Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence appoints seven new specialists on the back of strong and continued growth

Ogilvy’s social media practice 360 Digital Influence, part of STW Group, has added another seven employees to its team on the back of significant growth and demand for social media expertise. Ogilvy will also unveil a further two appointments in August.

Since the April 2009 arrival of Brian Giesen, Regional Director of Ogilvy 360? Digital Influence, the practice has grown to 14 specialist practitioners. In that short time, the practice has seen revenue growth of 440%.

Graham White, Managing Director of Ogilvy 360? Digital Influence Australia, said the practice has experienced rapid growth from day one. “Our growth, both in people and financial performance, reflects the ongoing demand from clients across the Ogilvy Group for strategic counsel and the creation and execution of powerful social media strategies – integrated with other marketing and communications disciplines.

“We’re seeing clients continuing to push more funds into ongoing social media activity. As such, we are also adding two more hires in August to ensure we can fulfil that demand and continue to be at the forefront of social media and digital engagement in Australia.”

Ogilvy 360? Digital Influence also became the most awarded social media team in the region after winning ‘Digital Agency of the Year’ by the region’s highly coveted Holmes Report Specialist Agencies of the Year Awards in April.

Giesen said the practice was extremely proud to receive this award as it recognised the consistent and disciplined delivery of outstanding work by the team.

“This is an excellent achievement which is particularly rewarding given the challenges of growing demand as digital influence skills and successful execution become increasingly important to all of our clients,” said Giesen.

“We’re thrilled to have another new wave of experienced talent joining us. They bring with them an array of knowledge and expertise in strategic digital planning, video content creation, analysis and analytics and community management.”

The seven new hires include two Digital Strategists and five Digital Analysts. They are:

• Lachlan Hibbert-Wells, joining as a Digital Strategist from Daemon Group where he was a Digital Planning Director;
• Megan Anhalt, joining as a Digital Strategist from US-based DoSomething.org, where she was Director of Media and Talent Relations;
• Mitch Phillips, joining from OMD as a Digital Analyst to work across a number of the practice’s consumer and natural resources sector clients;
• Gregory Tan, joining as a Digital Analyst from an online retail start-up in Melbourne;
• Mark Redshaw, joining as a Digital Analyst after three years as a researcher and sub-editor at online business information service, IRD Group;
• Melanie Vaz, joining as a Digital Analyst after working in Ogilvy PR since 2009. She is currently completing Award School through the Communications Council;
• Nathalie Bulsing, joining as a Digital Analyst following four years as a microbiological analyst in The Netherlands.

Ogilvy 360? Digital Influence is Ogilvy’s industry-leading social media and word of mouth marketing practice designed to help brands in an era of changing sources of influence. It is part of Ogilvy PR Australia, a joint venture between Ogilvy PR Worldwide and STW Group, Australia’s leading marketing content and communications services group.

Ends

For further information:

Tessa Sexton

STW Group

+61 421 098 674

Part 3: John Bell on getting the timing right to launch your social media strategy

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.

Following is the final post in 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.

Q: How do brands know they are ready to go to market with their social media program?

John Bell: In markets where social media hasn’t necessarily created a huge momentum, and Australia might be this way, the biggest challenge for communications and marketing professionals is timing. When do I get involved? When does it become essential that I do something?  When will my involvement and investment in social media be critical to my business compared to what I’m investing in now?

Those who have benefitted the most from social media are those who haven’t started too early, but early enough to get experience with it and start to understand inside their organisation how to manage their social network presence to be of the greatest benefit and create more two-way conversations between customers and stakeholders. It’s not like you can study up on it and then one day pull the trigger.

Research by The McKenzie Institute found that 20 per cent of brands using social media for marketing communication purposes across the enterprise are reaping 80 per cent of the benefit which leaves a lot of brands scratching their head and saying, “Does this do anything?”

I think that 20 per cent are the brands with the most experience and the most resources and commitment to social media. It’s the minority of brands right now who are applying social media to their business and feel confident and understand how it’s positively impacting them. I think this year in many markets, Australia included, we’re going to see brands that have been dabbling, start to get truly committed.

Question: How does Australia compare to some of the other markets you have experienced?

John Bell: The adoption curve has been tremendous with the growth in brands using social media for professional reasons skyrocketing. For a relatively small country of twenty million people, connectivity is fairly strong, there a lot of the conditions for marketplace readiness, including the growing use of smartphones, and strong levels of broadband connectivity, although I’ve heard there are some issues about the speed of the broadband. There’s a lot of experimentation occurring in Australia right now and I see a lot of companies hungry to move from experimentation to meaningful operationalizing. How can we get more out of it?

Question: This joke was doing the rounds on Twitter recently: “My boss found me asleep under my desk and was going to fire me, but I said I was planking so he made me vice president of social media”. Are jokes like this a reflection of the reputation that anyone can be an expert in social media?

