is that it’s not a sample of those exposed and therefor doesn’t require mass exposure for the activity to make recruitment possible. Instead it’s taken from all of those who have been exposed to the activity and who have made their sentiment known online (allowing for varying degrees of accuracy in the level of NLP in whatever tool you are using to measure sentiment). You’d need an econometric statistician to explain the qualitative differences in those two sets of data; I’m just saying their different.

So Wired is predicting The End of The Web.

Using data from Cisco the Wired graph shows not just a decline in Web based traffic and email but also a concurrent phenomena of traffic going to apps and other off web locations. As various commentators have pointed out, and Boing Boing graphically illustrate, the story is not as straight forward as the Wired article and graph make it seem; there are different ways of illustrating the data and the idea of many environments is not new. There are similar sorts of thoughts expressed in Forrester’s Splinternet view of the internet back in January this year.

But to paraphrase lots of other people; an exaggerated data point is a terrible thing to waste, and if all this does is gets us thinking about the non-web internet, then its a good thing.

So what implications does this have for how brands communicate with their audiences?

4 threats:

* Less contact through traditional owned media of email and brand web sites
* Less exposures (really can it get any smaller?) to audiences through online (web) ads
* Questions around the role of search in all of this; if audiences are not on the web as much how are they finding brand’s content and services?
* More reliance on user recommendations, not on searched discoveries

4 opportunities:

* Mobile and desktop apps and advertising (not new news but perhaps a bit more urgent)
* Content feeds via twitter / rss / podcast (really not new, but perhaps renewed relevance)
* Internet services to mobiles, tablets, social networks, fridges and in-car? (the day of the networked toaster is coming and you know it)
* Built in sociability: not just ‘share this‘, but real (compelling) reasons to invite others to use / subscribe / view

Stimulated

We received a brief at DraftFCB recently that asked for advice on using all three areas of search; SEO, SEM and “stimulated”. I think this is a really useful distinction and an obvious corollary to the oft quoted “three types of media”; paid, owned and earned which is neatly summarised by Forrester here.

What does it mean? If SEM is paid search and SEO is what you can do to optimise your own web site in search then to my mind stimulated is what you can do to activate both of those. In this interpretation, stimulating SEM would be driving users to a search engine with a specific search in mind, against which you have bought specific terms; Compare the Meerkat comes to mind as an example.

But it is the stimulation of SEO that is really emerging as an area of interest; how to harness the growing tendency of users to link to sites they like (which builds you-in bound links) and to write descriptions of them, which contributes to the meta data that search engines use to understand what your site is about.

I first noticed the impact of inbound links working on the Sony BRAVIA Balls campaign when one of the unintended consequences of creating the BRAVIA blog and the associated distribution of blog assets was that lots of high ranking blogs linked to the campaign site bravia-advert.com. The net result of this was that the site was the number one result in Google for the search term “advert”. For two years. Genius. If what Sony sold was adverts…so be careful what you optimse for.

As often seems to be the case whenever you get into the murky world of search there are myriad issues to consider including the follow / nofollow; the practice of marking links as ‘nofollow’ to exclude them from various search engine processes. This varies on different bookmarking sites and so can impact on their contribution to your SEO. With the rise of twitter and other mocroblogging platforms there has also been a huge increase in the use of URL shortening servcies like Bit.ly and TinyURL. Again these vary in the way that hey attributte links, although it seems most of them do fact act as stimulus to your SEO.

Putting these areas of pernickety technical detail aside it seems that overall social media links help browsers find your content and they contribute to your SEO to help serchers find your content. Both good things. So to get a handle on what kinds of social links you’ve got going on go and play with some of the tools that Lee Odden profiles on Social Media Today here. Or simply put your latest blog post into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

And happy stimulation.

Cruelty is always possible later

Although I found Altimeter’s Success Criteria for Facebook self acclaimed ‘heuristic’ approach a little too rough and ready in its conclusions, I did like its approach to research in general;

• Use of a Creative Commons License to encourage non commercial distribution with attribution
• Disclosure of vested interests in using their clients in the research on their web site
• Embeddable report available on Slideshare
• Plenty of opportunity for peer review in the comments; although so far its all been glowing endorsements that seem to suffer from something similar Blurb Insincerity
• And finally their invitation “To make Open Research work, we hope you read it, spread it, and use it to improve.”

But the next step has to be rather than use i tot improve, should be “improve it”. Open it up to peer participation after the fact or to contributions along the way al la wikipedia unless they fear the inevitable cruelty of contributors…