We had lots of fun last week preparing for my NY Social Media Week panel ‘Who owns this sh#t anyway’. View the archived live-stream here.

The panel gathered individuals from digital, PR, creative and client organisations to discuss the inside scoop on how social media is actually being handled. For me, it was a great moment to take stock with BBH buddies old and new to think about how really, in our heart of hearts, our particular skills and values can help our clients’ brands in this area.

For starters, it was easy to observe how incredibly inefficient the whole system is at the moment. Clients routinely find themselves with 12 different Facebook/Twitter pages, run by different people, doing different things. Agencies which could be fruitfully collaborating are pitted against one another (by design or by default) in an exhausting land-grab. There are pockets of customer service, pockets of CRM, and pockets of brand engagement; often, each with a different client, budget and objectives.

The concerns of my co-panellists were those of industrial-strength Social Media; they had to listen like their lives depended on it – because they did. They had to be in constant command of everything going on out in the community and constantly responding proportionately.

We creative agencies have had our fingers burned in the past by vaingloriously striding out into this fray and getting it wrong. Others have too, for that matter, but our hubris (alas) probably marks us out. So, we have re-shaped ourselves incorporating brilliant people who will make sure we don’t do this again.

But, really, the big gaping hole which emerged is that no one is approaching this entire thing brand first. The ever changing list of new social channels that spring up and flourish, each with its own set of values, behaviors and tone must be understood and used appropriately – but these are simply new lenses through which to view a brand. The more lenses, the more rich and nuanced an understanding of the brand is required.

What makes us creative agencies different is that we look inside first (great phrase, Sam Jesse). We don’t work in red-hot real-time response mode; we might do sometimes, but its not our fundamental default mode. Our centre of gravity lies with caring neurotically about a brand’s mortal soul. Our units of measurement are ultimately the muscularity of the overall brand and how we can flex it to our clients’ advantage when required.

So – what did the panel conclude re: who, indeed ‘owns this sh#t’? My personal shot was that the role for creative agencies is as the ‘priest hood of the mortal soul of the brand’. In our rush to barricade the land-grab we mustn’t forget that we need to think even more deeply about the powerful, differentiated brand stuff which is going to be so much more exposed than ever before. We also need to take the total holistic view which helps shape the overall ‘flow’ (thank you Jason G) of a brand’s body language and what it means for our coms plan.

In short, look to your mortal (brand) souls; there are nasty algorithms out there, bored consumers and social media overload; if you don’t know truly who you are and why you’re relevant –  you’re going straight to social media hell.

@saneel and @shaunabe present at Social Media Week 2012

This morning, I had the privilege of co-presenting with Shaun Abrahamson, the CEO of Mutopo and active member of the Labs community. We’ve been discussing how companies inspire their customers to give them so much more than a purchase. Today, we presented the culmination of thinking* both Mutopo and BBH Labs have been doing about this topic. It covers what can reasonably be earned from customers (media can feel trivial in comparison), and what ambitious companies are offering in return across various social media platforms. Just to prove we really get it, we made our entire presentation a collection of examples and case studies. Now that’s earning value, isn’t it?

Click the image above to watch a video of the presentation. The slides can be found here.

*Thanks to @jrafferty & @nalaisadog for their help with content and design, respectively

Questions, speculations, myth and fan expectations can turn a product and/or brand into consumer gossip. Apple announced the launch of the iPhone 4S, still a kick-ass phone but not the iPhone 5 we were all hoping for. What does the ‘33’ stand for on the Rolling Rock bottle? Why are AT&T cell phone signals so bad in New York and San Francisco?

Photo Source: Forbes.com

We spoke with our good friend Nick Denton, self-proclaimed Gossip Merchant at Gawker.  We asked Nick how can brands navigate the gossip about them and how Gawker can help them. He brought up three really good points that changed how we view things over here at BBH Labs:

1) Are we listening to the right crazies?
We let people with more time on their hands be more influential. Nick wants this to change. He doesn’t think time is a true metric of influence. He wants to emphasize those that are actually interesting in what they comment about. Why can’t brands do the same?