John Bell: That’s probably happened all too often with companies investing some kind of key token staff hires for people who showed an aptitude in this space. They then realise they have no marketing communication skills, and can do nothing besides introducing them to Foursquare, etc.

Now a lot of brands are looking for people with the right blend of serious marketing communication skills and expertise in social media.

The next generation does come in with an advantage because of their intuitive personal knowledge of the space, but to expect them to go launch a multinational social media based marketing program a day after graduation is not realistic.

Part 2: John Bell on the challenges of measuring 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.

Following is part two of 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.

Question: There isn’t a global standard for measuring social media. Is there a push towards this and what are some of the challenges in measuring the impact?

John Bell: Everyone wants a standard measurement model that all their colleagues and peers will rely on. I predict that will happen, or a series of standards will emerge, over the next 10-20 years, but right now we just have to take it upon ourselves to measure impact for what’s good for the brand.

Question: What are some of the ways marketers are already using the measure the impact, such as engagement?

John Bell: Brand marketers are measuring engagement, but there’s no way to understand the ROI of engagement. It’s based on factors such as time spent, number of interactions, anything that’s indicative of me doing something with the brand, even something superficial such as “liking” it on Facebook or commenting on a post, or watching a video.

These actions are all indicative of some greater level of involvement and if you believe traditional sales funnel mechanisms, saying that people are aware of your brand means you now have them more involved and engaged.

A smaller number of that audience is now considering if the product suits their needs, whether they will buy it and a smaller number still will go ahead and buy it. That degree of engagement is useful to understand: are people engaged or not? So you can look on the Facebook admin wall and get a number of metrics or interaction metrics that are helpful.

The other trend is that a lot brands are putting value on the volume and quality of ‘word-of-mouth’. What are people saying about the brand? Are they being positive or negative? Are they associating the brand with what the brand wants? For example, are people associating Ford vehicles with fuel efficiency? Ford is trying very hard to make some of the most fuel efficient cars in the world, and emphasises that in all of its communications and is this reflected in the conversations online?

What a few of us are trying to do is to prove what we intuitively believe to be true – that the greater the volume of talk, and the greater the positive share of voice in the marketplace for a particular brand is indicative of preference for that brand over its competitors. And depending on what they are saying, of course, it could indicate intent to purchase.

Question: What if people are using social media to complain about a brand? How can brands deal with negative comments online?

John Bell: What’s interesting about negative comments is that there’s been an unintentional effect of brands developing social customer care outlets online. Twitter handles are meant to grab your attention if you’ve got something going wrong. If I were a cable service, Time Warner Cable, for example, the Twitter handles of other cable providers are meant to capture people who are complaining or having problems and take them into service, get them to customer care and get their problem solved.

Because it’s through Twitter, in this example, they are doing it and quite publicly, so they are getting a marketing side effect in that people are thinking, ‘Time Warner is listening to us, that’s good’.

The problem there is that we have trained consumers that if they have a problem with a product or service the first protocol is to complain about it to their friends online because that’s when the brand will step in and come to their aid.

It’s an interesting problem. I don’t think we, as marketers yet understand what — if anything –  we can do to both serve the customer service needs that are happening in the public space but not encourage more of them.

Socialising the enterprise: a chat with Ogilvy 360DI’s John Bell

John Bell, global managing director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, visited Australia last week and spoke to BNET about the concept of socialising the enterprise.

John shares his thoughts with BNET’s Phil Dobbie on the opportunities and challenges that business leaders will likely encounter when devising and deploying social media strategies. He also explains the reasons why it’s important to make social media part of the corporate-wide strategy that promotes long term engagement.

Listen to the interview here:

Ogilvy Sydney Event With Radian6 Co-Founder Chris Ramsey

Livewire social network for seriously ill Aussie teenagers

Howorth ensured Livewire – www.livewire.org.au – was the website on everyone’s lips after officially launching the groundbreaking new online community in Australia. The PR campaign led to an immediate 25% increase in membership on launch day and invitations of support from like-minded not for profit companies.

More than 250 stories were placed in a wide range of media across every state in Australia – and even across the globe. Considering Google ranked Livewire as ‘the most searched story’ on launch day, this in no surprise. Highlights included

• Print – The Daily Telegraph, The Australian Financial Review, mX and suburban and regional news in NSW, QLD, VIC, SA and WA.
• Radio – more than 166 stories, inc luding coverage on every ABC station across the country
• Online – more than 55 pieces of coverage across news.com.au, yahoo.com.au, australianit.com.au, couriermail.com.au, heraldsun.com.au, smh.com.au, theage.com.au and more
• Bloggers – overwhelmingly supportive postings from Mum and Dad, tech and health bloggers
• Livewire ranked as ‘the most searched story’ on Google on launch day

As the first initiative of its kind, Livewire provides a free, safe and supportive online social network for Australians aged between 10 and 21, currently living with a serious illness, chronic health condition, or disability. It is a way for Australia’s sickest teenagers to understand that they’re not alone and support does exist for them.

