Digital Influence Mapping Project

My Mix of Social Media Trends 2011

It's trendy to write a "trends" post at the end of the year. Which doesn't make it wrong. 2011 will be a big year for brands who have gotten serious in social media. I would still expect a minority of the companies using social media will reap a disproportionate amount of the benefits. The McKinsey study put it this way:

"According to our research, the 20 percent of users reporting the greatest satisfaction (using social media) received 80 percent of the benefits. Drilling a bit deeper, we found that this 20 percent included 68 percent of the companies reporting the highest adoption rates for a range of Web 2.0 tools, 58 percent of the companies where use by employees was most widespread, and 82 percent of the respondents who claimed the highest levels of satisfaction from Web 2.0 use at their companies."

What will this "benefit pool" wrestle with in 2011? I found three different trends projections that are onto something and pulled the 3-4 important trends. All are worth a read in their entirety.  I have also added a "so what" for brands who want to plan around these. 

• Jessica Northey posted Seven Digital Media Trends of 2011 at Social Media Today. 
• Click Here published an awesome list of 10 trends on their site.
• Trendwatching has their own list of 11 which go far beyond social media or digital but have great implications. 

My Mix

The Digital Talent Pool - Jessica argues that tomorrow's talent pool for social media services inside or outside the enterprise will not come from internship programs but from social media entrepreneurs who are already walking the walk by using social media to popularize their videos or other creations.I agree and disagree. This year's social media talent pool for major brands or those serving them will favor the hybrid - those talents who can quickly bridge between a relevant marcom discipline and a facile understanding and use of social media. Social media savants who don't understand what 'lead generation' means or the fundamentals of reputation management need not apply....unless they are willing to learn fast.

Jessica is coming from a POV of a broadcaster. With that come an important bias that I agree with - we need more great storytellers experienced in social media. As for social media strategists, in general, look at Altimeter Group's Social Media Strategist Report. In the back, they outline the key characteristics of who enterprise should look for and I would argue their qualifications represent a blend of someone with business and marcom discipline and social media practical knowledge. 

So what? Finding the blend out there is tough. That's why many of us have invested heavily in immersive training programs. But rather than simply try and hire away strategists from groups like mine, invest and remain committed to a training program that brings social media smarts to your already smart marcom staff. See more of where we are headed in this post on training. 

Social Networks Deliver Qualified Traffic - Links posted in Facebook and Twitter can deliver an audience who not only has an interest but was driven their by a more trustworthy source - a friend or someone they know online. According to Social Twist, click-through rates from Facebook are a wopping 287% and from twitter are an astronomical 1904%. 

So what? While Facebook appears to have the largest reach potential, other social platforms have their own strengths. Brands must continue to adopt the "5 platform social strategy" (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr & social network #2) and differentiate how they use each. Having a Facebook strategy alone is not enough. 

Mobile Momentum & the Year of the Mobile Website - every year we all predict that 'this is the year for mobile.' I would argue that last year was that year. Others would argue that 2014 - the year mobile access of the Internet will surpass PC-access - will be the year.  Jessica argues that 2011 is a must-act year for radio programmers who should deliver more personalized and mobile content. That same advice can be applied to anyone who has a need to deliver content. Click Here comes to a different conclusion. Mobile access of the Web will exceed smartphone access of Internet content for some time especially if your field of view is global. 

So What? Make the decision in January to make a WAP version of your website. "Half a billion people accessed mobile Internet worldwide in 2009. Usage is expected to double within five years as mobile overtakes the PC as the most popular way to get on the Web," according to Mobithinking. It's time those folks could actually get valuable content from your site. 

Is Social Media Killing the Brand Web Site? - Click Here starts by posing the question about the continued relevance of the brand web site with the explosion of social networks. In the end, they support the importance of the brand site: "Despite the rise in buzz around Facebook pages, brand websites are every bit as relevant as they’ve ever been. They remain the only true digital channel that can be completely and wholly owned by you, the brand. While some social media sites may come and go, websites are an enduring digital touchpoint." Add to that the research that continues to support brand sites as highly trustworthy sources of information (everyone understands the bias of a brand site) and the need for "Google Juice" or good rankings in search engines for yrou owned content and you have your reasons for a brand website. 

So What? Setting aside special needs like ecommerce, brands should absolutely have brand sites. The change is that a balance of user experience needs and search engine optimization should drive the requirements. If you are not optimized to show up high in Google for what matters to you and your customers, you are missing most of the benefit of a brand web site. 