2) Create a safe space for conversations
Earlier this year BBH Labs wrote a post about Social Flings and this particular tactic falls into that camp. Brands need places where they can answer honestly and openly without general fear of attack. Perhaps AT&T invites an Engineer to explain the cell phone signal issues in New York and San Francisco? Lean into the controversy and squelch it. Gawker network wants to be that safe place for brands with a new offering launching sometime next year.

3) Brands need to be interesting as well
Brands (or brand hired celebrities) can join the conversation online and be a peer. Brands have a point of view on the world beyond their primary business. One example we like to use is, ‘If Red Bull the brand left a review on a skateboard that was being sold on Amazon we would find that review credible.’ If brands appeared in these spaces it could change consumer perception in a very interesting and unboring way.

What do you think of these points? Are we missing anything? Can we look at brand gossip in a new way?

It’s Monday. Almost an average Monday at the office, but today I went above and beyond my routine and made myself a salad for lunch! Partially due to the fact that Fresh Direct came this morning and partially because I’ve been attempting a gluten free diet, this leafy green point of pride made today special and I couldn’t wait to share it with the world. Some may call me an oversharer (cough: @barneyrobinson) and some may make fun of my food Instagram tweets (cough: @saneel), but I wasn’t going to let either rain on my parade. So, I sat at my desk savoring my spinach and beet salad, fork in one hand, iPhone in the other snapping away to get just the right shot, then scrolling through to apply just the right filter to capture the magic of my homemade goodness. And I did. And I sent my color saturated, Lomo-fi filtered picture straight to Twitter. And guess what happened? Within 5 minutes @PretzelCrisps had started following me and had Tweeted at me.

Of course I immediately DM’d back, excitedly starting a conversation with a brand that I had no opinion of about 5 minutes prior.

As you can see, the conversation centered around what they could do for me and they always responded within a minute. All in all, an extremely, and refreshingly human exchange.

This experience got me running around, ducking in and out of offices to tell people about it. Everyone was in awe of @PretzelCrisps’ behavior, as well as how they continued to engage me. It was a quick, powerful burst of brand dialogue, in the vein of a social media fling. @PretzelCrisps just proved that creating a relationship isn’t that hard in a conversational environment when you’re adding to the experience (complimenting me) and not asking much for much in return (an address for instantaneous delivery). They just made a huge impression on all of @BBHNewYork, both as consumers, and as industry folks aspiring to help make brands human.

Kudos and thanks @PretzelCrisps.

Source: Scoobay on Flickr

“In recent years organizations have raced to connect with fans and customers in new ways via social media.

Yet, the results have been mixed. Many organizations are struggling to start up communities, while others that have a community aren’t sure what to say or do with them. Meanwhile, a few companies are racing ahead to very productive collaborations yielding new offerings, better service and more sales.

BBH New York hosted a panel for Social Media Week last Friday called “Forget Communities of Fans. Get Partners,” to understand this world and find ways to navigate it.

The panel consisted of three people: The first was Peter Espersen, Global Community lead at LEGO, one of the most successful organizations working with communities today. The second was Kristen Taylor of NYU’s ITP program who is studying the art and science of community uncovering insights few brands have yet to consider. The panel was moderated by Shaun Abrahamson, CEO of Mutopo, a highly innovative social product development company.

Here are a few key bits of wisdom from the panel using Storify:

A number of important themes were discussed but the eight rules that the community manger of Legos introduced were probably the most helpful:

1. Set Expectations: Let the online community know what they will expect
2. Be Respectful: These aren’t freaks, they are important partners
3. Ensure Win-Win: Give them something to get something
4. Be Inclusive: Let everyone in the community have a chance at glory
5. Be Reliable: If you say something follow through
6. Ensure Transparency: Have answers to all questions
7. Limit Secrecy: Secrets drive the wrong type of relationship
8. Fair Compensation: If your fans provide real business value, treat them fairly

What do you think about brands partnering with fans for ideas and product development? What do you think about the rise of Community Managers in agencies or client organizations? Do you think most brands can keep to the rules that Lego has set out?

