360DigitalInfluence

Thanks very much to the nearly 300 people from across Asia who dialled into our webinar on “Social Media for B2B Companies”, hosted in partnership with the Wall Street Journal Asia and Citrix Online.

As promised we have uplosed the presentation deck to Slideshare and have updated to include links to a few great additional resources that you can use to help your business get started. These links include the following:

• Ogilvy On: Social Media for Crisis Management  
• Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business
• Ogilvy On: Facebook for Business
• Social Media in Asia Presentation
• APAC Statistics and Research (Asia Digital Map Blog)

Over the next week, the 360 Digital Influence team from across Australia and Asia will be sharing some of their favourite social media sites, applications, personalities and tools that are worth bookmarking. Sites that are, so to speak, delicious.

I’ll kick off the series by talking about Listorious - a new site that’s focussed on a topic that’s all the rage right now - Twitter lists. As you likely have heard by now, Twitter recently rolled out a “lists” feature that allows you to publish lists of people to follow on Twitter, categorised by topic. Listorious is simply a directory of “awesome” (their word not mine!) lists on Twitter and is a great place to look if you’re interested in hearing what people who talk about a specific issue or topic have to say.

Here are a few things about Listorious that are worth checking out:

• Tags: You can browse Twitter lists by tags
• Top 140 Lists: Organised by the most-followed Twitter lists and includes names you know such as Robert Scoble, Pete Cashmore & Tim O’Reilly
• Twitter Profile: The Listorious team regularly Tweets great new lists, so this is a good account to follow
• Australians: Heaps of Australian-related lists (e.g., Perth Twitterers, Awesome Aussies, etc.)
• Asia: Same for Asia (e.g., HongKong News, Mandarin-Culture, etc.)

And, if you’ve taken some initiative and created a killer list yourself, you can submit your list to Listorious as well.

Whether you are brand manager, marketing director or sales person, you will probably have heard the term “listening”. Although many understand what it is, few truly know how to effectively “listen” to customers they care about, and even less about how “listening” can be done powerfully in the social media process.

Tim Ho raised a good point in his post predicting that social media listening will replace tele-marketing and consumer surveys - which I believe will happen soon! - simply because insights derived from social media listening posts would be so much more accurate than consumer surveys. Think about it, I am more likely to spend more time telling my friends about myself than a stranger. As a typical Hong Konger, I despise random calls - they are irritating, tele-marketers talk like robots, and I feel disrespected. I might give tele-marketers 5 min. max listening and responding to them when I’m in a good mood - afterall, tele-marketers too are just trying to earn a living. But with social-media listening, there are no tele-marketers - simply because we’re eavesdropping and not questioning.

Whether you agree with this, we are more likely to tell our friends the truth, disclose more information to them and be happy to spend more time interacting with them - than people we don’t know. By eaves-dropping on online conversations brands can save an awful lot of manpower just to dial those cold calls, and results would also be more accurate. More importantly with “bloggers” where you can track them down, and do followups. With cold calls, telemarketers have numbers - But what’s their name? Age? Job? Interest? No one would give away such personal information to strangers. Remember with Social Media Engagements, “listening” is only is only beginning step. After targeting the influential netizens you want to engage with, “FRM” (Friend-Relationship-Management) says the rest of it.

According to yesterday’s SCMP article “Telemarketers to Police Themselves” - just a 1 percent success rate of the average 491,459 cold calls in Hong Kong per day would generate good business for a brand. That’s 99% of the time effectively down the drain - very inefficient in my perspective. From a psychological perspective, social media listening beats tele-marketing by miles. We are more honest to our friends than strangers. Economically social media listening beats telemarketing by continents!

Pat Law, a digital strategist based in our Singapore office, was recently featured in Her World Magazine as a leading “digerati diva” in Asia Pacific. It’s a great article and, in a five-page spread, it shows why we’re pretty lucky to have Pat on the Singapore team. You can read an excerpt of the article on Pat Law here.

Join me, Josh Mehlman (Editor, NETT Magazine) and Suzi Dafnis (Community Director, Australian Businesswomen’s Network) and find out!

