With 139 million users in Asia an more than 600 million user globally, Facebook is no longer just a social networking site. Facebook and other social networks have evolved into major revenue streams for some of the world's most innovative brands
Less than one year ago Mark Zuckerberg said social commerce "is the next area to really blow up” and many brands have moved quickly into that space.
Fan counts are giving way to sales numbers, offering excellent case studies for a new industry. There are a range of tools, software, and analytics has sprung up, allowing marketers looking to convert fans to customers.
On Thursday, July 21 at noon Hong Kong time you can join Ogilvy and Mather's award-winning Asia-Pacific social media learn for a 30 minute presentation on how brands have cracked Facebook as a way to grow their business.
As always in these lively sessions, we will take questions during and after the presentation.
Hosted by Ogilvy's Thomas Crampton, Brian Giesen and John Stauffer, this session will focus on:
- How to Use Facebook as a Sales Channel;
- Case Studies from Brands are Using F-Commerce;
- Strategy for Building a Virtual Storefront on your Facebook Page;
Brainstorms are a daily part of life in a creative agency. There are many different ways to get participants thinking creativity. Most involve a nurturing moderator that helps ideas take shape without fear of ridicule or "that won't work" mentality. (In fact, one of our models asks participants to suggest ideas that, if actually implemented, would result in getting fired.) These techniques help getting the creative juices flowing and reduce the risk inherent in brainstorming and offering up new ideas.
In my seven years in working in agencies - most at Ogilvy Washington & Ogilvy Hong Kong - I've learned that all the brainstorm tools, tricks, and tips fall flat if you don't have a rich and interesting experiences outside of the office.
The trick is to turn all those experiences into inspiration for creative thinking inside the office. Creative Directors can always spot people who don't have a life. Every TV spot pitched takes place in a conference room: "so we open with a group of people in a meeting.." {Disclaimer, having a life as I've defined it below is hard work. Like everyone else, I fall off the rails, get lazy or sit glued to my blackberry.}
Here are four tips and sources of creative inspiration my own life:
1) Enlist a Trusted Curator
Take a look at an average week on your browser's history. Chances are there's a pattern to the sites you read. Many of trends in social media have brought us farther apart, not closer according to the authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks who have tracked the spread of ideas across social networks. Take a look at this map of political blogs in the United States.
A diversity of opinion is critical. Find a curator you trust to avoid this chasm and find sources of inspiration beyond your comfort zone. My go-to curator is The Browser. They hand pick great content from sites I usually read like The New Yorker, Slate and sites I usually don't like The Dabbler and Slow Travel Berlin, two sources currently featured on today's headlines.
2) Creative Moments in History
I just finished reading Team of Rivals, a look at the Lincoln presidency through the lens of his rivals and the very same people he invited to join his cabinet. It's a lengthy 700 page book covering his early days as a child through his assassination and funeral. Most of the book is based on primary sources - speeches and interviews during his years as President. Lincoln was widely known as a incredible storyteller. This went well beyond camp fire tales. Read over this passage from a serious speech during the debate about whether Slavery should be allowed the "new territories", March 1860:
If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. [Laughter.] I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. [Applause.] Much more if I found it in bed with my neighbor's children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. [Great laughter.] But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide! [Prolonged applause and cheers.]
That is just the case! The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not. It does not seem as if there could be much hesitation what our policy should be! [Applause.]
The metaphoric device - using snakes and humans to illustrate slavery - influenced the debate and made a complicated and controversial idea a bit more approachable for the common man. This skill, the ability to draw a new relationship between two previously unlinked things, is at the core of developing a thoughtful insight. The more we're exposed to examples of abstract, metaphoric thinking, the better our own muscles function. This is at the core art of storytelling and there's no better way to exercise this than reading fiction or non-fiction featuring master storytellers.
3) Art & Literature
I am the farthest thing from an expert. I try, though, to expose myself to as much as possible. I enjoy putting on those touristy headphones and strolling around museums learning about the history and stories behind the exhibits.