We just got our hands on the video. It’s about an hour long but worth every minute:

Over the last few years I dedicated my ‘extra’ time to understanding and cultivating the theory, articles and case studies surrounding propagation planning. I shared everything I learned on my Blog. By sharing, others contributed and the ideas got better.

Sharing and generosity are very important in the advertising industry today. They make all of us better. As they say, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Edward Boches, who is in the process of formalizing propagation planning at Mullen, wrote a great post this week asking a provocative question, “Do you give content away because you want credit?” For me, I give content away to become a member of the club. A club of strategic planning minds that contribute everyday to a greater collective. This club is made up of so many people that I couldn’t possibly name them all here… but you know who you are.

So I was thrilled when Mark Lewis and the Planning-Ness conference asked if Mike Monello (Co-Founder at Campfire) and I would share our thoughts on propagation planning. I hope that you can take something away from this deck and inspire your creative and social media teams to develop work that gets spread.

(Best viewed by clicking MENU and FULL SCREEN)

We were asked to elaborate upon social media flings, a topic written about in a previous Labs post. This is what we shared:

Or you can check out a video of the 15 minute presentation:

(Skip to 1h13m mark)

In summary, the proposed opportunity of ‘social media flings’ is in all of those social environments where people connect online around a subject they’re interested in. The point is simply that a significant gap exists between having no non-paid contact with a brand and committing to a relationship with them in digital environment. Think blog comments, video responses, hashed twitter conversations, and so-forth—a collection of places where a brand can engage if they talk about something other than themselves.

The purpose of the breakout session was to determine how brands can credibly have such flings. The hour discussion led to some great debate. Below are some of the key points we found most interesting:

• The majority of the group felt any brand could have a fling. It wasn’t a matter of how interesting the brand was, but how much the brand stood for beyond itself. In other words, old school brand equity work was the key to opportunity. Although lifestyle brands do this well, there’s nothing keeping Raid (the group’s proxy for the antithesis of a lifestyle brand) from having flings about a subject they could credibly talk about, such as environmental issue, hygiene, etc.
• Alternatively, many participants felt that brands could “buy” credibility on a given subject. By taking a calculated approach to sponsorships, brands with no correlation to a subject matter could earn a voice within it through financial support. For example, Taco Bell and Major League Baseball have no logical relationship, but the brand can discuss baseball credibly thanks to its ongoing sponsorship and use of MLB talent and resources. This opens the door to flings, and could even help brands prioritize sponsorship opportunities.
• Brands can have flings across a number of subjects, not just those with direct ties to the product offering. Starbucks was cited as a brand that could have flings in music, news, technology, environmental issues, community, or even politics. The tangential relationship to coffee and “third space” wasn’t seen as a barrier.
• The biggest difficulty in having flings is making the connection to the product (although even loose association was considered enough by most participants). As a result, if a brand invests in becoming credible in a space (as say, Red Bull has with extreme sports), it actually opens the door for a challenger brand to step in and capitalize on the investment. This is a major opportunity for challenger brands (generally limited by finances). In the case of the Red Bull example, most participants felt Monster or another competitor, could have flings in and around extreme sports thanks to Red Bull’s commitment.

We’d welcome any further thinking around social media flings. Please let us know of brands taking advantage of this that you think are interesting, positive or negative.

We’d also like to thank Social Media Week for the opportunity, as well as all the wonderful participants that generously shared their thoughts.

Ulysses & The Sirens by Herbert Draper

Don’t get me wrong. We’ve argued long and hard here in favour of brands embracing new behaviours if they’re to drive real cultural and commercial impact. To invite participation; to get out there and allow their customers in. And in terms of audience appetite for this, we’ve even gone as far as to question whether Jakob Nielsen’s 90:9:1 rule – that states the vast majority of visitors to any website are only there to lurk – will hold water for much longer in this post last year.

