- Barney Loehnis, Asia Pacific Digital Lead of OgilvyOne Worldwide, speaking about key moments where brands can add value and win share of wallet through mobile.
- Gareth Ellen, Digital Planning Director, Ogilvy Action APAC, on shopper adoption of mobile and other technologies, plus lessons learned and best practices from brands and retailers
- Daniel Comar, Executive Creative Director, Ogilvy Action APAC, speaking about the role of creative digital in winning over shoppers.

View slides and the video below.  Also below, this week’s copy of In The News, available for you to download and share.

For example, let’s imagine that the agency behind the iconic Old Spice ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ campaign had put the kybosh on that idea. If they’d said it was ‘too risky’. None of us would have been able to enjoy one of the most memorable campaigns to come out of social media perhaps eve
r. Granted it’s still a young industry, but it can’t be denied that the campaign remains one of the most important social media executions the industry has seen.

For me, the inherent risk involved in it is what makes it so impressive. It could have backfired. But it’s the faith that the brand had in it that made it so pervasive. You could see it in the production value and the effort they’d gone to. That in itself was admirable, regardless of how successful it turned out to be.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that our focus should be putting faith into good work that we’re proud of and taking a chance to make something truly unique instead of regurgitating things that have worked in the past. Sure, traditional social media tactics have their place in our work but it’s not what’s going to win awards.

This post is a bi-product of stumbling across the above video where an agency took the idea of the ‘social media case study’ and completely flipped it on it’s head. The video shows that they know exactly how to conduct a social media campaign yet they convey it in an amusing, cute and affable way.

They’ve created a possible viral video just by promoting themselves and, like the Old Spice videos, you can tell that they’ve put the effort into something unique, albeit on a smaller scale…

1) The Consumer-Patient

2) Physicians/Healthcare Providers

Consumers have become increasingly empowered to take their health into their own hands via the Internet, gaining access to vast medical information portals, self-monitoring and self-diagnosis tools, and peer support social networks. In China, for example, 80% of consumers conduct online research before consulting their doctors. In Asia, bringing these tools to mobile phones has been key in increasing access to more reliable health information. This is evidenced by the rise of mobile health apps, which indulge our burgeoning obsession with ‘the quantified self.’ However, it can also be as simple as being able to SMS a network of doctors for answers to pressing questions in real-time.  SMS remains a powerful tool to connect patients and doctors in Asia (See mDhil.com in India and Buddyworks in the Philippines). As questions of trust persist in the healthcare industry, Asians increasingly refer to social networks to confirm or deny rumors or to simply look for the most credible answers. Likewise, social networks serve as a strong source of support for others going through a similar experience.

From the physician’s point of view, they have to now manage this newly empowered patient, who comes to them armed with information and data gathered online. They find they are having to make themselves more accessible via a multiplicity of channels while adhering to established codes of ethics and confidentiality (as often official regulatory guidelines about physicians’ social media conduct are lacking). Indeed doctors are now blogging and on instant messaging services, out to raise awareness as well as their own profile in their field. Eighty percent of Chinese doctors use online resources for general medical news or to stay up to date with clinical information. There has been an absolute explosion in doctors’ social networks. Check out DXY.cn in China for proof, where over 2 million doctors converse, exchange knowledge, and set up professional profiles. These networks are popular in Asia particularly where doctors don’t have access to the multitude of hard copy peer review journals as in the West. They are looking to stay current with research and cross-reference solutions for their patients. Like their patients, doctors are increasingly embracing mobile technologies to facilitate patient care and research.

All the major pharma companies have a social media presence but face intense scrutiny and increasing regulation. So what value can the pharma maker provide to the social media savvy patient/doctor?

• Curate credible and trustworthy medical information. Become a destination for reliable answers for disease management, not just a brochure of products
• Facilitate conversation and support networks. Bring those facing similar challenges together
• Give them useful tools that are relevant to your products and their lives. Breathe branded utility
• Be transparent, open and honest. Display a willingness to exchange information and care
• Gather intelligence from these forums to innovate and spur R&D

Thoughts? Questions? Additional insights? Leave your comment below or email me at lisa.werner@ogilvy.com.

I have the utmost respect for Paul, but strongly disagree with his post. Titled “Social Media Overload”, he states that:

“for those using several [social media] services it’s becoming a tiresome chore”.

“For social media services the key measures of how much time users spend on the site is becoming a game of diminishing returns, people have only so much time in the day or so much inclination to spend a large chunk of their free time online.”

“Social media services are going to have to show some value for the investment in time and the privacy costs incurred by business users, it may well be that many just don’t offer a good enough deal.”