I saw this piece last week at the Hong Kong Museum of Art: Diary of a Cloud by Tony Ng. I have no way of knowing how this will come into play in my work on behalf of our clients at Ogilvy, but I'm almost positive I'm a richer person having walked a few laps around this (may need to click through to Youtube) piece.
Keep an eye on the artists and aspiring novelists within your own social network. They serve as early indicators in shifts in culture, and history has proven time and time again they're the first to revolt, protest, challenge widely held ideas.
4) PIllar of Expertise
There also needs to be something else - a specific and deep area of expertise on which you can draw in thinking creativity. The web fosters a spirit of pancakes: knowing a little bit about everything. All seems knowable through Google/ Baidu. At Ogilvy there are Rugby fanatics, theater majors, poker players, pianists, etc. I am addicted to Documentaries. Through itunes and Snag Films, I get access to a great collection of free and paid documentaries. These are 90 minutes teleportations into the life of another human, and I draw on these experiences in creative thinking. Stand on a tall pillar of expertise for something you enjoy.
Everyone approaches the creative process differently. These are a few of my sources of inspiration and some ways I strive for a richer life both outside and inside the office.
Brands with markets in China know the standard social media sites do not apply. Facebook and Twitter are blocked and one of the most common Facebook alternatives cited in China is Kaixin.
Do not make the mistake of thinking this is a suitable replacement for a single point of entry, mass appeal social network. It's far from it. In fact, Sina Weibo is likely a much richer alternative, it's often described as the Twitter equivalent though the feature set and character limit for Chinese puts this site at the center of the SNS world in China.
Take a closer look at Kaixin's page views and you'll likely want to reconsider the sns if it's your first and only port of call in China:
I just wrapped up a great week at Ogilvy, Syndey working with and training a new batch of Digital Influence hires. While there, I also sat down for an Ogilvy Red Chair interview with Ogilvy's Sam North. Full interview below:
We've been spending a great deal of time thinking about the idea of Friends of Friends and the implications for brands. Not only you, but your 150 (on average) Facebook friends or your contacts on LinkedIn. This is the power of social media for brands that allow messages and ideas to travel from our core fans to their networks via word of mouth.
We know, from research, that this model of moving branded content around the social web via social networks is more effective than directly from the brand. This is the power of Sponsored Stories which puts news feed content aimed at FoF in Facebook advertising. Effectively, plugging acts of engagement, transforming it into content and then publishing that as a Facebook book.
Here's a video from Facebook that brings this idea to life. As it always the case in new products from Facebook, there's a major privacy issue. This time, it's the fact that users cannnot, at present, opt-out of this. So, check into Startbucks, and Facebook can advertise that fact to your friends whether you want it or not.
As a strategist for our social media business within Ogilvy, I'm often tasked with destilling huge amounts of consumer data into the few trends that matter for a client and bring them to life in a compelling narrative.
In a real way the best strategists in this space have evolved into storytellers able to use social media as a predictive tool spotting trends before competitors. The ideas developed then need to be sold in at the high levels of company. This process usually involves many iterations as agencies and brands calibrate the plan and build consensus. This is especially true for programs that touch multiple disciplines.
This recent clip from National Geographic is an elegant example of this trends + story telling formula:
Lazy journalists beware. There's a new service, Churnalism, that spots suspiciously similar news articles and press releases. The software compares company press releases and news articles, showing the percentage of cut, pasted and character overlap.
This is all the more reason why seeding and pay per post schemes will never work to build sustained word of mouth in social media.
First, web users are incredible savvy in spotting canned responses or misleading company representatives. We see this all the time in affinity networks, especially ones in which users are likely to have a shared expertise. Outsiders with a radical and unfounded views are policed by the group's natural influencers. Check out Automakers Facebook pages, especially sports cars, for examples of this in action.
Second, as search engines and third party software like Churnalism grow, we'll be able to sift through the army of reposts, bots, and fake accounts and sort out credible strangers from the efforts of "seeding"
Imagine a time in which the same sort of tool could identify Facebook users who've reposted the same complaint 35 times before on the same wall or those have posted the identical comment in five different brand pages.
