Part 1: John Bell: Moving beyond the experimentation phase of social media

When John Bell, head of the global 360° Digital Influence team – Ogilvy’s global social media marketing and communications practice, was in Sydney in June, Ogilvy PR’s Heather Jacobs caught up with him to talk about social media.

Based in Washington DC, Bell heads up the global team of Digital Influence Strategists integrating the power of social media – social networks, blogs, Web 2.0 applications – with digital marketing to produce measureable results. He’s developed strategy and executed award-winning programs for clients including Ford, Lenovo, Unilever, BP and American Express.

Following is a three-part series on how brands can get started in social media, measure its impact, how Australia compares to the rest of the world when it comes to social media and the challenge of finding social media experts who also understand marketing and communications.

Part 1: Moving beyond the experimentation phase

Question: You have a theory that brands are moving through what you call ‘the experimentation stage’ in social media? Can you explain this?

John Bell: The enterprise adoption curve shows there’s a path brands typically move along. It starts with phase zero, where people are nervous and full of anticipation, and shifts into the listening stage where brands want to know what people are saying about them online.

From there it moves onto the experimentation stage, where brands try things in social media – implement programs, encourage various regions around the world to try different things and allow entrepreneurial drive within the company to push forward experiments.

Pretty soon brands find that this approach doesn’t produce a significant business result so they want to get efficiencies or ‘operationalize’ their approach to social media.

This is largely trying to take all the experiments and align them with a business purpose, trying to manage the brand online so there’s isn’t 25 different Facebook pages. Instead, there’s one voice for the brand online that is purposeful, not simply whatever the person who did the feed decided on.

There’s a measurement model around everything that’s done so they can learn from their efforts, see what’s having a business impact, what’s creating customer value, what’s helping them build brand reputation and what’s helping them sell product through social media.

Beyond this is the promised land of full integration where social media becomes a part of everyone’s job delivering greater efficiency, greater customer value, and building good culture. I’m not sure if there are too many examples of that yet.

Q: Which companies are close to getting there?

John Bell: A company in the middle of operationalizing is Ogilvy client IBM, which has a long history of applying social media internally – and is an Ogilvy client. Unilever and Proctor & Gamble really started with social media as an external marketing communications discipline.

Q: Is there a sense that a company will think, ‘We’d better open a Twitter account and Facebook page to build up people to like them and once they get negative feedback or aren’t seeing immediate business results, they’ll think it’s not worth it.

John Bell: A lot of brands reactively get involved in social media and then realise, “Now what?” Along the way to getting reactively involved, they probably haven’t built the best foundation or put thought into their conversation calendar and the online space they are going to engage with people in.

They probably haven’t thought too hard about roles and responsibilities in the organisation and goals for those people.  They’ll wake up one morning after pulling the trigger on a Facebook program and blog program and say, “Is this all there is? Is this all I get?”

You would expect them to pull out, but hopefully in most cases, they then say there must be a better way.

We can’t leave social media. We all intuitively believe it has promise for our business – if nothing else a competitive colleague insists it’s the next big thing.

So brands try to find guidance from people who talk about social media as a business driven discipline as opposed to a fluffy “get in the conversation” type-way. Hopefully they find us. We’re trying to play that role for our clients because we understand social media has tremendous potential to drive sales and impact business. But only when you marry it with the best of marketing communications discipline do you get that.

People overestimate how social media has inverted the world. I think the impact is tremendous: it will transform us, make us better marketers, better product and service developers, but it hasn’t completely rewritten the old rules from marketing communications. They remain relevant today.

The obvious starting point is for brands to deliver some authentic value to their customers. We can’t just message people because we want them to understand something and then do it a dozen times to beat them over the head. We have to try and earn their attention and involvement by figuring out what they want from our brand.

TEDX Sydney: a crash course in ideas

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to be ‘accepted’ to be in the audience at the TEDX Sydney conference where I got a crash course in what some of Australia’s smartest, most entertaining and intelligent people — and the odd flying trapeze artists — are up to.

As part of Alan Jones’ social media team, my tweets formed part of a live Twitter feed on screens in the foyer of Redfern’s CarriageWorks where a crowd had gathered on LoveSacs. As word spread via social media that you could watch the event ‘live’ at the venue along with the 800 ‘chosen ones’ granted a seat in the auditorium, more people turned up and the tweet feed exploded.

Hundreds more watched the live stream on YouTube or listened to it on Radio National and Jones re-tweeted the best comments.

My top 10 moments of the day were:

1. When Mango, the blue and yellow macaw  flew on-stage as bird whisperer Josh Cook called him.

2. Biomedical animator Drew Berry – who has won an award for being a ‘Genius’ – showing computer graphics of DNA moving through the body and malaria infiltrating a baby’s vital organs after a bite from a malaria-infected mosquito.

3. The radical idea that taking time out and being bored helps the brain re-set itself. We don’t need to be connected 24/7. That’s what Genevieve Bell said and Intel is a client.

4. Geneticist Richard Cotton’s idea that sometime in the next two decades we’ll start carrying our gene sequence around in our phones. When a couple want to start a family they can compare genomes and a database will tell them if they have mutations that can cause diseases.

5. Richard Gill’s infectious enthusiasm for song that had us clapping along and the idea that every child deserves a great music teacher.

6. Astronomer Bryan Gaensler’s revelation that Australia has developed a telescope that can take pictures of the sky wider and deeper than we have ever seen, taking us back to the Big Bang.

7. Inventor Saul Griffith’s idea of wind turbines that soar like kites and harness strong winds to generate electricity. And his suggestion we ditch the monorail for ziplines and rollercoasters.

