360DigitalInfluence

Out-blog, out-tweet, outlast…10 bloggers, 24 hours in cool digs with hot tech toys…with 2 ultimate winners. All this happening as part of a LIVE display in a storefront window. Geeks go chic? Yes. Bringing blogging, tweeting, fashion and technology to the streets of Singapore? Ohhh yes! And the conversations have already started.

Stay tuned for our “The Making Of” video, which will be up later today.
Here’s the video!

Sleep-deprivation aside, we’re really looking forward to kicking off our first-ever Blogathon event, hosted by our client, Intel and partners, TANGS and Lenovo. More juicy details here.

Want the countdown clock? Grab it here and join us this weekend:

I’ve let a few days pass in order to observe and digest the after-effects of last week’s Open Room session, “Journalism’s from Mars, Social Media’s from Venus“. Needless to say, the conversations got colorful pretty quickly and have continued into the early part of this week, both online as well as in the print media. Searching the #openroom Twitter hashtag alone provides a good overview of what went down but if you want to read more, check out MyPaper’s piece on not writing off traditional media, as well as the posts by Claudia, IanOnTheRedDot, dk and one of our panelists, uniquefrequency.

Our aim of this session was to get 2 groups of people who don’t normally talk in person…talking. Both have their opinions and it’s not a case of either-or. While it’s always fun to sensationalize a gathering of seeming opposites such as this, we’re not debating whether journalism is better than a blog post or vice versa, but we did talk about the importance of solid business models in traditional media and the merits of social media in today’s new world of rapidfire communication, where anybody and everybody can be an influencer. And that’s what The Open Room is about - communicating in a human voice that is open, honest and respectful. In a world that is inundated with messaging, it’s our version of the “real coffeeshop talk” where one can listen and be heard. More importantly, it’s a place where stories get told. It’s our way of getting folks fired up and bringing real communication back to life.

We communicate with traditional media and bloggers everyday and believe that the system has room for both planets. Neither is better than the other but adjustments can be made on both sides so that news is reported better and faster. The bloggers who write great opinion pieces or commentary backed by fact are going to have the most readers. Similarly, journalists who have their finger on the pulse of wider conversations on the ground and online are going to be a step ahead. I like this post that talks about the relationship between blogs and mainstream media being a fact of life. What I think lies ahead is the next Open Room session, where we take the conversation up a notch and talk about some specifics. Brian has an interesting thought starter about Building the Future Media Organisation, which is definitely worth talking about, but I’d also like to hear from those who attended our Open Room. What burning conversations would you like to have next?

With Felix Soh, Head of Digital Media at SPH, and Thomas Crampton, Ogilvy’s Asia-Pacific Director of Digital Influence

Update: We’re maxed out on capacity! Thanks to everyone who RSVP-ed. Twollow the conversations via #openroom and le tus know your thoughts!
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A lot has been said about traditional vs. new media but it’s really not a battle with an either/or outcome. Fun fodder for an Open Room session over finger food, drinks and tweets where journalists and bloggers unite! Happening Thursday, 25 June from 7-9pm (venue TBC).

Thomas Crampton, who heads Digital Influence in Asia-Pacific, will be co-hosting the conversation with ex-journalist, Arti Mulchand. Tom recently video-blogged about his transition from journalism to digital strategy.

RSVPs closed.
RSVP: niki.torres@ogilvy.com

I came across this Quantcast summary that shows the tremendous growth of Twitter over the last 5 months. It now reaches over 4 million US visitors monthly. Not surprisingly, the audience skews younger (18-34) and typically visit sites such as Techcrunch and TVsquad.com. What did surprise me, however, is that there are slightly more women (53%) than men on Twitter. I’d like to know how many of those women come from the prolific mom blogger community.

Twitter makes for a great microblogging platform - which I like to describe as the online version of a brain fart. Think of those random thought bubbles that happen in your head throughout the day, whether you’ve just had a great idea at work, are stuck in traffic, spot something interesting…anything really. When used as an extension of an existing communications platform, these 140-character snippets often make for more interesting reads than anything you’re likely to say officially, which is probably why over 4 million people in the US alone are all a-Twitter.

However, Twitter is not for everyone and I would seriously caution marketers who think that it’s a great way to blast out 140-character promos. Adam Salamon has a bit of a rant about it here.

We started talking about this study in September last year and it’s now ready for download.

We’ve covered 12 countries in Asia and we hope you’ll find the insights useful in helping to gain a better understanding of how to benefit from interacting with customers through social media.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped with this, as well as everyone who’s expressed interest in getting a copy. Let us know what you think!