We’re going to continue arguing the case for new behaviour, not against. Nonetheless, there have been a couple of instances that have given us pause for thought recently.

First up, back in August this year, there was that letter from a guy named Brian, begging the marketing industry to stop pestering him to participate. Was it a spoof? Maybe. But we all shuddered and shared it, presumably because a small splinter of truth ran through it. Closer to home and on a related theme, it reminded us of Tim Geoghegan’s (@timogeo) 2009 tragi-comic ’360 degree campaign’ wheel, which manages to point out both the excesses and the futility of what – in the wrong hands – becomes a circular box-ticking exercise (still) for too many agencies and clients:

Source: Tim Geoghegan

Putting even gentle cynicism aside, in short we’ve been feeling uncomfortable, nudged into thinking harder about participation in particular.

Why? Primarily, I think, because we sense the marketing community at large appears to have reached a tipping point. The social web is still comparatively young, but in the face of eroding value elsewhere, marketers are flocking to it as if it’s the promised land.  As more and more brands pour onto Facebook, Twitter, knock-up a quick social game or crowdsource their next commercial, how many are *really* adding sustainable value?  To paraphrase 37 signals - how many are boosting the signal, not just increasing the noise?

Just because a ‘launch and leave’ approach is increasingly ineffective, doesn’t mean the opposite is immediately true of social or participative ideas. Being on Facebook doesn’t automatically mean it’s good. As more and more brands join an ‘always on’ world, we owe it to our audiences to think pretty hard about what we do, when and how.

Here’s a round-up of some of the things we’re learning:

1. As we’re fond of saying: Be entertaining or be useful. Or be ignored. It’s a simple premise: if a brand only talks about itself in a social space and doesn’t stop to check you have something people want to listen to and get involved with… well, we doubt an audience will cause a big fuss and leave overnight. Unfortunately, it won’t be that dramatic. A gradual exodus is more likely.

2. 365 is still a better number than 360. Better to concentrate on the eco-system of your idea, the relationship between activity on different platforms and also how it plays out over time in daily conversation, than worrying if it lives in every single channel, ticks every box.

3. Be yourself. It’s nigh impossible to maintain a Potemkin Village-style facade if a brand is always on. Better to work out what you stand for and what you believe in, then find ways to reach communities you can exchange value with. It’s near heretical to say it, but I’d argue a clearly defined set of values or beliefs are more essential to a brand than an organising thought or idea.

4. Short time-frame communications events are the ‘new’ campaigns. Think Burberry 3D globally integrated, social shows once a season and of course Old Spice: 186 videos produced in a 48 hour awesome binge of a Response campaign, then a gracious bowing out. Ditto Ben & Jerry’s 100 fair trades. By definition you can’t continuously maintain a ‘spike’ when activity is this intense. Nowadays it’s about having an ongoing bedrock of conversational and transactional marketing in owned and earned media, with timely new releases that play a vital role in fuelling and broadening that interaction.

5. Look where you can provide difference. Nothing new here: if you offer exactly what everyone else offers in the same places, why would someone choose your brand? If you’re getting stuck, look outside for external sources of inspiration. “Do interesting things, and interesting things happen to you” as our own John Hegarty says.

6. Don’t declare the death of anything, unless it really doesn’t have a pulse. I’m mindful of the recent upwards blip in discussions about display advertising’s future, not least in Calle’s post here. (As an aside, my favourite title for a post ever is “The Tragic Death of Practically Everything”, hat tip Nick Bilton).

7. Look hard at the implications for organisational behaviour. A massive topic in its own right, but in short there really is no-where to hide. Managing conversations and producing digital outputs pushes *everyone* to face outwards; organisations to be open vs closed; to work in ways that are iterative and responsive; to understand speed is a competitive advantage. And finally, to leave our egos at the door and understand the need for excellent curation alongside creative and commercial vision.

Whilst this post may be about drawing breath for a second and deliberately evaluating the ‘here and now’, we’re not thinking for a moment that there’s any chance of turning back or slowing down. We’re also sure these thoughts are just a start. What do you think? What have we missed?