The Future of Social is Shopping - Click Here focuses on deal sites like the ever popular Groupon, Facebook Open graph functionality and the pending advances in search that will return info on what your friends "liked" in Facebook. I cannot help but think of some of the other big social advances this year including:

• Also-ran Ebay honing their mobile app shopping experience
• The buying "clubs" I belong to including Gilt, Jetsetter, and idelli
• Luxury fashion brands who were once luddites but this season not only webcast their Fashion Week collections but made advanced purchase possible
• Brands making transaction apps available in Facebook including the announcement by P&G to make products available via that platform

So What? Do you sell something? Then you ought to be experimenting with the many ways that your products or services can be sold via social networks or that the buying experience can be made more social. 

Urbanomics - Trendspotting takes a higher bird's eye view of trends. They make their point on the growth of cities:

“Today, half the world’s population – 3 billion people – lives in urban areas. Close to 180,000 people move into cities daily, adding roughly 60 million new urban dwellers each year.” (Source: Intuit, October 2010)."  

Certainly many of the world's infrastructure sellers like IBM, Cisco and others know these trends all too well. But city growth will accelerate the global growth of social media. With growing city populations come more concentrated access to the Internet via broadband or mobile. 

So What? Don't let Brazil's 6% broadband penetration fool you. Like a lot of countries, Brazil has experienced considerable "mega city" growth over the last forty years and smaller city growth is still happening. More people in cities will likely mean more people using the Internet. If you are trying to reach and engage customers, you wont be able to ignore the Internet no matter where you are in teh world. 

Pricing Pendemonium - This is Trendspotting's  companion to "the Future of Social is Shopping." The effect of group buying, coupons, buying "clubs" (or sales sites - choose your definition), and variable pricing practiced by everyone form hotels to airlines to Amazon is that consumers will be as confused as ever about what something ought to cost. Should they hold out until the handbag ends up on ideeli? As brands get dragged into a pricing war that may actually undercut the brand's value, what's a brand manager to do? I recently went to a local bath showroom that we like and have purchased from before. I was there to replace my GROHE (cl) Movario shower. I wanted to give them my business but a quick check online showed me that the bricks and mortar was selling them at 100% premium over Amazon (or was Amazon discounted 50%?). I bought online. I am also convinced that had I really looked beyond my trusted Amazon, I could have found it at 20-25% less than I eventually paid. Trendspotting describes the cause: 

"More consumers are constantly connected, and when they hear about new deals online can quickly and easily spread them through their social networks.Increasingly, consumers will be part of exclusive networks or groups to either receive special deals or demand them.Mobile devices increasingly enable consumers to find or receive dynamic deals right at the point of sale, or to compare prices online."

So What? All this special pricing will drive consumer crazy as most of us just want a fair deal. We expect manufacturers to make money. Will all products revert to what seems to have happened in the auto industry where we can all see the dealers price and then expect a modest mark-up? Is the next stage of pricing pandemonium completely transparent pricing where consumers see manufacturer's cost, wholesale and then retail all next to each other? I would expect trusted brands to emerge as more important than ever. Brands may be built differently in the social age yet the fundamentals remain - what does a brand stand for and meand to you and me. 

Eco Superior - when everything you could buy has a 'green' claim of sorts why would you buy one over the other (all feature benefits being equal)? Like "pricing pandemonium" how do you know who to trust when everyone claims a green benefit? Trendspotting defines the problem:

"When it comes to 'green consumption', expect a rise in ECO-SUPERIOR products: products that are not only eco-friendly, but superior to polluting incumbents in every possible way. Think a combination of eco-friendly yet superior functionality, superior design, and/or superior savings...

• While 40% of consumers say they are willing to purchase green products, only 4% of consumers actually do when given the choice. (Source: Journal of Marketing, September 2010)
• 58% of global consumers think that environmentally friendly products are too expensive, while 33% of global consumers think that environmentally friendly products don't work as well. (Source: GfK Roper, September 2010)
• While the volume of green products available to US consumers increased by 73% between 2009 and 2010, only 5% of products were not found to include some 'greenwashing' claims. (Source: Terrachoice, October 2010)"

So What? This is clearly not a social media issue per se. It may be that it will be up to consumers to sort through the claims made by marketers and there is no better way to do that than through social media. Sites like EcoVillage Green, will serve to educate the most motivated of consumers and their very existence may inhibit the most hyperbolic green claims. Right now, companies get away with greenwashing because figuring out who really has a big carbon footprint or who has a bigger lifetime landfill impact is just too complicated. As sites like visualizing.org take complex data and crunch it, visualize it and spread it across social network, we may all learn the real deal behind green claims and choose products and services more confidently. 

Sleeveless Social Business Training in 2011

 
Last post, I shared some of our experience training a global team of marcom pros in social media. It's tempting to continue and expand what has been a success. Still the "three persistent pressures" and other learnings drive me to want to reinvent training. Our current program includes plenty of "roll up your sleeves" experiences. It serves both marcom strategy and skill as well as enterprise needs. We solve real business 'briefs' during our sessions. Now its time to go deeper into the experiential. Lets rip off our sleeves entirely lest they get caught in the messy machinery of social media.

