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!

There were many great learnings and takeaways, but here are a few that I will hang over my desk.

1) As marketers, we should develop social media programs that are not only fun and engaging, but also contribute to the client’s bottom line (we often get hung up on the creativity or virality)

2) The top 3 things CMOs look for in a social media campaign in 2011: (1) Reach & Position (2) Preference (3) Action

3) Set realistic and achieveable KPIs and diagnostics before executing any social media campaign (even better if you could tie it into sales)

4) Did you know that only 10% of friends get your wall post in their news feed?  So understand what are the best days and times to reach out to your audience.

5) Ideas don’t come from social media or technology, it comes from people. Fredrik Haren’s equation that Idea = p(k+i).

6) Don’t just focus on now (i.e. iphone apps, Facebook games), find out how we can help our clients prepare for the future (i.e. social on mobile)

It is no secret that the Internet in China has been an agent for reform, and it is serving as a valuable tool for people to explore a world often beyond their reach. The Internet is not only serving China’s growing set of Netizens though. It is quickly replacing traditional media as brands and companies seek to connect with their consumers in new and different ways. With the exception of Google, international platforms that offer a cut and paste version of their American or European sites simply fail and often get banned. Popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter have fallen victim to the Great Firewall of China. While young innovative Chinese Netizens can find a way to get to these sites, why would they want to? Chinese social media is simply way cooler.

The Internet in China is dominated by long-running, multi-service portals like Sina, QQ and Sohu that have been offering social networking, discussion forums, blogs, instant messaging and other “socialised media” long before Twitter and Facebook. As the nationally preferred form of social media, bulletin board systems (BBS) are available in every imaginable topic, and in these forums, Netizens can be extremely vocal, resourceful, risk-takers, subversive and sometimes a little worrisome.

However, for the most part Netizens are simply seeking entertainment and escape. The bulk of internet users in China, young white collar urban Chinese, are informed, intelligent and generally optimistic about the future. This state of mind is exemplified by one of the hottest games at Kaixin called Parking Wars. Players earn virtual mullah for parking in their friends’ spaces and issuing parking infringements if they catch their friends parking on their home turf, with more money earning you shinier wheels. It is simply addictive and unrivalled by anything on Facebook.

Netizens love the collective and escapist nature of the Internet where avatars have become a nationwide obsession and are carefully designed as a form of self expression and extension of personality.  QQ offers avatar clothing and hairstyles for 1-5 RMB apiece. Many friends are made only in avatar form online, with Netizens never actually meeting face to face.

With no hesitation about inundating friends with requests to play this game, read that blog, join in this conversation or watch that video, the Internet and social media are no less than a national addiction. This addiction, and fast growing channel, has become the opportunity and challenge for companies and brands. The question everyone is asking is how to get started?

The first movers among companies and brands in leveraging the Internet to reach their customers know that a true digital brand experience requires creativity, authenticity and originality.

Chile

The government of Chile in promoting Chilean wine in China understood this. With limited funding and an ambitious agenda, ProChile, the Chilean government body responsible for the promotion of Chile and Chilean Wine, found gold with their online campaign.

China’s rapidly growing wine industry is full of both opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity rests among China’s rapidly growing wine connoisseurs, who seek new and different types of wine. The challenge was that Chinese consumers often default to French wine and high prices, focusing on the status achieved by the association of consuming French wine.

What Chinese consumers didn’t know was that Chile has affordable and high quality wines. The Chilean government wanted to reach out to Chinese wine consumers and help them understand that there was more to choosing wine than just comparing price tags.

The primary objective of the campaign was to increase Chilean wine sales in China. Beyond that, ProChile wanted to promote Chile to create a stronger brand presence for Chilean wine. The result, after only three months conducting a multi-phased digital campaign, was that Chilean wine moved up in the rankings of wine exporters into China.

Background

Wine is one of the fastest growing alcoholic drinks in China among a defined target audience of young (25-35 years old) urban professionals. However, after conducting research, young urban professions were often embarrassed to order or purchase wine because of a lack of understanding about the product. At the same time this group of people fell in the demographic of heavy Internet users. They were the foundation of China’s flourishing social media scene. These consumers were found to often look to bloggers for advice and viewed the internet as an instrument for self study and a place to share knowledge and recommendations.

Hence, it was obvious that online education and social media engagement should serve as the cornerstone of a campaign to build awareness, trial and preference for Chilean wine.

Strategy

Seeking to empower consumers with knowledge and confidence, the campaigned focused on arming netizens with the tools to buy or order wine. To create a bigger brand presence, images were used and information disseminated about Chile as a constant backdrop to everything undertaken.

A three-phase campaign roll-out was launched:

Phase 1: “I love wine.” During this phase every Netizen was invited to learn about wine appreciation, appealing to all current and would be wine drinkers.

