360DigitalInfluence

An item that clients often ask for when rolling out a campaign, is the obligatory checkbox, that says Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter is not the gift that keeps on giving, unlike services such as Slideshare.

Allow me to clarify. Client asks you to roll out a campaign, there’s an event, the event hashtag goes crazy, you’re trending on Twitter, client loves you. Three days later, you do a search and find NOTHING. Zilch. Nada. That’s because Twitter search does not persist. So when people go looking for information after the event, you get no link backs to your campaign site, and there’s no ‘word on the twittersphere about your campaign’. Not ideal right?

Now just to clarify what I meant about Slideshare. If you upload any presentations from the event to Slideshare, it will live there and your content will be searched for and found ad infinitum.

OK, so the headline is a little bit controversial and a bit of bait. But here’s the dealio. What you want to do, is aggregate the hash tag stream on an open, search engine friendly platform. That might be a WordPress site as an aggregator, Tumblr or some other bespoke system, this has to be done if you want the conversations to be found down the track.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for the prompt to commit this post to paper. He talks about using a live blogging application which is great idea. This works well if you have an official blogger at the event. What a campaign aggregator will do though is capture everything on the hashtag (and any other social media) not just what your official blogger is doing.

Facebook’s market muscle is being flexed again as it now muscles in on Foursquare and Gowalla. Location based services for brands and people looks like it might be rolled out as soon as this month. According to Mashable, the social networking site will mimic Foursquare’s ability to ‘check-in’ to different locations.

Given sheer user numbers, it looks like Facebook will drive adoption to these services faster than Foursquare ever will.

If you recall, Facebook has already taken the:

• @replies feature from Twitter
• Dropped the ‘is’ like Twitter
• Live status updates from Friendfeed (which it bought)

And so continues the rise of the Facebook juggernaut.

Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence is looking for a Digital Strategist for our growing Sydney office!

The Digital Strategist is expert at evaluating a client situation and developing a comprehensive digital strategy that includes social media outreach, online marketing, development of user experiences, search visibility programs and innovative ways to engage people. He/she must be fluent in all aspects of social media. The ideal candidate:

• has 1 - 2 years agency or in-house experience;
• is an active blogger or active in social media;
• is a project management pro
• can work under pressure.

Experience can be in either a public relations or advertising agency, but fundamental to the role is participation in social media. You will be given training how to develop social media strategies the Ogilvy 360 DI way that provides the best value for your clients.

In return, you’ll get to work with some of the biggest brands in world, a very cool team global team, and great social workplace.

To apply, contact Brian Giesen (@bdgiesen, brian.giesen@ogilvy.com.au) and Graham White (@gwhiteoz, graham.white@ogilvy.com.au)

We have been fooling around with “What does the internet think?” a little bit in here for a bit of fun. And with the big news of the day being the Microsoft Windows 7 launch I thought I would see what the internet thought about Windows 7. Little did I know I would uncover a massive conspiracy.

My first search I used the fastest method, and asked the Internet to use Google only, and here is the result (click for a full size):

I thought to myself, “Gee, I didn’t think that the internet was that apathetic about Windows 7!”

So I thought I’d rerun the search based on Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing:

I smelt a rat. So the final search I took the slowest option and checked against ALL search engines:

Is there something fishy going on at Googleplex?

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Disclosure: Microsoft is an Ogilvy client, however they haven’t paid for or endorsed this post, but this blogger thought the results were extremely amusing. This blogger doesn’t really believe that Google is tampering with the scores… or are they?

I’ve been thinking lately that we could potentially use social media monitoring tools to prevent suicides and mass murders. The idea struck me as I was working with some clients on a couple of issues / crisis management projects lately.

In the midst of the hurley burley of crisis mode, a news story caught my eye­. Killer George Sodini went berserk in a Pennsylvania gym and killed three, wounding nine before turning the gun on himself. The thing about it is, he blogged about doing it. That’s when the idea sparked.

So I did some digging

It’s not the first time, that social media was used by a killer or a suicide victim to declare their intentions. With a quick search, I found Paul Zolezzi, a model who declared he was going to kill himself on Facebook and did. More interestingly though, I found Hsu Yu-sheng.

Hsu Yu-sheng

Hsu is a gay and lesbian rights activist in Taiwan, who on August 6 wrote a farewell note on his blog in English. After seeing the note, readers of his blog, launched a full scale effort to save him. Friends and strangers alike, thousands of people banded together, to try to track him down and others posted kind comments to his blog.

Police arrived at Hsu’s place just in time and saved his life.

The idea

We use social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 to listen to conversations on the blogosphere and elsewhere to protect brands. It’s not a stretch to deploy these tools to protect people.

How it would work

1. Radian6 set up to listen for a list of keywords
2. Suspect posts are parsed through to a heuristic analysis engine to further determine the sentiment of the post. Radian6 is has a automatic Sentiment engine built in, but we need one that would be tuned to suicidal/homicidal sentiments
3. Results that come up positive there are alerted to the on duty psychiatrist for an assessment and to alert the relevant authorities

There would be many issues that would have to be dealt with to make the system viable, feasible and workable and even then it would never be a certainty. What it would be is another tool in kitbag to tackle an extremely complex and difficult problem.