Next week Wednesday, we’ll be running a 1-hour session on Facebook for Business.  Here are the details:

Lunch+Learn Webinar
Title:    Using Facebook to Build Your Brand
Date:    Wednesday, 14 Oct 2009
Time:    12 noon Australian EDST

REGISTER HERE!

During the session, we’ll be giving practical tips and covering:

• 5 ways to a rapid-start strategy in Facebook
• How to engage your Facebook community
• Real-life examples of how businesses of all sizes use Facebook to build their brands
• And more…

Earlier today I had the opportunity to be part of a Webinar that covered how IT managers could use Twitter to help solve some of their day-to-day challenges. The Webinar was sponsored by our client Citrix Online and featured some great speakers, including Leslie Nassar of Fake Stephen Conroy fame, Richard Binhammer from Dell, Glenn Dobson of Citrix, and Nate Cochrane of Haymarket Media.

I kicked off the presentation with a quick 101 of Twitter, how to use it to achieve a specific business or communications objective, and how to get started in Twitter in a strategic way using a 3-step methodology:

1. Follow:  First start off by following people who are relevant to whatever it is you’re talking about on Twitter (e.g., IT staff, your customers, etc.)
2. Create:  Tweet on a regular basis and share things that are going to be of interest to the people you’re talking to and, equally importantly, on-topic (or at least of interest).
3. Engage: Once you are following people and listening to what they’re saying, are Tweeting on a regular basis (creating content), then engage by replying to others by asking questions, re-tweeting people who are saying interesting things, etc.

Based on a quick audience poll that we did early on into the Webinar, it seems that nearly 3/4 of IT managers here in Australia are considering using Twitter to address IT issues - but not currently using it for that purpose.  What was most interesting to me and the other panelists, however, was that 6 percent of the audience were using Twitter “unofficially” - in other words going out and solving IT issues that customers are having on a personal basis.

Here are some interesting discussions and take-aways from today’s session:

• @ksantolin: #twitter4it @richardatdell believes that existing code of conduct and employment contracts should cover social media confidentiality
• @ksantolin: #twitter4it dedicate certain personnel to answer queries on twitter (eg helpdesk) as part of their usual helpdesk duties @glenndobson
• @MartyAtDell: @bdgiesen said in #twitter4it webinar that the Australian growth rate of Twitter outpaces other countries
• @adriankhall: #twitter4it - follow; create; engage - customer service
• Dell’s @DellOutlet Twitter account is driving sales and revenue on new product at Dell.com according to @richardatdell
• IT departments should skill up staff on handling issues, the same way they deal with people by phone and email

And for all who are interested, you can download the full Twitter for IT Managers presentation deck over on Slideshare.

Rohit Bhargava and I teamed up with Senator Kate Lundy to present a half-day government Web 2.0 workshop last Friday in Canberra, Australia. The Gov 2.0 workshop was sponsored by Frocomm Communications and drew more than 50 government and non-profit communications and marketing professionals.  You can download our presentations here:

Brian Giesen |  Rohit Bhargava |  Senator Kate Lundy

If you’re someone who looks after communications for a federal or state government agency here in Australia or across Asia Pacific, here are 15 reasons why you should be moving toward including social media into your communications programmes starting now and for 2010. Here they are, in no particular order:

1 .Citizens Trust Each Other:  Today, Australians are trusting each other more than what they read in a newspaper or see in an advertisement. Faith in a trusted “citizen stranger” is on the rise.

2. The Postal Rule. Joanne McGovern of GovGab once said at a Government Web 2.0 event in Washington that agencies should be active in social media for the same reason that the Post Office builds post offices in city centres - because that’s where the people are. That’s true here in Australia, with 84% of online adults having visited a social network in the past month.

continue reading

Here is a copy of a column that I recently wrote for the Australian Financial Review on ways that marketing and public relations managers can tell a real “expert” from someone who’s not quite there yet. This was written slightly in jest, so feel free to leave a comment if you have other suggestions.

Do a quick Google search on “social media expert” and you come across a plethora of sites with comments such as this: ”Half the people on Twitter claim to be ’social media experts’. Where did they all come from and what is the criteria for expertise?”