I’ve written about social media flings before, but all the recent buzz about privacy issues got me thinking about this subject again. Brands are obsessed with friends and fans in social media environments when a much more relevant (and achievable) goal would be a less committed relationship: a fling. Why ask so much from a consumer when most brands fail to deliver on expectations anyway? The number of brands I’ve met with an editorial calendar and iterative community management strategy is so few, I can count them on one hand. Yet, the gathering of fans / followers / cults prods aimlessly on, justified via the value of earned media. The idea of talking to a million people whenever you want — that’s just too good to not pursue, right?

I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m too demanding as a consumer, but I have a tough time with the “in or out” invitation posed by most brands. I was talking to @hashembajwa about this recently and he cited the following example: “I love and am loyal to Virgin Atlantic, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear from them at any point other then when I have London on my mind.”

That comment really struck me. For him, it was about context. And that’s really what a fling is. It’s like a camp friend— that kid you were super close with at camp. You couldn’t imagine a scenario at camp he or she wasn’t a part of. But, once you got back home,  regardless of promises to call and write, it didn’t happen. It just wasn’t relevant to stay in touch back in your normal life. But hey, next time you were at camp, you two picked up right where you left off, no? That’s the perfect camp friend.

So why aren’t brands OK with relationships like that? Context isn’t such a bad thing. It’s what good media planning is all about. And if the main arguments for these ludicrous fan numbers I hear brands chasing is rooted in earned media, it seems only rational they would evaluate said media based on quality, as they do with all media.

And that’s the rub.

You see, context of any kind is where brands face the privacy issue square in the face. They need to know as much about a person as possible to have these flings. Most brands on Twitter, for example, wait until you’ve called them out by name before @-replying because they fear otherwise their tweets will be viewed as spam. It’s the same expectation you’d have as a consumer in Facebook. What if a brand waited until your status was relevant to them to reach out to you? “@hashembajwa, I see you you’re excited about dinner in London, would you like some help planning your trip? – Love, Virgin.” Scary for many people. But enticing as a brand. And that’s why most brands are going to sit quietly while Facebook takes its lumps and sorts out privacy on their behalf. I guess they’ll depend on creating their own context via campaigns, but that’s pretty darn hard.

So, if you’re a brand with something at stake here, would you step in? I can’t imagine brand managers want any part of that conversation, but I think it’s important they have one. Without some understanding of what the pros and cons of the privacy issue are, Facebook is left alone as big, bad brother. In reality, lots of brands would help consumers tremendously if given the opportunity via this type of context. Yet no brands are stepping up, even as a collective, to help consumers understand if there is another side to the privacy issue. How can we expect consumers to make an objective decision about something when they aren’t hearing any upside?

Because, talking to a million fans about camp while they’re in school might feel like a relationship, but I’d argue making out with them while they’re at camp is a lot more social.

Or at the very least, it’s more fun.

This is a rare event for us, a guest post from an ex-BBHer, Pats McDonald. Pats has written a fair amount on related topics in the past here and we’re delighted she agreed to do this follow-up.

Hotly anticipated at South by SouthWest but held back for the first ever Twitter developer’s conference in April, Twitter unveiled its long-anticipated advertising platform last month. While the announcement has been slightly overtaken in the hype stakes by the launch of the Facebook Open Graph, the iPhone OS4 and the Apple versus Adobe showdown (quite a month we’re having), there is nevertheless some serious food for thought in the nuances of the Promoted Tweets platform.

I’ve written before about some of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies the very idea of sponsored tweets and more recently about the very real danger that by polluting the stream, over-advertising in social media may strip the medium of much of its value. So it was intriguing both to see Twitter’s home grown platform and to see reactions to that platform in the Twittersphere. Teeth gnashing was-perhaps surprisingly-at a minimum, although there was some inevitable concern about the proposed long term shift from advertising around keyword searches to advertising in the stream.