This Newsweek story about Barack Obama’s 26-year-old speech writer is a fantastic reminder to all of us professional communicators of how compelling an honest human voice can be when it comes to telling a story.

I keep banging on about the importance and value of communicating openly and honestly, and this holds true especially for people in prominent positions…whether you’re the head of a company or the head of a country.

It’s easy to get lost in marketing messages and I cringe every time I see a press release or hear a speech that seems like a robot created it. Cold, meaningless, inanimate.

That’s why we like holding Open Room sessions…to let the human voices of our clients come through and tell the stories that people actually listen to. The kind of stories they in turn go on to tell others.

Here’s a repost of an article I wrote for iMediaConnection, which aims to get more brands thinking about how they can re-energize their PR efforts going into 2009.
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The most successful brands this year will be those that engage openly and invite deeper participation. Here are some ways to kick-start “Open Room” communication for your brand.

The economic downturn is forcing many marketers to tighten their belts and rethink their marketing mix.

A big upside, however, is the opportunity for companies to really hunker down and focus on bringing out the core value of their product offerings, raising their service levels and improving the way in which they communicate with their customers to build preference and grow loyalty when consumer sentiment is down.

The evolution of communication
In January 2008, the Asia Pacific region had more than 300 million internet users at least 15 years of age accessing the internet from work and home computers. This represents an increase of 14 percent versus a year ago and makes Asia Pacific the largest of the five worldwide regions, according to comScore.

The internet has dramatically changed the way in which people communicate and leveled the playing field in which marketers operate today. Not only is it significantly easier for people to consume, create and share content in real time with other like-minded individuals, it is also easier for brand owners to track these conversations, reach out to influencers and measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

This is the groundswell that Forrester Analyst, Charlene Li, talks about in her blog.

If consumers are not actively generating content, the majority are at the very least searching for the experiences and opinions of others who share the same interests on a regular basis and are being influenced well beyond the marketing messages that are put out on corporate websites.

It is therefore imperative that brand owners have their ear to the ground across all channels where this communication is taking place.

2008 was also a year in which we increasingly saw the intersection of traditional and new media in public relations, where more journalists were regularly looking at blogs and forums for story ideas and commentary.

As even more people turn to the internet as a credible source of information in 2009 and beyond, the brands that will emerge stronger are those that effectively blend solid PR basics with more direct and open communication across all platforms — a concept the 360-degee digital influence team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide in Singapore have dubbed “The Open Room”.

How “Open Room” communication works
As its name suggests, “Open Room” communication goes beyond the traditional press conference or media interview to create opportunities for closer face-to-face interaction and conversation between brands and a wider sphere of influential advocates.

This is achieved via a phased program that begins with the setting up of active online listening posts to discover and map relevant conversations about a brand or product and come up with key insights.

We then identify influential voices within those conversations before creating strategic opportunities focused around compelling experiences and participation to engage directly with those people to help tell the story.

The most successful brands will be those that engage openly in the dialog and invite deeper participation. Communication, after all, is a two-way conversation that is most lively when both sides are actively contributing.

Here are three simple ways to kick-start “Open Room-style” communication in the new year:

Listen more, listen everywhere
Here is a common client scenario: Your media monitoring systems are all in place and you track press coverage like a bloodhound. But do you know what is being said about your company, its people and products in thousands of casual conversations that are taking place in the wider online sphere?

If you have never searched for your own brand in Google, Twitter or Facebook, you should. Then do the same for a competitor and compare the results. Chances are you will find out something that you never knew — both good and bad. It takes less than a minute to set up a free daily Google Alert on your own, and it pays dividends in providing useful insights.

One of our clients, Dell, does a great job of listening via its Direct2Dell and Ideastorm sites. Not only do these sites provide an open channel of communication, but they also serve to build a strong community of people on the ground who actively advocate Dell’s products and regularly participate in the conversation.

Start the year by setting up an online listening post as mentioned above. It is an excellent way of discovering what people are really saying about you and identifying individuals or groups who are fans or detractors. It helps to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Refresh your newsroom
Static, one-way newsrooms deserve a makeover in 2009, so look beyond text-only documents and paper press kits.

Creating and embedding short video snippets of your spokesperson(s) into your announcement, along with links to images hosted online are simple embellishments that serve to make your news more compelling for journalists and ripe for sharing on the web.

Get a social life
The digital groundswell is a natural result of the evolution of technology. Social media is not a magic bullet in a lackluster communications plan but rather one of the many new communication channels that must be considered when listening and speaking to your target audience.