It is a fair question, particularly as so many companies are seeing (and being told by a growing army of “social media experts”) that social media is the shiny new toy for strategic communications. So what are the criteria for expertise? How do you pick the real expert from the person who has just decided that his pastime should be his profession?

Here’s a checklist that might help:

1. The person must be able to show demonstrable results that involve real metrics, not just the number of followers they may or may not have on Twitter or friends on Facebook. Hint: Kyle and Jackie O have a lot of Twitter followers. Do you want to let them loose on your marketing?
2. They should be able to point not only to other people’s success - Obama’s election, Telstra, Dell, JetBlue and so on - but some of their own. Hint: ask them if they have ever been faced with a campaign that was not working and how they turned that around.
3. They must have a methodology and strategy tailored for your company. Hint: if their plan solely consists of setting up a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a blog, then be very, very scared.
4. They must have been active in the social media community for a long time. Six months on Twitter makes you a beginner, not an expert. Hint: check how often their blog is updated and how active they are at responding to posts.
5. They must have a system for measuring the effectiveness of any campaign - and followers or friends or hits isn’t it - and the ability to change strategy if things are not working. Hint: if they look blank when you ask them about Plan B, ask them to shut the door on the way out.
6. There needs to be a support team to monitor your brand and your program. Hint: if your “expert” is doing it all, then you are either paying too much or your expert is a one-man band living on hope.
7. They must be able to define social media. Hint: talking about Twitter, YouTube and blogs is not the correct answer.
8. They need to tell you just how much work is required by you and/or your staff to ensure that social media contact is effective. Hint: everyone will talk about conversations; the real expert will talk about the necessity for frequent, meaningful conversation that rarely involves promoting your business or your product. Yes, it is time-consuming and that is costly, but done properly it is close to being the best research you will get.
9. Make sure they know the strengths and weaknesses of the major tools that are available. They should know when to use Buzz Numbers versus Radian6 versus Kaava and not be wedded to a particular technology. Hint: ask them about Nielsen, Buzz Numbers, Radian6 and Kaava. If they look blank, do the door trick again. \
10. Be wary if they extensively quote the Cluetrain Manifesto (the equivalent of the Old Testament) or Seth Godin or give you 50 complicated slides running on about tribes. Hint: this means they are still learning about social media, which is good for them but bad for your campaign. 
11. You constantly see their names in the comments section of marketing blogs bashing other people’s campaigns, or other people in general. Is that the type of person you would feel comfortable representing your brand in public?
12. If the answer to your question about what to start in social media is anything other than “Listen“, keep looking.
13. They must not call themselves a social media expert/ninja/jedi/guru. The social media landscape changes so quickly that the term social media expert is something of an oxymoron. The space is continually changing. Expertise in one area may be valuable one month and totally outdated and useless the next. Hint: not so long ago people were raving about - and paying $US580 million - for MySpace and now it is sooo last year.

I thought the end of the week would be a good time to start winding down from the mania of work, take stock of what’s been achieved and what I can look forward to in the week ahead. For me this week, it’s about going back to basics and cutting through the fluff in the way we communicate.

No matter how many times it’s been said, I still continue to come across dire examples of communications folks who seem to rapidly lose the plot after “Dear [Editor name]” or “Dear [Blogger name]“. Maybe it’s because we’ve gotten too used to pitch templates, or there’s a false sense of security that the mention of a big brand name/spokesperson equates to instant interest. Or maybe some folks simply get scared when trying to reach out to bloggers and forget how to speak to the human being at the other end of that email.

A few oldies-but-goodies that I will be closing my week off with:

Thou shalt not blast the world and their mother

It all boils down to relevance. Has the journalist/blogger written something of relevance recently that you can reference in your opener? You won’t know unless you read. Read the papers, read blogs, follow smart people on Twitter and read what they link to. Doing so makes you a smarter communicator…for yourself and for your clients. And for goodness sake, address your email recipient by name.

And your point is..?

Anyone out there a fan of The Big Wiffle Waffle? Not me. You’re reaching out for a reason right? So state what it is. Spending the first 5 lines talking about your client’s history/milestones/messages will get you nowhere fast…except maybe the “Delete” button.