Three new training tracks
1. Understand (and believe) the 6 ways digital & social changes business (not just marcom) - Even if all we do is aspire to solving marcom challenges that deliver business results (Ogilvy goes farther than this), understanding how social & digital changes many businesses will help us be more effective. It's hard to suggest a crowdsourced idea program like Ford's Your Ideas* without understanding IP legal issues and how the core product design team approaches innovation. To build a proper brand program around a new idea like IBM's Smarter Planet* how you can involve employees in spreading the word via their online and offline social graph becomes critical. Understanding employee policy and their use of social media is key.

We can't force people to "believe." That would be wrong. It is less about getting alignment around a singular belief that social media is the cat's pajamas than to work with professionals to discover what they do believe about social and digital's impact on our lives. If we design our next generation curriculum around that goal, we are helping people understand and think about these changes to arrive at their own heart-felt conclusions. 

6 ways digital & social changes business

• Moving marcom from media planning to influence planning
• Empowering employees as advocates & navigating new HR issues
• Affecting the innovation process and management of IP
• Managing risk & reputation
• Building more direct customer relationships (and customer service solutions)
• Retooling for rapid, non-stop change

2. Live a day in the social life -  Jeffrey F. Rayport shared a point that Facebook's Kevin Colleran made at a recent W50 event. With such a big and quick moving shift in consumer behavior as a result of adoption of all things digital and social, it only makes sense that the marcom professionals committed to understanding the customer adopt those behaviors. It's not enough to get your research team to distill the research into a 2-page brief. Nor is it enough to have a anthropology team produce a quaint 4-minute film on the social habits of teens. Here's how jeffrey/Kevin put it:

"Try living a day in your customers' media mix.For example, if your target customer spends five hours a day on Facebook; sends 120 text messages and half a dozen tweets a day from a smartphone and posts photos, videos, and blogs around the clock; "checks in" regularly using Foursquare at favorite retail locations to become "mayor"; relies on a plethora of mobile apps like Google Maps to get from one place to another, RedLaser to check prices on SKUs at Kroger or Best Buy, and Fashism to crowd-source advice from others while shopping; goes online at RueLaLa and GILT for flash sales just when the boutiques open; and subscribes to Groupon or LivingSocial for alerts on local deals, there's a good chance you might want to know what it's like to live a life like that.

There's an equally good chance that (and this was Kevin's point) knowing what it's like to live your customers' media might change the way you use marketing and media to reach, influence, and interact with your customers. It might even change what you do radically."

3. Solve the business challenge socially - I remember and anecdote from a few years ago at Unilever. Not sure of the facts behind this but in short, brand builders and brand developers where challenged to create marketing plans for the year without television. This was a test that was later rescinded. I believe the whole point was to force them to think beyond their current strengths and comfort zone. Our training workshops have always been organized around real "briefs" that must be solved by social media solutions. We simply need to expand that making it a bigger part of the interactive sessions we stage.

Many organizations will continue to have a spread of experts to novices amongst their ranks and the immersive exercise is the best way to have the group spread the knowledge while at the same time building the confidence of even the most intimidated in the team. 

 

We made a commitment to training even before we recognized the scale of the impact of social media. Now that that is clearer we need to constantly re-tool our approach, building on what works and not being afraid to reinvent the experience. 

 *these brand references are all clients of Ogilvy's

What will Social Business Training Look Like for Us in 2011?

We have trained hundreds of people within our company and our clients to use social media effectively not just in marketing and communications (marcom) but across the enterprise. We have designed and delivered curriculum over the past 5 years that has really served to empower both the 'thinkers' and 'doers' in social media. We have wrestled with and addressed the three key challenges with affecting change through training (not "won" as there is always room for improvement):

1. Deliver experiential training that goes beyond knowledge and information - we roll up our sleeves and use social media during training to solve business problems. Its not enough to understand our planning framework or the digital crisis management system we apply or how we combine social grassroots (e.g. Facebook) with content and experience design. We run trainings around business problems in a challenge setting. That drives understanding.  

2. Add scale via an always-on, on-demand system - we launched our online Social Media Belt Training resource this year. Team members from anywhere in the world can hone their expertise by accessing dozens of training modules to understand how to activate events via social media, ensure best-practice ethics in their work, measure performance and more. Now we can reach beyond the never-ending schedule of terrestrial trainings to reach even more people. 

3. Design everything around an accredited "belt system" - People need to have goals that they recognize. Business managers need them too. Our belt-system, defined 3 years ago, has been formalized and expanded. And its being tracked.