While I think it’s fair that small businesses may be facing some difficulty trying to justify spending time, money and resource on social media, I think it’s much less because “it’s a tiresome chore” – I think they’re just not clear about WHY they’re on social.

I’ve referenced this chart before, but it most clearly reveals just how powerful social media can be on purchase intent. With online reviews second only to word of mouth in purchase influence, there’s a huge opportunity for small business to use social media to build relationships with their customers, get feedback from advocates and detractors, hold special sales for their brand advocates, generate sales leads, manage their reputation, establish themselves as thought leaders, and the list goes on.

They just need to know what they want out of it. Then they need a strategy. Take Shoes of Prey, for example. A start-up business by Michael Fox, Jodie Fox, Mike Knapp and Mark Capps, their website 22Michaels is a “diary of [their] adventures, successes, failures and everything we learn as we attempt to start a business or two”, they have used social media to establish themselves as thought leaders in the space. Smart Company has voted them one of Australia’s 25 top business blogs for two years runing, one of Australia’s top 10 online retailers, 2010′s Hot 30 Under 30, and attended an online retail forum with the Australian government to showcase how smaller business can harness the internet.

Shoes of Prey is an e-retailer that sells custom-made shoes, and they have used their website to ask their consumers what they think of their latest online shoe designer, providing them with unique intelligence around purchase intent as a result of the designer, intent to purchase, ease-of-use and general feedback, which will (presumably)  be taken into consideration for future edits and improvements on the site.

Other small businesses can just look to the current landscape to work out what best practice looks like, what they need for their business, and how to get there. Australian examples include Appliances Online, which has one of the largest and most engaged Facebook pages nationally; Shoes of Prey; Big Brown Box – a retailer with a great Facebook page; 65 degrees – a Melbourne based cafe that has established itself as the 56th most influential food Twitterer in Australia; and more that crop up every day.

In the early days of social media, a cliched adage was that businesses should be on social media because “your customers are going to be talking about you anyway – don’t you at least want to know what they’re saying?” (Channelship has a great article that says pretty much the same thing, titled “If Brands Don’t Listen, Your Facebook Friends Will” by the legendary Brian Solis).

Social media has brought companies and customers closer than ever, and have broken down the walls of communication between the two entities. It’s made companies more approachable, vulnerable and accountable – and has empowered customers to be honest about their experiences, whether positive or negative. Social media allows businesses the “right of response”, allowing them to amplify their customers positive experiences, and solve their negative ones.

And let’s not forget the most obvious avenue for social media use by small business – customer service excellence.

Although Paul says that “people have only so much time in the day or so much inclination to spend a large chunk of their free time online… the value proposition becomes less compelling”, I think the main issue lies more with available resources for small business than a less compelling value proposition.

The case has been made for the value of social media – not to mention the added benefit of how social media marketing is a scaleable effort, depending on the available resources, both in time and money – now it’s just up to businesses to decide how they want to use it.

Don’t start up a Facebook page with weekly competitions and promising customer service support unless you have a community manager that can support that activity. Don’t set up a Twitter account encouraging customer feedback and asking engagement questions if you don’t have the resource available to respond to brand advocates and detractors. Don’t set up a corporate blog that gets updated once every other month.

Look at your business goals and come up with a strategy. Focus on the platforms you need to be on to achieve those goals, and plan on a timeline the tactics you’ll use to get there. Just like any other business marketing strategy, social media requires time, dedication and discipline – but this doesn’t mean that it needs to consume more resource than is allocated.

What do you think? Does social media have a place in your business – and where?

But don’t get confused – Google’s only indexing the comments from the Facebook connect add-on commenting system (read this if you’d like to find out how to install it on your website), NOT personal Facebook comments on Facebook itself.

These comments are now being crawled – and ranked – in Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It seems Google is continuing to take its dedication to integrating social signals into its search algorithm. Social signals refers to a social search feature that tailors  your personal search engine result rankings that’s influenced by your own social circle i.e. if a friend of yours has commented, +1′d or “Liked” a particular article, product listing or review, that result will rank above other “organic” results.

This is obviously going to be a huge plus for e-retailers – Think Geek is a great example of this. Their product pages utilise both a Facebook social plug-in as well as the Facebook “Like” button, allowing visitors to see which of their own friends have already “Liked” the product, as well as the ability to read what other users have to say about the product.

