Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Since we post so many other agency’s successful campaigns, I feel it’s okay to also post something we’re proud of once in a while. In this year’s JdW (Jahresbuch der Werbung), we won in the Megaphone category, automotive category and durables category. The case is based on a social media strategy across offline and online channels.

Congrats to the team and a gutsy client.

Saw a video by Hubble Innovations, via Florian Geiger today.

The video outlines the well-know problem of traditional media’s slowly but surely failing business models and claims to be able to solve it.

The Future of media brands - Case Study from Hubble Innovations on Vimeo.

The solution isn’t exactly new: it’s a super-aggregator idea that totally personalized to me, my location, my social network and content/event preferences. Even though they claim rights to the idea, it’s preposterous. This idea already exists in partial solutions already in existing synching and SM integrator solutions. In fact, some could argue: “Isn’t this what Facebook is slowly becoming anyway?”

My take on this is: The concept is a fairly logical and tempting conclusion based on the insight that people would like to have everything in one place and like location awareness. Apart from the title of the video being a misnomer (it doesn’t address the future of media brands but rather paints a picture of a desired user behavior), it will still take quite a while to build its proof of concept.

1. First of all, as we have seen with previous aggregator solutions, it takes a while for people to completely disband their existing behaviors of going to single source. For example, even though RockMelt had a pretty good start through social buzz, actual usage after initial sign-up have dropped. People tend to go back to their fragmented user behaviors until the user experience has matured. For complete adoption of an aggregator idea, the individual moving parts AND their respective user behaviors have to be quite mature. I don’t think this is the case just yet for this concept.  But it probably will in the future, after some other ideas have trailblazed these behaviors, failed on the way, and generated learnings that will ultimately benefit some 20-something entrepreneur who will become a billionaire, again.
2. Apart from the fact that the idea remains quite abstract and hidden behind a fancy animation, it also fails to address how exactly this is supposed to save traditional media, or at least revolutionize or evolve the media and publishing space. Who in fact would be a qualified media partner to build and propel this concept?  The concept does mention how people will pay for this experience, but not who gets paid for it and how. Assuming that the concept can repeat an Apple-like success of starting to pay for content (which is lofty enough), I still think this is the key point in terms of business maturity that will make or break this concept. Which content producers (old media or new) will come together how, produce how, and get paid how. In fact, since so much of news, information and entertainment is based on actual people (users) sharing and producing content without getting paid for it, wouldn’t you have to find a way to have them get a share for their content production and dissemination activities (see flattr) as well? So much of their behavior is about sharing (old) media content that the benefit of doing it just in one place might not be enough (ironically, in a way they are actually responsible for keeping those traditional publishers in business through their activities). In fact, this important social sharing aspect would probably have to be addressed as part of the business model, otherwise it will just remain one more aggregator solution. A solution that until now has no user base (such as Facebook) or no real competence in traditional content creation (such as NYT) and no competence in new content creation (such as Gizmodo or Mashable), and which is my point: no real strategy on HOW to pull it together. It’s a user experience vision, not a business idea, is my point. And, unlike other aggregator and synching solutions such as Read It Later, Instapaper, Dropbox and others which very defined user goals they serve, this solution would have to solve for it all. And we know how many attempts it takes for even the big players (think of Google’s long list of abandoned Betas) to pull it off and how many product ideas need to fail before maturity sets in. So keep trucking, but prepare to wait a while.
3. Also, the concepts just assumes people will behave this way. But when you look at those early adopters who are responsible for initial successes of of new web offerings, you can quickly see that they are quite different from those who come in when a certain maturity has set in. In fact, early adopter behavior is (to some extent) one of not managing and aggregating their experiences, but rather seeking new ones, so that those become trends that then lead to being reaggregated in new experiences again. Therefore, the game facebook plays is a type of tug of war of those users that they need to innovate, while maturing an experience for the large mass to keep them happy while also making sure the innovator group doesn’t get bored.  Facebook has, by and large, played the game the best in comparison to for example local market solutions in Germany and other places. The point is, aggregation happens after innovation. And they are different things to different types of users at different maturity levels. The concept fails to address this (at least in the video). There seems to be no go-to-market strategy.