This has all generally worked. Now the temptation is to slightly improve upon this model and continue to deliver it. After all, this has accelerated our ability to have the most experienced and expert global network of social media strategists that I know of. (This is a claim I feel confident of and have worked hard to deliver. I am keenly aware that this may draw challenges from other expert groups out there and I look forward to that challenge).

That being said, it will not be enough going forward. In the spirit of Ogilvy's "divine discontent" we must reinvent our approach to training. There are three key pressures that cause me to rethink this approach. 

Three Persistent Pressures

We have focused our training on creating "white, red and black belts" in social media throughout the agency. Our never-ending goal is to maintain every agency team member as a "white belt" with a large group of red belts and a growing group of super-expert black belts who not only design programs but execute them, as well.

1. The expanding application of social media to business - IBM held their Social Media Business Summit, more brands than ever attended the WOMMA Summit and the Marketing50 event in Boston earlier this month brought C-suiters together to wrestle with a bigger impact on business than just marketing and communications innovations. Social media affects employee policy and communications, IP protection, IP development/innovation, legal and more. Our training must expand into these areas.

2.The leadership divide - current business leaders around the world continue to wrestle with a divide of those who believe and even understand digital and social media innovation and those that remain either skeptical or intimidated by the change. No single "executive digital immersion" workshop will solve eradicate the divide. Rather there is a cycle of learning and embracing that will continue for some years until the application of social and digital become so pervasive in business to the point that we will likely stop using the words "social" or "digital" to qualify initiatives. Everything will be social and digital. 

3. We are talking 'behavior change' not new "channels" - 90% of the gifts I purchased this holiday season were researched and purchased online. Some I bought through my smartphone. Almost all were ideas I heard from family, friends and peers at least 50% of which I heard about online. I paid attention to reviews on many of them. I Googled to find variants and colors I wanted. I never went to a mall. I didn't have the chance to watch much television as I was too busy. I read 5-6 magazines religiously yet none were key to my purchases except one (Monocle). Anyhow, you get the point. My behavior is much different this year that last. My influences are more personal and more complex at the same time. Advertising plays a role but is not primary the way it once was. This means that the entire marcom "industry" will be trying to change going forward to match that change. 

One of the highlights I took away from the recent experience Ogilvy had with the Hyper Island digital training that was also highlighted in a solid article in Fast Company. That highlight was captured by my colleague, Sean MacDonald who runs a digital strategy group at Ogilvy. His point was that there are so many great thinkers/creators in the marcom disciplines who are essentially intimidated by 'digital" and "social." If we could reduce that barrier - make them more confident through knowledge and experience -  we would all reap the benefits of their seasoned expertise and creativity. While that may simply sound like a justification for more training, it also means the existing "black belts" in social have to be a bit less exclusive about their expertise and quite a bit more willing to admit that making social media principles accessible to more seasoned marcom pros will unlock more social media creativity.  

These persistent pressures and our own experience training marketing and communications professionals over the past 5 years points me towards a new training priority next year: Sleeveless Social Business Training in 2011

more on that in the next post...

Hear From FTC on Privacy: WOMMA Webinar

The FTC has recently announced their intention to "guide" how marketers are using behavioral targeting and other forms of advertising to reach consumers online. Consumers have a right to privacy of their data and this may lead to some convention like a "do not follow" feature. We have a choice to either self-regulate or see what legislation might be cooked up to protect consumers. 

This week, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association has a webinar featuring Manas Mohapatra, Attorney, Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, FTC. Before freaking out about the implications, join the webinar to learn directly from the FTC. 

WOMMA Webinar - December 15

Exploring Privacy: What the FTC Wants You to Know When Building Your Social Platforms  

Cost: Free for Everyone

Date: Wednesday, December 15, 2010  Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (CST)

Speaker: Manas Mohapatra, Attorney, Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, FTC

Register Here

 

Background

• NY TIMES: F.T.C. Backs Plan to Honor Privacy of Online Users
• NY TIMES: Technology Outpaces Privacy (Yet Again)
• NY TIMES: Legislators Support Internet Privacy, but Question How to Achieve It

Five Types of Social Media Integration*

*And they are all harder than you think

We have been pushing our "integrated social media" for a few years now - probably sooner than we should have. When we said 'integrated' a year ago generally we meant integrating marketing, communications and customer service. Implicit in that is a second interpretation of integrated, this time to mean the combination of owned, paid and earned media strategies and platforms. That's what tends to get the biggest impact in social media from marcom programs. 

Now integration means something more to the top brands who have been experimenting and applying social media over the past few years. Both Jackie Huba and Jeremiah Owyang recently published posts on "the year of integration." Each has good experience consulting with major brands to call on. Jeremiah's recent survey with social media strategists at major brands revealed a natural conclusion - to get the most out of social media, brands need to integrate it across the enterprise. 