We already know that personal advice and online comments by users influence purchase decisions more strongly than other types of information, with online reviews second only to word of mouth in purchase influence. As such, there’s now an ongoing trend for marketers to consider integration with social platforms to support and encourage online comments and personal advice around products – and it’s precisely this phenomenon that Google (and/or Facebook) is leveraging by indexing Facebook comments. The key takeaway from Rubicon’s research above? The Web is the #2 resource for customer support information, after user manuals.  It ranks ahead of calling the manufacturer or asking a dealer.

Now, more than ever before, websites have more incentive to install the add-on, once again preserving Facebook’s position as the leading social network.

We’ve got a great example of the Facebook comments plugin below, right on Asia Digital Map, showcasing the broader appeal for the plugin on blogs and other content distributors. With social signals becoming more and more important to SEO, it does look like it’s the next frontier for Google and Bing. If you’d like to find what which social signals Google and Bing actually count, Search Engine Land has a really good article here.

1. The name of the page
2. The agency managing the fan page
3. The number of fans on the page
4. The page’s “People Talking About” Statistic – showing page engagement
5. Percentage of fans engaged

They purpose of their report is to set engagement level benchmarks for each of the 6 industry verticals that they covered in their study:  Fashion, Tourism, Media, Sport, Politics and FMCG.

A statistic of note is their “Australian [Facebook Page] Engagement Average” – 1.96%
To provide some context:

• the population of Australia: 21,874,900 (Source)
• the number of internet users as a percentage of population in Australia:  72% (Source) or 15,749,928 internet users

You’ll find a snapshot of their original report below, but if you’re after the full report, you can download it here. There’s already been some criticism of the study for various reasons – and any attempt at ranking brand pages is sure to result in some controversy. Some thoughts and criticisms from the community management community include:

• There is no indication of whether a brand is in the middle of a huge campaign or not (which is sure to skew the study)
• The “People Talking About” statistic, while useful, is a dynamic figure that changes daily – and the study doesn’t state its methodology – so it’s not possible to tell is the numbers are an average over time or just a snapshot
• Lack of sentiment analysis

That said, it’s still a great point of reference and a valuable look into the world of Australian community management.

In case you missed it, a Twitterstorm erupted Down Under this afternoon over a customer service (I use that term loosely) email from clothing retailer GASP. You can get all the juicy details here:

Exhibit A: The Complaint Email

Exhibit B: The Response from GASP Online Customer Care

Outrage over the email quickly gained traction and GaspGate soon burst into the Twitterstream with the hashtag #GASPFAIL  in the top 5 most trending topics in Sydney, #GASP taking spot number two on the national list.

The GASP Facebook page was the scene of a brand massacre with people expressing their disgust at GASP’s treatment of their clientele and inviting a response, apology, anything….

Whilst this PR disaster unfolded, there was one noticeable guest who did not come to the party, GASP. The only official response from GASP came through deleting Facebook posts from their wall before finally doing away with their brand page altogether.  #GASPFAIL indeed.

Here are some of the comments before the masses were silenced:

Aside from investing in staff training and development, what could they have done to better to manage the crisis? Well, quite a lot.

Like all businesses operating in this brave new world of always on here are some of the crucial mistakes made by GASP this afternoon:

1. Removed complaints from the Facebook Page
2. Remained silent
3. Removed the Facebook page completely
4. Still silent…
5. Twitter, which is a more prominent feedback channel during a crisis, was going off, yet the Gasp Twitter Handle remains, yep, you guessed it…silent (and barren to boot).
6. Links are being circulated to personal Facebook accounts of GASP staff, showing rather unsavoury comments (whether related or not to the customer service email). This shows you just how far consumers will go if wronged.

So, what could they have done?

1. Not handle the customer complaint the way they did first and foremost. They wouldn’t  have this issue had they handled that situation more wisely.
2. Listen and monitor. Once the issue erupted, they should have set up social media listening immediately for brand mentions. This would have provided many insights on what was happening and how the issue was escalating; this in turn would have provided critical information that the PR and management team could have built a plan from. Had GASP been monitoring they would have seen a spike in mentions which would have alerted them to the impending brand massacre.
3. Have a crisis plan in place. When things go wrong it is crucial that there is a clear escalation process and employees know what to do. You have to act with speed before the problem escalates and gets out of control.
4. Admit you’ve made a mistake and rectify it. Don’t stick your head in the sand and pretend there isn’t an issue, address the issue and address it publicly using your social media channels.
5. Be authentic. Don’t throw a canned response or token apology and expect it to change sentiment, it won’t.
6. Never EVER remove negative feedback from your social channels.  It’s social media 101. As GASP has learned, your community does not appreciate being silenced.
7. Have a social media policy. If your employees are active in social and identify themselves as an employee of your business,  they should have clear guidelines on what is and is not appropriate in social media

Crises happen all the time and we know how quickly they escalate with user generated content and social media as the accelerant. A combination of planning, preparation and process is your best defence. Have you got a crisis plan in place?