So, in conclusion: thanks for the video, but a) aggregation itself is not an idea, it’s about how you aggregate, with who and when, and b) the big players have been working on it for a quite a while anyhow and c) you can’t pull it off if you don’t have some background at being expert in at least one area that is key to business success: i.e., producing worthwhile content, or making people pay for content, or innovative payment technology, or maturing a user experience for disparate user behavior profiles.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Facebook rolled out some changes to user’s profiles earlier this month, including a snazzy new band of photos across the top of most people’s profile pages.

This naturally inspired some people to find novel ways to express themselves using the ‘canvas’ at the top of their newsfeed, including (famously) Alexandre Oudin. After a few more days, there were sites popping up everywhere to do this to your profile in a few easy steps (Photo Magic, Oudinizer, Profile Maker, etc.).

Impressively, Schweppes acted quickly to get a developer to create a Schweppes Profile App on Facebook, as explained with the following video:

I like that they managed to turn around the app so fast, and keep the entire experience relatively simple.  My questions are:

1. This seems to be an activity that most people might enjoy, and I wonder if Facebook considered making the functionality native.  To be honest, the process is still a little complicated, due to the tagging requirements, and Facebook could get around these elegantly.

2. I think the resulting photo could have carried at least a nominal amount of branding - maybe even flirt with a facet of the product?  What about making you in your photo engage with the product in some way?

Although here’s a good example of what you should probably not do:

3. When these mercurial changes occur on Facebook, I wonder if there is really any benefit to the ‘first out’ application.  The app seemed to have some loading troubles a few times when I was using it.  Stability should be pretty high on the list of requirements, one would think.

The buzz surrounding Social Media is deafening in marketing today and every marketer is under pressure to deliver smart, powerful campaigns that utilize Social in relevant and effective ways.

However, a lack of benchmarks, combined with a massive amount of data possible to capture has made the actual choice of what to measure no easier for most Brands.  Some experts offer suggestions in the form of lists of possible individual metrics, but I’m not sure this is as helpful as it could be for the people struggling to decide how to invest. What marketers need are strategies that help them craft objectives that can be measured in ways that make sense to the marketing organization.

Garrett Ira (guest blogging here on Kylelacy.com) has collected some great examples of key metrics to track, but the real secret is how to set up objectives for your campaigns (and I do mean campaigns, not just social actions) that include social objectives which can then be measured by actions that the user takes, like clicks, likes, shares, check-ins and tweets.

Some campaigns are about getting the word out about a product, service, activity or cause, so those should have key metrics around both impressions/reach of the campaign message, as well as the viral aspect of how much the message was shared onward from the initial share.  These metrics feel a lot like media numbers, and can be better understood by stakeholders if they are presented as purely that - “Here’s your awareness.”

Some campaigns or actions, however, are aimed at involving the consumer in something - getting them to participate in meaningful ways - and these actions should be measured using brand and impact studies, since you want to know if the people have changed their relationship to the brand in some way, due to the interaction.  Tracking the interactions themselves without examining the underlying impact to building meaningful connections is a quick way to confuse senior management - “Are that many downloads a good thing?”

Lastly, if the campaign is about sales, then don’t be shy - use a panel and find out what your campaign in social did to impact their purchase behavior.  Using proxies for purchase intent is always tempting here, but keep in mind that there really is a difference between a purchase and signing up for coupons/email (or asking for more information).  Be firm and decisive here, and if only a panel will deliver it, then get a panel together - “What means a ‘win’ for me in terms of sales?”

Naturally, some situations and organizations will pressure people to avoid picking a focus (we all want it all, right?), but asking the team to consider “What are we REALLY doing with our consumers?” can help to guide the right choice of metrics for social, and ensure that the team aligns behind a cogent, clear goal.

Photo: D Sharon Pruitt

This week, Jumo launched their beta social network for causes, issues and organizations.  The press was a little hotter when the project first was announced, and there have been 60,000 members in the closed beta.  Factoid for the day: Jumo is Yoruban for “together in concert”.

The site is designed to make it easy to follow (think ‘like’) updates from a variety of causes and even join in the conversation. The interface is familiar and integration with Facebook is, to use one of their favorite words, frictionless (no surprise there, given he was a co-founder).  The causes (they use the word “issues that you care about”) fall into 7 groups - Arts/Culture, Education, Environment/Animals, Health, Human Rights, Peace/Governance and Poverty - and there are 9 or so orgs in each group already, with surely more to come.