Five Types of Integration

Brands face five types of integration. They are all important and most are hard but necessary. 

• Paid, Owned, Earned 
• Global & local
• Across the Enterprise
• Inside & Outside the Organization
• Inside Every Job

Paid, Owned, Earned - When you combine the power behind your own Web site and Facebook page (insert brand social web properties here), with some purely social strategies like engaging influencers or inspiring a community to share with sympathetic advertising geared to increasing reach and presence you will have a more successful program. I am not dismissing the basics of having a great product or service and customer service with their ear to the ground. Those I take for granted. Once you move beyond the unshakable foundation towards pro-active marketing, an integrated approach works better every time. 

This model implies a commitment and routine of the marketing and communications teams within the company working together. Often these groups have a different reporting structure. Sometimes they are a bit competitive. Once in a while it is hard to guess they even work for the same company (or customer). 

The "ceneter fo excellence" federation model has worked to bring these disparate teams together. 

Global & Local -   Big multinationals in B2B and B2C often split budgets between the corporate center, often called 'global' and the local market. Since different regions of the world are developing social media differently and at different rates, not every local market feels the pressure to adopt social media marcom techniques....yet. I have seen many situations where the social media ambition of the corporate center whether based in the US, EU or China isn't matched by the local marketplace. And often the local marketplace has explicit or implicit power over the issue.

Most often the marcom budgets are bigger at the local or regional market level and the global team must rule by attraction versus fiat.   It's one thing to impose social media governance rules to limit the uncontrolled growth of brand Facebook pages. Most local markets will understand the issues there. It's another to pressure a local market to shift budget to social strategies when you are hammering them for sales targets at the end of the week. Nothing new there. If brands want to incent markets to change, they will need to give them room to do so and exhibit some global leadership that says 'this is important.'

Across the Enterprise - HR, IT, Legal, Finance and Product Development are just three examples beyond the marcom and customer service units that are increasingly affected by social media. If its not protecting intellectual property from some bone-headed blurt on a Facebook wall ("we finally had a breakthrough on our battery technology by using...), its wrestling with the demands of video-heavy network traffic on the IT backbone as people stream video for legitimate and illegitimate reasons. The social media guidelines we all created 5 years ago to tell our employees what they could and could not do via social media now seem quaint. 

If your marketing culture is to embrace social networks than it does no good to have your HR leadership restricting access to Facebook or YouTube on the network. Integration across these units is critical going forward. And yet this is where a lot of paralyzing conflict will arise. Just look at the crisis management scenarios when legal needs to restrict what employees say in relation to the crisis due to their litigation implications. Communications leadership often wants to get out and walk the walk of openness and plain-speak and just say "sorry, we screwed up.." but can't and stay in sync with legal. 

Inside & Outside the Organization - What does the staff at the brand do and what do their agencies do? Never mind which agency type. The question of what is handled internally versus via a partner is going to be a work in progress for years. Should agencies manage the Facebook wall? Early wisdom was that brands should not delegate the conversation to an outside party. Well, many agencies are as close to the Brand and the business as any staff member.

We have seen a demand in our Conversation Management services (which include Facebook Activation & Management) grow considerably. Now I believe this is temporary and that over the next 3-4 years, brands will settle on a staffing commitment to handle these responsibilities. But the question remains, how can you best integrate your internal and external resources in a medium that demands authenticity, responsiveness and transparency? 

Inside Every Job - We aggressively train everyone in the agency. Someday, we believe 'social' will be a part of everyone's job just as 'digital' has become. We will stop using the word 'social' as a qualifier for certain tasks and responsibilities, e.g. 'social strategy' will just be strategy. While we need ot make social media a part of everyone's job, we have a long road to get there. Still, brands are working hard to deliver the training that will help grow proficiency and confidence. 

Training goals, onboarding procedures and even hiring diagnostics that identify how socially savvy new recruits are will help get to this integration. 

This is the year of integration for many brands. I doubt we will all make equal progress against these 5 type of integration. I suspect it may break down like this for many:

2011 Enterprise Integration

• Paid, Owned, Earned: big integration gains 
• Global & local: Facebook progress but otherwise it's just a start
• Across the Enterprise: just a start
• Inside & Outside the Organization: somewhere in the middle
• Inside Every Job: its a start  

 

related posts:

The Power of Integrated Social Media: Video

Integrated Agencies: The Real Question

The Future of Advertising isn't Advertising - Take 2

Integrating Social Media into the Marcom Team

The Future of Advertising isn't Advertising - Take 2

Robin Grant at We Are Social wrote a post around a presentation he created on the evolving agency landscape. He named it "The Future of Advertising Isn't Advertising." He offers a view of how agencies (successful agencies, I presume) will re-assemble around social media. 