8. Shaun Tan’s Oscar-winning ‘The Lost Thing’, which was particularly magical  accompanied by the original score performed by Michael Yezerski.

9. The discovery that Daniel Johns is rather attractive. Especially when he sings. Even if he did split up Silverchair and spends most of his time at the Ivy pool bar.

10. And just as I was exhausTED* and couldn’t take another genius Paul Kelly was on hand to sing a song and tell a yarn.

*Pun stolen from the Chaser’s Craig Reucassel wrap-up.

By the way, TEDX Sydney is an offshoot of TED (Technology Entertainment and Design), the annual conference in Long Beach California featuring 50 speakers who give an 18-minute talk on ‘Ideas worth spreading’.

Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

To be one of the 1000 people in the US audience you need to be “a leader in your field and can make a strong contribution to the TED community through your energy, influence and connections to change the world”. And have a spare $6000. Applications for TED 2012 in California have already closed.

Call it elitist, but a whole community has built up around the conference globally with 500 local events similar to TEDX Sydney held around the world each year and the online TED talks attracting more than 290 million views.

The Sydney license is held by Remo Giuffre, who runs REMO, and thanks to his merry team of volunteers it’s free to attend, but you still have to apply for a seat in the main theatre.

TEDX Sydney: Were the ideas worth spreading?

The first people Ogilvy PR’s Heather Jacobs ran into a TEDX Sydney were a team from Ogilvy & Mather. So, she roped American Express creative director Simon Bloomfield into writing up a piece for the website on his experience.

The second annual TEDx Sydney has come and gone (or the 3rd if you count the one not organized by Remo), and a few days later I sit pondering what I found of it.

There’s no doubt it was a brilliantly organised, thoroughly fascinating, and somewhat overwhelming day in the Carriageworks surrounds, but there’s been one thing gnawing away at me: I didn’t walk away from it as inspired to do something as I did after attending TEDx Sydney 2010.

Was I the cynical old hand, compared to the many starry-eyed TEDx virgins in attendance? Or was it something else?

I’ll be honest and say things didn’t start well when everyone bar the back two rows (containing the designated “blogging community”) were asked to switch off all electrical devices. How were we supposed to spread the ideas if we couldn’t take note of them? (#tweettweet?) I confess I didn’t turn my iPad off but felt conspicuous when I did try to jot something down.

But I don’t think that was the main problem.

Try as I might, five days later I can’t really recall hearing any big ideas that were really worth spreading. At 2010’s event, Rachel Botsman delivered her first presentation on Collaborative Consumption, and whether you were into it or not, it was an idea that has well and truly spread from that point to all corners of the world.

Sure there were plenty of ideas that made sense – Katherine Samaras’ presentation on obesity certainly was that. But if parts of the US are already looking at it – read here about Arizona’s plans to tax the obese – then it’s hardly revolutionary.

And there were ideas I certainly agreed with – I went home and told my wife I wanted to take my girls out of ballet and get them into an instrumental music program thanks to Richard Gill’s speech. But after two years of end of year concerts that look like someone’s trying to herd cats – it was hardly going to require a big push. (Question is will screeching cats be any better?)

There were loads of interesting people doing loads of interesting things – Drew Berry the biomedical animator; Josh Cook the bird behaviourist; Bryan Gaensler the astronomer; Johanna Featherstone the poetry advocate (yep, not sure what that means, but she was cool) … the list could go on. Everyone was really interesting to listen to.

But I reckon other than Saul Griffith – who wanted to (re)spread the idea that the future should be awesome (robot shark submarines, anyone?); and Genevieve Bell, who told me it was OK to be bored every once in a while (and revived my faith in big corporations like Intel at the same time), there was no one else that really got me thinking.

Except I did think that the upcoming Daniel Johns/Josh Wakely collaboration was likely to end in disaster. But boy can he sing.

Yes, I loved the day, and yes I’ll be clamouring for a ticket again next year (providing this post doesn’t put me on the outer with the organisers), but I just hope third time round I walk out burning to make a difference somewhere.

Then it’s up to me spread something.

What happens when your PCs become obsolete?

Technology moves at a fast pace and staying current can be a challenge. But when you do invest in new hardware, what do you do with the old stuff?

This was a recent dilemma for Howorth after we recently replaced our entire fleet of more than 30 PCs. The last thing we wanted to do was chuck them out.

Although these PCs were no longer suitable for our business, they were still operational and we were sure they could be donated to assist disadvantaged communities.

So, we contacted our client Microsoft for some assistance and they immediately put us in touch with WorkVentures.

For more than 30 years, WorkVentures has been helping make a difference to the lives of people who live with financial, social and educational disadvantage. Having recognised that employment is the key to helping individuals build their self-esteem and overcoming the fundamental causes of these problems, WorkVentures has developed numerous programs, to help improve their clients’ employability, and many of them use technology as the vehicle.

One of those programs is called Connect IT, where they take decommissioned PCs and refurbish them with software donated by Microsoft. These machines are then sold to low income households and to other non-profit organisations. In 2010, Connect IT sold more than 6,000 PCs, mainly to job seekers, disability pensioners and support parents.

“For those of us who have used a PC at work and home for many years, it’s astounding to learn there are still 600,000 Australian households with school-aged children that have no access to a computer or the internet,” said Scott Millington, Head of Connect IT.

“Research has shown that computer literacy is crucial to ensure low income households are not trapped in a lifetime of disadvantage, so making low-cost refurbished PCs available is a great way to change people’s future prospects and pathways. As a not-for-profit organisation, we need the support of the community and the business sector, so we’re truly grateful to Howorth for their kind donation.”

Find out more about WorkVentures and its Connect IT program, please visit www.workventures.com.au

The Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team is now hiring!

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