Phase 2: “I love Chilean wine.” Focusing on the specific advantages of wine from Chile, the second-phase of the campaign encouraged people to convert to Chilean wine. Here, the campaign highlighted the affordability, taste quality and sustainability practices that set Chilean wine apart from the wines of other countries. In the process, we introduced netizens to the different regions of Chile, furthering education.

Phase 3: “I love Chile.” With a solid understanding of Chile, through Chilean wine, the door was open to introduce Chinese consumers to other products produced by Chile – fruit, salmon, urban transportation and tourism.

The main channel to begin discussion of Chilean wine was to leverage the blogosphere and make this viral. To begin with, the campaign involved collaboration with four influential bloggers asking them to stage a competition. Each week over four weeks the bloggers were sent a bottle of Chilean wine, together with information and facts about Chile.

The thrust of the blogger involvement centered on getting them interested in writing about the wine in their blogs in their own personal style. The blogger’s posts were aggregated at a site developed for the campaign, zhiliwine.com. This allowed us to create a lasting and permanent record of the event. Throughout the campaign over 70,000 netizens voted for their favorite articles, with many bottles of Chilean wine offered as give-aways for the competition. Blog posts were featured on the front pages of some of the biggest portals.

A broad social media footprint is important for every brand, and marketers need to take their message to the places where netizens are already investing their time and trust online. To extend the campaign message, popular social media was leveraged with content continually added to encourage debate and to help establish a community where netizens were able to discuss wine. Specifically:

• Kaixin – Chinese social network site where wine fans could come together and share wine drinking tips.
• Youku – Chinese video sharing site (like Youtube) where content was produced specifically about Chilean wine and this was uploaded for all to view.
• Flickr – Furnished numerous photos of Chilean wine, landscapes and other activities by ProChile in China.
• BBS forums – Seeded information in more than 50 relevant BBS forums to encourage interest.

The campaign empowered Chinese consumers to drink wine with ease, and impress their friends and business associates with “Webisodes” (short videos), created specifically for online video sharing networks as a tool for self-study. Through the webisodes the campaign delivered simple tips such as how to open a wine bottle, how to taste wine with confidence, and how to pair wine with Chinese food.

In addition to the online outreach, a comprehensive Interactive e-book in cooperation with Chilean wine companies in China was created, and the Chilean wine companies provided content and incorporated the e-book into their own marketing strategies.

Beyond social media, the campaign involved working with editors and producers of major portals to promote the campaign vehicles: the e-book, the videos and the blogger competition. It was important to reach out to editors of the more traditional online media so that the campaign reached people who do not use social media heavily, but who regularly read major Chinese websites such as Sina and Sohu.

After only three months, the greatest achievement was seeing Chilean wine climb from the fifth to the fourth largest exporter of wine to China, according to the Commissioner General of ProChile in China.

Like the country itself, social media in China is fast paced, constantly changing and growing faster than anywhere else in the world. For brands looking to get on China’s digital highway, seatbelts, a GPS and a little sense of adventure are a necessity. There is no more rewarding or amazing place to do social media.

Michael Darragh is Digital Strategic Planner at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide / Shanghai and producer of World Expo Blog.

From May to October 2010, Shanghai will play host to the largest world fair in history and the organising bureau are ensuring it is a digital expo too. Expo Online is a key measure of their digital communications and we are now able to get a preview into what’s in store.

You can browse the 5.25 square-kilometre site and interact with the various country and corporate pavilions on the Pudong and Puxi sides of the Huangpu River respectively.

In the screen capture at the top of this post you can see a section of the Asia Pacific area of Expo 2010. The big brown pavilion with a red marker on top is Australia. To its left you can see Thailand, and on the right Singapore, Malaysia and New Zealand. Meanwhile in the image below you can see the big Korean and Japanese pavilions.

Next year Expo Online will enable users to have a fully interactive experience, going inside the virtual pavilions and enjoy beautifully created digital experiences in several languages. Until then have fun playing around with the current version and if you want to learn more about World Expo 2010 Shanghai, check out my blog.

One of the rules that he points out is one that we tend to forget: ‘Quality NOT quantity’. Too often PRs get flack for doing a last minute dash to sign up as many people in their network to become friends/ fans on their clients’ Facebook groups and pages or on their Twitter handles.

As PRs, we need to continue to educate our clients that the real value does not lie in the sheer volume of people we sign up but rather in the quality of the people we engage (even if it’s only a handful!).

Consider who your target audience is, where do they frequent and how to reach them. Who is in your fans/ friends extended networks. Are they the right audience to target?

Using Twitter as an example, it’s important to do the analysis and drill down into who the person is that you want to connect with, get to know them, follow them for a while and find out what they write about. Also have a look into who follows that person, are they the appropriate person for your client to be reaching out to or is there someone in their Twitter network that is better?

This tool can help you determine the most appropriate people to follow:

If we want to get some real and long lasting results for our clients, the key is to make sure that we’re speaking to the right audiences!