The worst blogger “outreach” emails I’ve come across actually go on to tell the blogger what to do. Example: “In exchange for XYZ, you will write a weekly post about XYZ in your blog and create a YouTube video.”

Think about emails that you personally receive that get your attention. They tell you right up front in the subject line what you’re going to get, and it’s based on understanding what you like and what you want. The same principle applies.

Who said so?

Saying your product/contest/event is cool or exciting usually makes it come across as anything but. Especially if you’re fond of using exclamation points in every other sentence!

Again, go back and focus on the individual at the receiving end of your email. One size does not fit all and that’s the surest way to getting you some solid blogger backlash…online or behind your back.

Lastly AND firstly, listen

Nervousness and insecurity can drive us to be verbose, repetitive and fluffy. So I say stop talking for a minute (or more). Take a step back, look straight at whom you’re talking to and really listen to what they’re saying. Set aside your urge to sell your message and instead try to understand what THEY are looking for. You’ll be surprised how far this simple exercise gets you.

Have a great weekend. And while you’re at it, check out:

• 7 Things to do to Avoid Being Killed by a Blogger in a Pitch
• The Real Difference Between Journalists & Bloggers

On 17 July 2009 at sundown, ten brave souls ran a 24-hour race. Blisters and bruises damned their feet not, although sore fingers and tight bladders weren’t pleasant neither, I don’t suppose. Welcome to blogathon 2009.

The 10 brave souls chosen for this run were already champions in their own domains. United by a common thread for blogging, they are undoubtedly the pulse that pumps through the veins of Singapore’s social media community. As they reached the finishing line, I was left feeling like a junkie fixed on an emotional high.

I applaud the 10 brave souls – Claudia, DK, Dottie, Hillary, Jayden, Melly, Nadia, Nicholas, Sheryo and Stephie. Personally, I can’t go beyond half an hour without fidgeting and these fellas did so for 24 freaking hours. What’s more, they were gracious enough to pose for, and with, the river of curious people strolling by Orchard Road. Such sport. Singapore Tourism Board should take note. Tons of tourists went on a shooting spree with their cameras that day.

The post-event video says it all.

One of the topics the brave souls had to write about was about the race itself, and 10 things their readers should know about it.  In the true spirit of the race, let me, the organizer, share with you 10 other things you should know about blogathon.

1. The concept of pitting 10 bloggers against each other was conceived some time in December last year by the Ogilvy 360° Digital Influence team in Singapore for Intel, at the balcony of the office. We like the balcony. It is our Mecca.

2. The idea would not have come to life without Lenovo providing the machines (Lenovo IdeaPad U350) and TANGS playing host. Typically, the collaboration of 3 brands would’ve been a logistical nightmare for any agency but in this instance, it was smooth sailing with everyone on the same page. I apologise if I’ve been too bossy with any of the brands though.

3. 5.8 blog posts and 34 comments were generated every hour for 24 hours. Yes, we have a lot to say.

4. The average person viewed 11 pages per visit to our blogathon website.  Not too bad, considering a good number of us don’t flip that many pages in our newspapers even. Over 44,000 page views were made during this period.

5. The average person stays for about 12 minutes on our blogathon website. If you think about it, that’s like watching 24 30-second television commercials consecutively without a toilet break.

6. Speaking of toilet breaks, we were originally deliberating between intervals of 3 and 4 hours, but decided on 2 hours because hell hath no fury like a tight bladder scorned. The official toilet break sign is now in the hands of the unofficial toilet break announcer, Tania.

7. Miyagi and baby Kai popped by to say hi. On that note, I’d just like to add that my left bicep has grown more muscular courtesy of baby Kai.  Forgoing dinner, Irene Ang came by to say hi too, and tweeted a picture of DK’s nephew before heading off to yet another event.

8. It felt more like a social media summit for the country, with bloggers nationwide coming by to rally support for the 10 brave ones. Both Pamela and Melly have an intensive list each that you should check out.

9. DK should really consider the hat as a permanent fixture to his outfit considering the rave reviews. Given what the Girlfriend thinks of the Boyfriend, Nicholas should make Fred Perry his next best friend.

10. No event is truly successful, without a troll or two. I echo Ben Koe’s words. Thank you, #BthonSucks.