I think successful agencies will reassemble around business acceleration.  They will become relentless about learning and applying any discipline that can help their client meet today's and tomorrow's business challenges. Today that includes dramatically shifting from marketing mix-thinking to reflect true consumer behavior around social and digital. Tomorrow, it will likely be the effect social media will have on the entire enterprise. 

Relentless Reinvention

I love reinvention. Complacency kills. But so does fanaticism. We have been reinventing the agency for some time. First, we were pressed by the world transformation by everything that can be called 'digital.' Then, we needed to embrace all that is "social' once it became clear to everyone that the explicit and implicit changes brought about by it were irrevocable and great. Some of us were fanatical about the change and it sounded like we were throwing everything great that had been accomplished in marcom. That wasn't the way to go. Two things happened along the way:

1. we really changed
2. we realized that we will always be changing

Converging on Social Media
Robin makes the case that all of the traditional agency types - media, advertising, communications and digital - are converging around social media. The success stories will be formed around 5 expertises to define "a new agency." Here are Robin's ingredients: 

• An innate sensibility for social media
• A deep understanding of digital marketing
• Using PR techniques evolved from PR
• Strategic, editorial and creative talent
• Research and analysis expertise

I actually believe that the next success stories will be driven by three principles:

1. they will be organized around influence vs. the marketing mix
2. they will be fully integrated in all the ways that matter
3. they will mix the rigor of mature disciplines with innovation around new ones 

Organized around influence - Shopper marketing; social CRM; integrated strategy (owned, earned & paid media), environmental marketing, cultural marketing - these are all disciplines that emerge in response to how customers behave and think - how they are influenced. No doubt that interruptive advertising is no longer the 'blunt instrument' in the top of everyone's toolbox. We are now expressing a lot more empathy towards consumers and constituents and finding better ways to earn their attention and involvement (and ultimately their business). How people are influenced - from advertising to consumer-based earned media to just-in-time utility delivered to POS - is more important than the traditional marketing mix org structure

Fully integrated - Agencies are a business model. Adaptive teams are an operational model. Adaptive teams are assembled and adjusted based upon what it will take to solve the client problem or accelerate their business. These experts are pulled together based upon their contribution to the solution and client. They may belong to other tribes for the sake of discipline development (my folks come from the social media "tribe") and they come together to work as a team. Agencies who do everything possible to allow for the friction-less formation of these teams will win. Big or small agency is a pointless argument (except I think "big agencies" have an advantage again so long as they really make team work the priority. After all, they have the best experts from many disciplines who understand how integration works).

Mix of rigorous discipline and innovation - No doubt that social media significantly changes the game for brands. But it doesn't burn all previous marcom logic to the ground. What we need now is a mix of the best of marketing and communications disciplines - key skills like reputation management, CRM, interactive usability - and new POVs born from social media and the behaviors it serves.  

The New Kind of Agency

So if these are the principles, then I would define the following ingredients to form "the New Agency:"

Social Brand Management - brands have a new side to them. Its how they behave on Facebook. It's what they do to provide more value like delivering utility or entertainment. It may not turn brand management on its head but it certainly requires new skills and insights.    

Blended Strategy - you have your blended teams and now your blended strategy. It should be a strategy to accelerate business. It will include marketing, communications, customer service, sales and more.  

Customer Experience Design & Management - whether in a Web site, facebook app, or physical storefront, nothing could be more important today than the customer experience. In loyalty studies, customers' crave simplicity. If we can make their experience to checkout 5% easier, we have really helped. 

Conversation Management - okay, call it community management, I don't care. I do think our ability to manage conversations with communities of customers and stakeholders will be key to clients and agencies for the foreseeable future.

Always-on Research and Insight - from cgm listening to search intent modeling to polling and more, we have added a collection of fast, responsive research techniques to our everyday work. 

Performance Marketing - nothing happens without great measurement. We will finally enter the age of dashboards where we are able to refine all of the bazillion things we can measure into simple, actionable views. 

Adaptive Team Model - we will expend significant energy to reducing barriers to cross-discipline team work, enhancing how we work virtually and how creative gets done in a networked universe where many more people are 'creative.'

Efficient Production - we have to respond to business needs for lower cost and quick "operationalizing" anything that works. 

Robin's got a good view of the agency of the future. I have added some things that come from our own transformation. There will be no more "ad agencies" in the future. Those that were defined by advertising in the past will become the new agency lest they be reduced to buying boxed sets of Madmen and drinking gin martinis till they pass out on a Monday night. 