Key steps

Howorth ensured the Livewire story was blasted far and wide across the country by devising a strategic media and blogger engagement plan. Key steps:

• Pre-negotiated interviews with AAP, Radio National, The Daily Telegraph and news.com.au to drive news interest on launch day
• An exclusive launch event featuring the Hon. Senator Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and Jill Weekes, CEO of The Starlight Children’s Foundation, for over 150 media and corporate partners
• More than 50 interviews organised post-event to drive momentum across radio, print and online news
• Blogger outreach to establish brand evangelists and generate positive word of mouth

Livewire were thrilled with the results of the campaign

“The Howorth team was appointed at short notice. The particular expertise of Vida and her team was their comprehensive knowledge and contacts within the media industry, particularly with online media which was a key strategic area we wanted to target.

“The Howorth team went over and beyond our expectations, and we were delighted with the level of media that was generated. They were always available and, most importantly very quickly established a thorough understanding of what Livewire is all about and what we were hoping to achiev.,”

Omar Khalifa, Managing Director, Livewire.

TweePR: Australia’s PR practitioners on Twitter

I just spotted TweePR.com.au, an interesting initiative driven by the school of marketing/communications at the Queensland University of Technology.

TweePR aims to “give a bird’s eye view of what the nation’s public relations gurus are tweeting about. Watch myriad issues unfold – as interpreted by the nation’s masters of PR – all in one place.”

The river-of-news format is a nice touch, enabling you to see real-time messages being tweeted.

There’s also the tweepr top 100 list, which ranks Australia’s PR practitioners from 1 to 100, calculated based on the number of followers, updates and how recent their tweets are.

Howorth-ians in the list are @bdgiesen, @GWhiteOz, @Ofagirl and @deelau.

Preference-based consumer marketing. Why do we ignore it?

There is a vast amount of research that has been conducted recently regarding the consumers’ preferred method of receiving marketing communication. A recent study by Forrester Research, and commissioned by ExactTarget, highlights that the majority of consumers today still have a strong affinity towards email.

The important take out: Consumers prefer email at a rate of three-to-one when compared with any other avenue for marketing communications such as social media, Instant Messaging, phone and SMS!

Despite the abundance of research that all points towards email being the marketing method of choice for consumers, why do marketers continue to ignore this?

Despite the spike of Internet users using social media, for example three quarters of Australian online adults use social technologies (Forrester: Australian Adult Social Technographics Revealed 2008), consumers in general are NOT open to receiving marketing communication via this channel.

As social media continues to boom with new channels for communication being created everyday with new social networking sites and the like popping up, there is an overreliance and tendency to use this medium for all-purposes in order to reach the masses.

Unfortunately we forego the very fundamental principles of Marketing 101. We need to stop, think, plan and go back to basics:

• Who are our customers?
• Where are they?
• What are their preferences for receiving marketing messages?
• What are the right messages for each customer segment?
• What channel do we use to reach them?

A quick Google search and some top line research is enough to reveal where our customers’ preferences sit. It’s all very simple. Follow the basic principles of marketing and target the appropriate marketing messages to the appropriate consumers based on their preferences using the appropriate channels!

Sadly, we are missing the point! We’re frustrating consumers and, ultimately, not getting the outcomes that we desire!

Spotted: Twitchiker and the Feats of Tweet

Earlier this year, a freelance journalist by the name of Paul Smith (no relation to Paul Smith from the AFR), embarked on an adventure to get from Newcastle to New Zealand in just 30 days.

He put in place a few rules for his journey and unless these were followed, the whole adventure is over and he goes home:

• He’ll only accept help (lifts, a place to stay and food) from other people on Twitter
• He can’t make any plans further than three days in advance
• He can only spend money on food, drink and anything that might fit in his suitcase
• If there’s more than one offer on the table, he gets to choose which he takes. If there’s only one, he has to take it within 48 hours
• If he’s unable to find a way to move on from a location within 48 hours, the challenge is over and he goes home

Fast forward to September, he’s halfway across the globe in much more interesting places than NZ (…sorry Kiwis) and with a whole heap of amazing stories to tell about his travel adventures.

He has also recently embarked on a new project, Feats of Tweet, with an aim of using social media to change the world – one tweet at a time.

These are both great example of social media – used the way that social media is supposed to!

Online communities: think ‘quality NOT quantity’

Nate Cochrane pens his rules for social media etiquette on iTNews. And in a style true to the very fundamentals of social media which encourage active sharing and participation, he has made a point to list the rules he outlines as a work in progress and has opened it up for discussion on the site.

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?

The following tool can help you determine the most appropriate people to follow:
http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/12/17-ways-to-visualize-the-twitter-universe/

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!

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