A recent study published in McKinsey found that 80% of revenue growth from global brands can be attributed to decisions about where to compete, leaving 20% attributed to how. As any marketer can probably attest, and as the authors say, "the exact opposite of the allocation of time and effort in a typical strategy-development process." The authors encourage granular segmentation, adding "think 30 to 50 segments rather than the more typical 5 or so."
If we apply this same discipline to social media then the question becomes: how can marketers move from 3 or 4 tier segmentation model to the 30 or 50 level?
Reverse Engineering Through Social Media
Traditional marketing models prescribe that we divvy up our segements into halves and then halved again and halved again until we have no more data at our disposal. Consider a FMCG brand that first decides on women in the US, and then women 25-34, and then women with household income of less than $75,000. We've gone from planet earth's six billion people down to a few million in just three strategic decisions. That was easy. But we'll never get to 50 segments this way.
Instead, we should ask ourselves who, exactly, is the ideal end user? Creative writers are taught to develop an imaginary "ideal reader" as a technique to hone their prose (as an aside, authors from Ian McEwan to Stephen King have talked about their own 'ideal reader' in interviews and it's a fascinating doorway into the mind of a novelist.)
Social media allows us to not only imagine but identify a real person who can serve as a model "generation zero" in our word of mouth modeling. From there, strategists can backtrack, uncovering likely ripples in a person's social network. If you've found a person, a marathon runner and nike shoe enthusiast, who is that person likely to influence?
Twitter: who follows them, what lists do they appear on, who are the most common re-tweets? Klout / Research.ly
Blogs: what sites are listed on the blog roll, what are the most common inbound links? Yahoo Site Explorer
As you collect and try to make sense of the data, you'll uncover a narrow sliver of influencers that likely share common attributes such as location (Twitter list of runners in Portland Oregon) age (college running club on Ning), or experience (Couch to 5K Facebook group). This same person is probably has other friends, non-runners, that don't matter to you as a marketer. That's fine, you're looking for that one network to serve as a micro-segement.
Paul Adams writes that a person's social network is not simply a massive party of friends but rather a more nuanced collection of many groups, typically 4-6 independently operating from one other. I think it's this level of granularity that will yield meaningful results as we
Why Should Brands Care? With traffic to search engines now overtaken by social networks, much of your audience is likely to encounter a brand message in his/her Facebook newsfeed than in a search engine. And, even in that search engine, that same ideal consumer is likely to see content from the network you've uncovered in the search results page.
I recently mapped out my LinkedIn contacts using a new visualization tool from LinkedIn Labs. While looking at the chart, I was reminded of Paul Adam's Real Life Social Network research suggesting an individual typically has 4-6 generally separate groups of friends. He made the case for a deeper level of categorization, beyond the generic "friend" level on Facebook. Looks like the same theory holds true for LinkedIN as I can identify at least five groups of contacts:
Ogilvy North America - this is big hive of activity on the left and where I've spent the previous two years meeting colleagues and traveling to different Ogilvy offices. Just north of that core hub, there's what I've labeled as Ogilvy Asia: still within the same agency but you can see a growing collection of networked contacts in places like Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh and Kuala Lumpur.
Also clustered together is my network of college friends from the University of Maryland this is a small group as most people I know didn't start using LinkedIn until after graduation. There's also a tight network - if slightly distant - collection of colleagues from a former agency, Stanton Communications. Sandwiched in among these groups is a loose smattering of what I defined as Influencers: individual people that I've come to know and respect as thought leaders in the marketing and social space online.
Finally, there are the outliers - people I can't quite classify and that LinkedIn Labs doesn't seem to be able to make much sense of either.
LinkedIn is also unique in the sense that users are typically clustered by their jobs which serve as crystal clear boundaries (e.g you either work at Ogilvy, or you do not). I suspect a similar map for my Facebook friends would reveal a more chaotic hive of activity.
Why? Because, if you're like me, you've never emailed a Facebook friend to say "Listen, Derrick, we're letting you go from "College Friends Inc", instead you'll be interning at "Post-College Flag Football Team". Come, let's meet who you'll be working with." While LinkedIN's networks are predominately employer driven, my contacts on Facebook represent a more nuanced groups with some people straddling between two or even three categories of friends.