By Lucie Snape (@LucieSnape)

View “#GASPFAIL” on Storify

Earlier today, Mike Boyd and I presented an updated version of the Marketers Guide to iPad for Business as part of Citrix Online’s Lunch + Learn series.

A few of the key take-aways from the session today:

• When it comes to getting an app approved by iTunes there are no guarantees in terms of time frames, though if you’re working with a company that understands app development and has a good track record then expect a relatively fast turn-around (roughly 4 days)
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew – in other words, don’t attempt to make your ipad app deliver too much by cramming too much information or functionality into a single app. If you have several business objectives pick the single objective that will deliver the largest business impact, or build multiple apps.
• Leverage existing resources and think about what existing content you already have in your wheelhouse that could be repackaged for audiences who prefer to view content via iPads and tablet devices – but then go above and beyond.
• More than 300,000 Australians are browsing the mobile web (as of May 2011, Nielsen Australia) – how does your organisation’s Web site appear when viewed from an iPad or tablet PC?
• Video, user-generated content, photo slideshows and games are common interactive elements found in some of the most popular ipad apps
• Before developing an app, audit similar apps in your industry and be sure to differentiate

What did this mean to me? Over time I’ve come to realize that getting lost in my imagination – something completely congruent to a young boy – is something that I’ve made sure I never grew out of as I’ve grown older.

For me, this idea of imagining and getting lost in your thoughts is crucial to developing a constantly evolving creative output. In an industry that lives and breathes from the formulation of ideas, the art of imagination seems one that we don’t nurture past the age of say fifteen. Sure, we want to be creative; we want to create innovative campaigns and brilliant creative concepts that will wow our clients. But, if we’re not taking the time to imagine, to go ‘off with the fairies’ then how are we delivering anything that the client can’t get from another agency?

This is best represented in a cunning trick that renowned UK hypnotist Derren Brown played on two unsuspecting ad men. He had two men ride in the same car on the way to a creative briefing and then presented them with the brief. They had a set amount of time to both come up with an idea. Due to Derren ensuring that the car they rode in on the way to the briefing stuck to a specific route, both men came up with almost identical ideas. They’d taken in particular symbols on their way to the briefing – architecture, other advertising, street signs and landmarks which informed their creative output and had them both create similar creative.

Does this boggle your mind?

In a world where we’re constantly sharing media with each other, it should. The internet at large is simultaneously the biggest and the smallest environment in the world. We’re all sharing and we’re all viewing similar content and creatively, this is a harpoon in our side that can seriously impede any kind of unique creativity that was once enjoyed before the availability of the global orgy of content we currently indulge in.

If we’re all drinking from the same water fountain, singing from the same hymn sheet and sharing the Kool-Aid then this presents a problem if we want to keep our creative minds as sharp and unique as they can be.

What can we do?

We need to look out more windows. Stare into more space. Fantasise and internalize yet be open and obnoxious with our brainstorms. Never black-hat, but never settle for an idea you know deep down just isn’t creative. We need to get stupid with ideas before we get smart.

We need to be childish. And that doesn’t mean imagining what’s possible – it’s dreaming of the impossible and making it a reality.

Check out the Derren Brown video here

Below are some common questions which I’ve come across in conversations with clients, esp. those who are new to social media.

Q: Why is social media monitoring more expensive that our news monitoring service?
A: Compare the number of newspapers and magazines to the number of websites, blogs, forums, portals, pages on social networks; it requires much more time and effort to find the relevant info from the sea of data. Machine-generated results can only give you so much info and not insights. At the end of the day, you still need a human to analyze the data and provide you with the right advice to help move your business forward.

Q: What if we find negative comments / people complaining about my products / services? What should I do?
A: What if a customer called your hotline to file a complaint?  What would you do?  You would first understand the problem and then address it.  The reality is that you cannot make everyone happy, but you need to try.  What you can do is prioritize and address those that are most important or have significant impact on your brand’s reputation.

Q: I prefer to allocate money to run a campaign rather than a listening program.
A: You should invest in both, but listening should always come first and become a routine just like your news monitoring.  Listening not only serves as a monitoring tool, it can also provide great insights to brand perception and consumer sentiment (without paying for a focus group or a research house to conduct an audit). Most importantly, it can help you address an issue before it turns into a crisis.

So why do we need to listen?  Because everyone good conversation starts with listening.  And social media is all about good conversations and engagement with real people.