The myriad digital media platforms and tools can no doubt be overwhelming but rather than fear these new technologies, we should resolve to familiarize ourselves with what’s out there in order to better understand how it all works. Remember, we regard email as nothing scarier than a handwritten letter or fax message was 10 years ago.

One essential to-do item for 2009 is to get your team started with a Digital 101 workshop to introduce some of the more popular online technologies beyond email and instant messaging.

You might be surprised at how simple practices such as reading social media thought leadership blogs, learning to use an RSS reader, understanding how Google search works and collaborating on wikis can help make your team work much smarter and faster… and even spawn fresh ideas about other “Open Room” ways to communicate.

So simply put. Thanks to Pat Law for sharing this:

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Warning: this is a fairly long post that contains quite a few buzzwords.

More and more often these days, I hear from companies who want to “go digital”. Yes, “digital”, “social media” and “Web 2.0″ are rolling off the tongues of many marketers and it’s great that more and more folks are beginning to recognize the importance of communicating on the fast, fluid and sometimes fickle platform that is the Internet.

However, I find that many folks are clambering onto the online bandwagon and shooting from the hip without proper thought about the whys and hows.

Some common loose cannons:
- “I want to start a blog/Facebook group.”
- “Let’s invite some bloggers to our event.”
- “I want a microsite.”
- “Create a viral video for me.”

While these are all elements that can be incorporated into a digital influence program, they aren’t one-off solutions that can be pulled out of a hat and just thrown into the marketing mix. One of the first things I always ask clients is “what’s your objective?” The next thing I ask them to do is listen. If we don’t know what people are saying about our brand or products online and the places where these conversations are taking place, how can we figure out the best way to engage them?

Starting a blog, Facebook group or microsite is easy as pie. But if you build it, will they come? Keeping something like that going, however, requires commitment and compelling content. Don’t start something if you don’t have the time or resources to sustain it. Having credible, knowledgeable spokesperson(s) to front a corporate blog is key, as is having a rolling calendar of fresh, interesting content to put out there for readers. And, of course, the next step should be opening it up to reader participation and inviting additional contributions. Direct2Dell is a great example of how this works.

I’m all for companies involving bloggers in events, especially when there are interesting announcements, products and/or personalities that are relevant to the bloggers’ interests. But knowing what makes bloggers tick requires involvement. Communications professionals need to be in the same spaces as netizens in order to understand how they work. We spend so much time putting together media profiles and briefing books, building media relationships and poring over newspapers and magazines clipping away…we should do the same with the bloggers we want to engage. Set up an RSS reader and subscribe to bloggers’ feeds for a better understanding of what they write about. Then reach out and comment at the very least. It’s amazing how much one can learn by looking at someone’s blogroll and clicking on. Simply blasting out a generic press invitation to bloggers to try to get more bums on seats and score your “digital outreach” brownie points ain’t gonna cut it. Pat Law’s said it before and Ben Koe has a another neat post on the state of “pitching bloggers” that has spawned a few other interesting reactions from fellow netizens.

And give the bloggers content they can easily use. A standard paper press kit is pretty useless and swag bags will only go so far. Try adapting a social media release with links to more information and multimedia that can be posted, embedded, tagged and shared online. If that’s too daunting, consider jazzing up the standard online press room with podcasts, links (to event photos on Flickr, user videos on YouTube) and other multimedia content.

I can’t stress enough that digital influence is not a magic bullet or a shot in the arm. It can start simply by setting up Google alerts with keywords about a brand or product, and searching for your clients on YouTube and Facebook. That’s where you get your first online insights from. From there, it’s a matter of clicking on and building that knowledge for a better clue about the space.

I hate using the phrase “pitching bloggers” ‘cuz it sets my teeth on edge and I think creates a negative perception from the get-go…but for lack of a better phrase, here are 11 points straight from one horse’s mouth that every communications professional should hard-code into their heads. We need to stop propagating PR flackdom!

I sometimes don’t blame bloggers for sliming some of the more clueless folks in my industry because we sometimes get so lost in The Message and in trying to please our clients that we lose sight of what it is we’re really here to do. COMMUNICATE. And, as far as The Open Room is concerned, communication has got to be open and real. Remember how to talk to people? Like, really talk?

When I’ve spoken about Digital Influence…both internally as well as to clients and prospects…one of the things I always stress is the need to listen and understand. Blankanvas’ points #7 and #8 are your starting points. How can we ever know how bloggers tick if we’re not online in the space and using the tools? If you haven’t figured out RSS and the basics of Technorati yet, you need to NOW, otherwise chances are you’re going to get it all wrong.