A promoted tweet from Starbucks - one of 6 initial advertisers

The Alimeter group have written a characteristically incisive analysis of exactly what the platform entails and how it will work, but three aspects of the announcement struck me as having much broader implications for us all:

• The introduction of “resonance” as a metric: a measure of the value of a promoted tweet to the community, based on a combination of 9 measures including clicks, re-tweets and replies

• The idea that the community will decide which advertising endures-as Twitter’s Dick Costolo says “If a post does not reach a certain resonance score, Twitter will no longer show it”

• The idea that Twitter will continue with advertising only if it adds value

I was also struck by an interview with Porter Gale, VP Marketing for Virgin America explaining its planned used of Promoted Tweets:

“The company is purposely burying their Promoted Tweets in nearly impossible to find search listings…. Gale describes the follower relationship as something sacred and one the company has no intention to disrupt. She says, “people have to really want the promotion to find the tweet.”"

This represents an extraordinarily restrained approach to a medium where there has been a tendency for brands simply to pile in and make their presence felt, prioritizing awareness over engagement or added value.

Clay Shirky contends that “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity.” Undoubtedly, some models need to be broken and abundance has been an immensely powerful force in the evolution of the web. But the power of marketing to add value (particularly in the on-line space) is something that is arguably already broken and that scarcity could just help us rebuild.

The most powerful and provocative ideas emerging from the Twitter platform for me then are these:

1. Marketing can and must add value to a user experience

The very idea that marketing can add value is nigh-on heretical in a digital landscape where the prevailing attitude is that marketing is irrelevant at best and pollution at best. But it wasn’t ever thus…a significant proportion of the UK population used to agree that the advertising was almost as good as the programmes. The idea that advertising enhanced our viewing experience-in the way that a cartoon or newsreel enhanced early cinema experiences-wasn’t a ludicrous one. Much has changed in the media landscape but the goal of enhancing-rather than leaching value from-an experience is surely one we must believe in and commit to more than ever.

Not every activity will add value in the same way. The value may be rational, it may be emotional. A beautiful press ad can enhance my reading experience-no glossy magazine would be the same without them. A witty and provocative poster can enhance my journey to work. A useful piece of software can make my life easier or the things I love more accessible.  But we need to believe once again that our activities can enhance an experience and we need to set that as our benchmark.

We need to ask ourselves on every brief, on every project:

How will this activity add value to our consumers’ lives?

2. Scarcity may help us add that value

This is an odd idea in an age of abundance. Many of us have talked a lot in recent years about the need for brands to do more-to try more things, be seen in more places and start more fires. In an age of fragmenting media channels and attention spans there’s no question that there’s still wisdom in this. There’s also no question that abundance represents interesting opportunities for brands, as the ever-awesome Faris Yakob points out. But perhaps over-abundance is killing us. Perhaps in an age of over-abundance a radical strategy is to do less. Not try less, or experiment less, but try lots, learn lots and refine to do less. If we’re not delivering something genuinely valuable, something that is not simply the token banner campaign or hashtag but a genuinely exciting use of a medium, then to quote the design legend Dieter Rams, ‘less but better’ is perhaps a (counter intuitive) thought to conjure with.

3. Every media owner needs to start thinking about how they protect the stream

In practice, much of what Twitter has baked in to the Promoted Tweets platform mirrors existing consumer behaviours. We already know our consumers have the means and the desire to avoid those commercial messages that fail to engage.  Few media owners however have taken the same steps to protect the medium itself from the impact of excessive or unengaging advertising.  Given the recent announcement that Facebook may start allowing status updates to push McDonald’s product messages the need to protect the stream or lose the audience is something every channel owner must consider.

John Batelle sums up the Promoted Tweets platform as follows:

“If Twitter gets this right, only “good” ads will make it into our Twitter streams. That will force marketers to mind what they say when given the privilege of being inserted into our feeds. To think hard about adding value to the conversation that surrounds their brands.

And honestly, isn’t that the kind of behavior we’d hope for?”

If that’s not a rallying cry for an industry, I don’t know what is…