Rethinking the Marketing Spend Towards Driving Advocacy

This month's Harvard Business Review blasts "Social Media and the New Rules of Branding" in that corny laundry detergent typeface that folks use to connote, well, branding. David Edelman from McKinsey writes an anchor article in the issue. Clearly, we are starting to see the depth of McKinsey's interest in social media between this, their June 2009 research paper on how companies were benefitting from Web 2.0, and last months presentation from McKinsey at our WOMMA Summit. They clearly believe that social media has a significant business impact and are gearing up to counsel clients accordingly. 

Trick is that so much of social media strategy is informed by execution. It is near impossible to simply deliver strategy without the capacity to execute, refine strategy and iterate. But that doesn't mean that McKinsey has it wrong. In fact, the HBR article has a lot right.

The Consumer Decision Journey

David and his colleagues challenge the traditional one-dimensional read on the sales funnel. (i.e. where you see the funnel as a linear progression from awareness to conversion and loyalty. They offer their own view which they argue reflects consumers real experience. They have their Consumer Decision Journey while we at Ogilvy have Customer Journeys.  Both are doing the same thing - paying attention to the influences on purchase behavior and, increasingly,  advocacy. Their model breaks the consumer experience into 4 stages:

• Consider
• Evaluate
• Buy
• Enjoy, Advocate, Bond

They argue that marketers should not waste energy (and money) by allocating spending across media. Rather they should focus on stages in the decision journey - those stages where they can have the best impact.According to David, their research reveals that 70-90% of spend goes to advertising and retail promotions to reach consumers at "Consider " and "Buy." Consumers can best be influenced at the Evaluate or Enjoy, Advocate, Bond stages. The power of word of mouth or advocacy in this "influence" is large:

"In many categories the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else's advocacy. Yet many marketers focus on media spend (principally advertising) rather than on driving advocacy"

Imagine what might happen if the largest part of an integrated marcom plan was geared to drive and amplify advocacy...

4 Takeaways from the 2010 WOMMA Summit

Just back from an all too brief stop at this year's WOMMA Summit and I wanted to share 4 quick takeaways:

1. Big Brands are sounding serious about social media/word of mouth marketing

There are some terrific folks leading the charge at their company's equivalent of the social media 'center for excellence' - Petra Neiger/Cisco and Ekaterina Walter/Intel to name just two. They have identified a framework for applying and governing social media at an enterprise level. They each have some version of the "7 Responsibilities of the Center for Excellence" on their agenda. They have a system for training, delivering 'best practice' consulting or solutions,  have determined how to govern use of social networks that actually support the business. In most cases they have made preliminary bets on technologies that can help them scale like listening technologies and social CMS systems like Buddy Systems and/or Vitrue. 

I say "sounding serious" vs. getting serious only because most companies are dramatically underspending in social media in terms of staffing and overall budget commitment. I see many indicators that that will change in 2011. Brands will not only support the small social media strategist team within the enterprise, they will start staffing and funding at appropriate levels.

2. There really is a difference between a historically ad-centric view and a public relations view of social media

I live and work in a completely integrated universe at Ogilvy. We talk about solving client business problems. Discipline expertise is key yet social media clearly transcends any one group. So, I am naturally inclined to want to be a little "blind" about where social media specialists come from. Still, I have been reminded recently that there are some prevailing attitudes towards social media depending upon which discipline you are steeped in. PR or communications professionals who really embrace social media tend to put a high premium on using the discipline to drive true "earned media" (aka word of mouth). Advertising professionals often tend to look at the paid, owned, earned triptych as equal contributors to driving metrics indicative of engagement which is on the path - hopefully - to increased consideration or even preference. 

3. Value metrics are moving from incidental to explicit

We have good data and good models for understanding the business value of social media and word of mouth marketing. It is not just marcom campaign performance but lifetime customer value, recruiting and retention, reputation and more. Between our own efforts at Ogilvy, the slide that MKinsey showed at the WOMMA 2010 Summit correlating word of mouth to sales (for Sony) and the collection of information gathered by WOMMA in the Metrics Guidebook - we have accumulated enough valuable models and results to drive sound business decisions. Problem is that it is still hard. Brands who want to bridge the delta between their conviction that social is important and their willingness to spend will have to invest time and energy aligning to the best models. There is no shortcut. 

4. A community of practitioners is priceless

I also learned the value of participating in a community of folks who are committed and experienced in a discipline fueled by passion and brains. In the daily grind of getting work done and the assault from so-called social media pundits everyday, I lose sight of how important it is to connect with the true experts in the field. That's the biggest benefit to membership in WOMMA. That's why my team will also attend WOMMA's School on WOM in the Spring (disclosure - Ogilvy is a governing member and I continue to serve on the board)

Brands Get Personal to Drive Word of Mouth

"Personal Media" used to be a synonym for social media. That fell by the wayside a few years ago. Still, so much of social media is captivating because we reveal our personal interests and opinions, allow and invite personal connections with others and, in general, look for a more personal approach in our communications. 

