The Buzz Bin

The final presentation I’m attending is Ogilvy’s Stephen Marino. He will be discussing creating digital influence programs.

Digital influence is defined as…

A word of mouth marketing discipline

With a methodology for identifying and engaging digital influences and

Activating networks of people to share and recommend products, services and issues.

We create engaging experiences designed to promote awareness, brand loyalty advocacy and conversion.

Guiding principles for a successful digital influence program:

• Listen first
• Offer different and deepening ways for people to engage
• Build relationships not just campaigns, and
• Measure performance now

You are engaging your consumer in the relationship, asking for interaction. Social media gives people the opportunity to build on that relationship, reaching out to a broad audience of influencers (including bloggers!).

Stephen mentioned again the idea of ROI – Return on Involvement when discussing measuring performance. That is the ultimate measure of success for social media and digital influence campaigns, who is involved and interacting with you?

An example for large consumer companies (example given: Sleep Number bed) is to make sure you are listening. If there is a problem (say, a post written in anger on a blog about your product), make sure you identify it and address it, it’s just good, basic customer service – gone digital.

You may not always convince your critics, but you will win over your fans.

Engagement According to Ogilvy

Time spent leads to content creation and collaborative filtering. Content creation leads to co-creation, and collaborative filtering leads to conversation.

• Time Spent – branded entertainment, task fulfillment
• Content Creation – product reviews, testimonials, blog posts – outreach
• Co-Creation – product/service innovation, co-creating advertising, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding
• Collaborative Filtering – bookmarking, tagging, rating, voting, sharing
• Conversation – product feedback, blog posts/comments and message board posts

Measurement Ingredients

• Engagement and read – page impression, visits, and unique visitors, time spent, pages per visitor, emails opened and click-throughs, and video views, audio played, etc…
• Word of mouth – number of mentions, recommendations mentions per user
• Earned media – offline media mentions
• Search visibility – higher search results, 3rd party results, greater search results “share”
• Research – customer/stakeholder feedback, product sampling

The PR Factor

Blogging is word of mouth and peer-to-peer. It’s proactively engaging in social media in a way that you can’t do through traditional PR or telemarketing, through traditional marketing and events. It gets people to be a part of the conversation, and

PR means being able to represent a company’s corporation or product to the consumer. Social media in a way seeks to take public relations back to that, to the heart of the constituency.

Well, it’s time to wrap this party up. Thanks to everyone for the great discussion on social media/social software, marketing, communications, blogging, Twitter, SEO, and most of all, CONVERSATION.