Previous comments from the company clarified that the site is not about donations (although you can click through to the organization’s homepage to give if you’re so inclined), but rather getting people connected who care about specific issues.

But I have to ask: Why would I use this service when I can already get these updates on Facebook itself?  Is there another audience out there that is not on Facebook, but would want to use the service for charities and causes?  My hunch is that this platform is designed to allow for smaller charities that don’t advertise widely to get eyeballs on their cause without having to pay for Facebook ads.  Jumo makes it easy to explore a variety of charities that would probably never get my attention, since this type of exploration is such a basic part of the site (One complaint: hovering over a charity it would be nice to get some overlay information about it - I should be able to know a bit more about it before committing to follow it) The integration with Facebook certainly could help in terms of spreading activity on that site without paying for the traffic upfront.

When Facebook re-launched Groups, I was wondering if they were considering just rebranding part of their platform as a news service, which is kind of the main functionality here.  It pulls the latest and greatest to your Home page, and allows you to read summaries, or delve into the original articles at will, with the ever present opportunity to join the conversation and comment.  Sharing without commenting doesn’t seem to be present, but this is beta, so things could change rapidly.

If you’ve got an organization that needs to connect with people, this could be another platform for you, but the question remains: What’s the value?

You can follow Jumo on Facebook and Twitter.

Check out this short video from Common Craft about how employees can participate responsibly in social media.

Watch it here.

Ideal for HR and PR professionals, it talks about how honest conversations by real people in the company can help customers make better decisions and increase trust.

Even though the video is short - everything is covered in terms of setting up guidelines, processes to follow, and things to watch out for.

via Common Craft

Just saw this on Tiago’s FB Wall. The E-Tomb. Why not? As our lives get digital, why not our deaths?

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Fun video showing a life lived - but solely from Facebook’s perspective:

Via AllFacebook.com Via Mashtart

David Armano has a post over at Logic+Emotion that deftly lays out the basic flow (along with a graphic of it) for companies to follow when monitoring and engaging in Social Media.

It’s great content, and his points about the difference between knowing the plan and living the plan are wonderful advice for companies entering the space, or looking at revising their processes and policies.  There are definite processes for companies to follow to respond correctly to online comments, and his framework of Listen, Assess, Engage, Repeat is a good example of how to set this up.

Two things I would highlight or expand on in his flow, however, are the occasions when there are no scenarios in place, as well as how to proceed when the organization has a fantastic response that can really turn the corner with a consumer, versus when there is ‘no hope’ of a satisfactory outcome. Now I know I’m being expressly picky here - there’s no generic flow in the world that works for absolutely every brand or platform - his model is really good.

In the first instance, there will always be situations that no planning brought forth, and the Community Management team needs to know what to do then, and who to make the call. (You could argue that his Assess boxes are about these processes)  The issue here is that you need a clear hierarchy that can be effective and decisive, but lean and responsive as well.  Addressing this issue requires 3 things from the team - deep expertise in both the brand and the community itself, a spirit of collaboration that encourages people to ask for input to make sure the response is the best it can be, and a really smart toolset that makes communication and collaboration super-easy for the team. Once people trust that they are only a click away from the right expertise to make a decision, they will use it - because it breeds success. I’d like to see more teams make these three elements a formal part of their process flows, because I think it recognizes the importance of their role in the process.

In the second case of being able to hit a ‘home run’, there are times when the Community Manager needs to have the flexibility to make a call about a post - and respond with confidence *in the community* to help other members know that there is a real solution, even in cases of ‘acidic’ complaints.  There is a flow for this in Armano’s chart.  But sometimes there is no solution possible, no momentum behind the complaint, and possibly no validity to it as well.  This scenario could happen even with complaints, as well as other issues, as he shows.In those cases, the best response is sometimes no response.  The consumer has vented, and if there’s nothing that the company can or will do about the issue, then there is nothing more to be done or said without adding fuel to the fire.  In these cases, I would add an element that examines momentum, to allow the team to ascertain if a baseless claim has no momentum that it should be ignored, but if it gains momentum, that the level of alert and attention needs to increase.

Do you agree?  Are there times when there is no possible response to a rant?

Via Logic+Emotion

Photo credit: Lara604 / http://www.laraschneider.com/