So, what happened at Facebook Studio Live? Hundreds of agency heads, clients and industry professionals gathered together on a rainy Wednesday afternoon at the trendy space at Carriageworks in Eveleigh. There has always been a cloud of mystery and secrecy that surrounds the Facebook brand, which was evident upon arrival. Small Facebook branded moleskins were handed out and guests not knowing what to expect were ushered into dark auditorium with microkitchens on either side of the room that included unlimited refreshments and snacks, we later learned a staple feature of every Facebook office. The crowd got to hear from superb speakers about the Facebook hacker culture, the evolution of Facebook over the past decade, creative solutions for advertising, and the deepest level of Facebook insights and metrics available to brands with additional ad spend (of course.) My top four key takeaways I took from the day are summarised below:

1) The most successful social campaigns have impact through ALL of the following: connections, engagement, influence, and integration. The best social marketers in the world don’t create campaigns that just have the BIG idea any more, they create social programs that scale in all four categories. How do you do this? It all starts with the standard creative brief and asking two key questions a) What is the key engagement insight? b) What is the social insight?

2) Don’t underestimate the power of the conversation calendar. More and more marketers are fighting for the same short-attention span on Facebook. So, what does this mean for brand pages? Facebook is about creating authentic relationships and creating a community management strategy and conversation calendar that demonstrates the following:

• Understand what motivates social behavior
• Have a clear purpose and authentic voice
• Create many meaningful and light-weight experiences
• Posting is like a dinner party, be a brilliant conversationalist
• Creative is both an art and a science

3) Facebook Studio online offers a fantastic wealth of global information and resources available to all marketers, brands, and agencies. The site aims to celebrate the great work of agencies and marketers and inspire others, while sharing resources to help strengthen existing Facebook campaigns. Take for example the Flair Fashion Tag campaign. This highly innovative and creative Facebook app developed by Belgian agency Duval Guillaume Modem allowed people to easily tag pieces of clothing in photos and share them with friends. All “fashion tags” were then displayed on the Flair Facebook Page and the top submissions were also featured in a magazine, a nice integration between Flair’s offline and online presence. This campaign was one of the first ever to be featured on the site and even earned a Media Lion at Cannes last year.

4) The possibilities for brands on Facebook are boundless. Facebook allows brands to connect with consumers in a digital world with the same authenticity as the real world. According to Mark D’Arcy, Director of Creative Solutions at Facebook, successful Facebook campaigns for brands focus on utility, relevance, caring/sharing, and light-weight design, rather than disruption. If used smartly and strategically, a Facebook brand page is one of the most amazing devices for storytelling and understanding consumer insights.

There are just a few of the takeaways I took away from Sydney’s first ever Facebook Studio Live. I will be sharing more content and key learnings over the next few weeks!

Social media presents both tremendous opportunities and potential risks for all types of businesses and brands, including our own. To remind staff in China about the importance of posting responsibly and how we can protect ourselves, Ogilvy and our clients from harm we created this cartoon to make policy reading a little less boring. Enjoy!

To celebrate the great spirit of the digital culture in the agency, we’ve redesigned the look and feel of Asia Digital Map. We’ve focused on making it easier to share, which we believe can encourage more contributors to post exciting digital content on here. The current version is still on beta, it will become more and more stable in the coming days. So feel free to report to us if you have any feedback.

We will also have a new contributing system soon which we will announce once it’s confirmed. In the meantime, please enjoy this video above taken by ThomasCrampton.com during his holiday in France. 

Last night we launched the IKEA Hong Kong “Bedroom Makeover” photo contest, created to bring real-life value to the social experience. Fans (that could include you!) are invited to upload a photo about their bedroom storage nightmare and tell us how IKEA can help them solve it for the chance to win HK$10,000 in IKEA stuff. Three grand prize winners – determined by a combination of popularity and creativity – will then get to run around IKEA “supermarket sweep”-style and grab as much as they can in 90 seconds.

Check it out here: http://on.fb.me/BedroomMakeover

This experience follows a “Lucky Draw” that ran for two weeks with the objective of growing our community and pre-empting buzz around the Photo Contest. This strategy yielded great anecdotal results: 7,000 fans in two weeks, plus an additional 2,000 fans overnight based on a single “sneak peak” post about the upcoming $10,000 prize bucket.

Now, our focus with “Bedroom Makeover” is very much on rewarding our current community of brand loyalists, leveraging this fan activation to drive earned media within their extended networks.

Both experiences are part of an integrated campaign around the benefits of organised living. Or, as IKEA calls it, the great feeling of being “Happy Inside.”

The “Fill the Sky” CNY Fireworks app allows users to add virtual fireworks displays to any photo that they’d like to take. Personalized text greetings can also be added in Chinese and/or English. The holiday photos can then be emailed to family and friends, be directly uploaded to users’ Weibo accounts, be shared through social networks or saved for future use.

The App is FREE and available now on the App Store.