Brands should not lose sight of this when using social media and trying to get ideas to scale. Royal Dutch Airline, KLM, knows this. Here's how The Next Web (great resource) describes the program:

"When passengers check in at KLM’s Foursquare locations, the KLM Surprise team then uses social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to find out information about the passenger...The KLM Surprise team then uses this information to come up with a personalized gift to surprise the passenger with. The team follows up after surprising a passenger by monitoring the conversation generating on social networks by that person and their friends. They also take photos of the people they have surprised and post them to the KLM Facebook page."

@AmericanExpress (cl) is known to do the "twitter fairy" from time to time. That's when a brand listens to customers talk about their experience with a brand and surprise a customer with a personally-relevant gift (e.g. "I saw you redeemed points for a trip to NYC, here are 2 tix to BonJovi on us..."). That the surprise is made public through facebook pictures or other amplification of social media adds reach and if done well, is not disingenuous. This is a brilliant way to generate high-quality word of mouth and is a great part of an overall strategy in social media. However, it will die under its own weight if mistaken for a stand-alone strategy.

Does it scale?

Naysayers can kill a great tactic by insisting that everything deliver on all of the needs of a marketing plan. They would criticize these types of programs saying they cannot scale to a big enough program to have a positive impact on business. Public displays of customer appreciation can easily reach more than the customer, herself.  Other Twitter followers see the Twitter fairy do her thing. Other KLM customers in the terminal or on Facebook see a brand getting personal and caring. Still, that's not te type of scale that hard core marketers want to see. 

Then advertise. Then build a great social media strategy that includes the Surprise team and social grassroots (our approach to activating large communicties to 'care to share'). Add scale through complimentary tactics and ideas. Dont make every individual idea carry all of the water for a program. 
The best, most effective social media is integrated social media. The best strategy weaves together the complex strengths of different social media platforms and behaviors. Offering a genuine personal touch is one of the great things brands can do thanks to the amount of personal preferences and tastes we are all sharing out there. 

Make getting personal part of your strategy. 

The State of the Enterprise Social Media Strategist

Today, Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group released a research paper, Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist. I, along with many colleagues in social media marketing, were interviewed to offer a snapshot of the social media strategist in major B2C and B2B enterprise. The report offers great insight from a certain vantage point within business - namely the guy or gal holding the social media title or responsibility.  It's interesting as I had participated in a much higher-level forum hosted by Jon Iwata at IBM for C-Suite executives two weeks ago on social business and its impact on the enterprise. That was a closed door session and I will only reveal that many senior executives take social media very seriously even if they do not have a complete vision as to how it will impact their business. 

3 Key Parts of the "Corporate Social Media Strategist" 

Help Desk vs. Scalable Social Business Programs: Jeremiah contends that the Corporate Social Media Strategist has a decision point where s/he can either fall underwater with a growing set of tactical requests they cannot hope to fulfill within the organization or they can reach "escape velocity" where they start to lead some significant change. I am not surprised to hear this. I would argue that more and more of their bosses are coming to the conclusion that they must double-down on their social commitment and make more senior, disciplined hires to really reap the benefit of social media. Some of their first hires may be swimming in a pool of too many requests and may just not have the business experience to work 'soft power' within the organization to overcome it. 

The report outlines the skills needed at various stages in the development of social media within the organization. It may be that the evangelism that is helpful at the "Awakening" phase does not serve the strategist needed at the maturing phases. There the business really needs a disciplined business person who can align social media enthusiasm with business reality. 

The Hub and Spoke Model Dominates: There is a great summary of the organizational models for different groups. We, ourselves, see a consistent phenomena - the "center for excellence." This is almost always a matrix federation from different departments brought together by their common interest in social media. "Center for excellence" is essentially a hub and spoke solution. Since adoption of social media requires so much education and interdisciplinary collaboration to really work, the "hub" model is a workable short term model (3-5 years?). 

Hiring Standards Are Sound Benchmarks for Success: If you want to set up your organization for "scalable social media programs," the report offers 10 useful guidelines for hiring the right person. No major enterprise needs the social media "evangelist" in my humble opinion. That ship has sailed. They need someone who can navigate the matrix, make advances and inroads through "soft power," integrate social media with traditional business functions and more. This is the last section in the report and offers a great checklist for business leaders. 

The report is very useful. It gives us all a mid-level view of the state of enterprise social media not just the job of the corporate social media strategist. The C-suite may have a different view. A growing number of business leaders know that social media will affect their business in big ways and are actively searching for ways and people who can up their game and go beyond social media experimentalism.  

Report: Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist: Be Proactive or Become Social Media Help Desk

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.