Search for “Fill the sky”

Videos about the app in ENGLISH on
Youku and YouTube and in CHINESE on Youku

Enjoy the app and please share. Best wishes for a healthy, prosperous and wonderful Year of the Rabbit!

Sign up here for free last minute registration.

If you can’t make it this morning at 11am Hong Kong time, I’ve posted below the strategic framework we’re about to present.

Stay tuned; we’ll be posting the full presentation on Asia Digital Map later today!

(ht: to @timho for design)

Here’s a clip from our interview…

Why Tweetup?

Some of you might have seen tweets about the Ogilvy’s APAC Digital Influence Summit lately. Ogilvy’s DI Summit is an internal event held by the Asia Pacific Regional team where all the digital experts from around the region will be attending a 3-day event in Hong Kong to exchange digital knowledge, connect and bond with other team

Although the event is not open for public, we would like to offer you a chance to meet our team, head of the global digital influence team John Bell will also be flying all the way from Washington DC! It is a very rare opportunity for you to meet all of us at once, in the offline world!

When?

Tweetup will be held this Sunday, June 27th at 7pm. Not the perfect timing for tweetup but due to the World Cup schedule, this is the only time when venues are available.

Where?

Tweetup will be held in RED Soho as usual.

Address: 2/f, Kinwick Centre, 32 Hollywood Road, Soho Central. (Right next to the escalator above hollywood road)

How to sign up?

Here

See you there!

This article was originally posted by MEDIA

Shenan Chuang (pictured), chief executive at Ogilvy & Mather Group China, shares her insights on marketing to Chinese consumers during the rapidly approaching Chinese New Year period and gives advise on how brands can capture a bit of the holiday magic.

1. Planes, trains and automobiles. In China, each year’s ChunYun, or Spring Festival travel season, sees hundreds of millions of people crisscrossing the country to reunite with their families. During this 40-day frenzy, three distinct groups of travellers can be spotted based on their choice of transportation. Migrant workers and students flood the trains; office workers, expatriates and overseas travellers form the core of the air travel segment while short-distance travellers take to the streets in automobiles. This mass migration means most consumers deviate from their normal media consumption habits and channels for up to a month or more – not an insignificant amount of time. Buses, transit zones, and outdoor media often become the primary communication channels for a country on the move.

2. Know your (often unlikely) brand ambassadors As scores of migrant workers and students temporarily trade in the bright lights of the big cities for their hometowns in the countryside, they arrive loaded with gifts, products and information from their big city lives. Viewed as successful returnees, their attitudes and opinions on brands and products are very influential on old friends and family. For brands seeking to penetrate lower tier Chinese cities and rural markets, word-of-mouth endorsements from these (often unlikely) brand ambassadors are your best – and most effective – bet.

3. The New Year’s Eve dinner. The New Year’s Eve dinner is always a highlight of the holiday celebration and family reunions. But the format has changed over the years. First it was a must to gather at home for the annual feast. That tradition eventually gave way to eating out as many families chose restaurants for their convenience and ambiance. Nowadays staying at home for the once-a-year indulgence is back in vogue – but with a twist. Rather than slaving over a hot wok or battling for a reservation at a hotel, more families are choosing to order ready-made meals that can be enjoyed at home without the hassle of fighting for a taxi only to be stuck in holiday gridlock. This shift signals big business potential for brands that can enhance those dinners at home with tableware, gift sets of holiday spirits, sweets and snacks or even jumbo family packs for the three generations reuniting over this special event.

4. CCTV New Year’s Gala – who’s watching? The CCTV New Year’s Gala (or ChunWan) is the premier mainland Chinese television event of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl in America. As the most influential and highly rated TV show in China, the Gala attracts marketers eager to buy airtime at any cost. But be forewarned: audience ratings drop as you move from the north of the country to the south. The highest ratings can be found in Northeast China where 85 per cent of residents tune in. This percentage drops to 70 per cent for Beijing and Tianjin, 60 percent for Shandong/ Shanxi/ Henan/ Shaanxi, 20 per cent for Shanghai/ Jiangsu/ Anhui/ Hubei/ Sichuan, 10 per cent for Zhejiang/ Fujian, and below 5 per cent for Guangdong/ Guangxi/ Hainan. So before you burn through your budget, think hard about your target audience… and where they live.

5. Home (and nowhere else) for the holidays. While some sightsee during the holiday, others prefer to “ZhaiNan,” which essentially means hibernating at home doing three things: eating, sleeping and surfing the web. Surfers are primarily engaged in online shopping, SNS and gaming. In 2009, online retailer Taobao.com reported a 195 per cent increase over 2008 in the number of products exchanged by consumers during the CNY period. Bestsellers were mobile phones, digital products, household appliances and gift packs with health supplements. Another trend of recent years is the younger generation’s preference for sending New Year greetings by SMS rather than paying a visit to relatives and friends.  As the internet and mobile applications make their mark on millennia-old traditions, it’s time for marketers to make inroads into the CNY “ZhaiNan” phenomenon.