Recap: Social Media for Creatives and Their Clients

This past Tuesday, the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington (ADCMW) hosted “Social Media for Creatives and Their Clients.” The lecture was presented by John Bell, Managing Director of the 360 Degree Digital Influence Practice within Ogilvy PR. John developed 360 Degree Digital Influence to connect Ogilvy’s brand-building PR expertise with insider’s knowledge of new digital trends.

During his lecture, John addressed five trends the team at Ogilvy has noticed in social media over the last year:

1. Engagement replaces “creative.” Where audiences previously looked for unique or unusual design, audiences are now looking to be entertained and delighted when interacting with brands. Ogilvy has revised their creative brief to include an engagement strategy — basically answering the question “why the heck would anyone give a s* about spending time with your brand” as John explains.

2. Facebook. John suggests that Facebook is the most important platform for brands right now. Because of its real-time nature, Facebook is, and will continue to be, a hub for people. Developers will continue to enhance Facebook’s applications and interface and users will continue to adapt and adopt the increased capabilities.

3. Twitter for business. John points out that many brands were eager to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, and many of those brands are not using Twitter as well as they could be. In order to be successful on Twitter, brands must have a strategy for interacting with the Twitterverse. American Express (@askamex and @americanexpress) not only uses Twitter to answer customer service questions and promote their products, but they also have an Amex “Twitter Fairy” that rewards members for talking about their brand on Twitter.

4. Social media ethics will become a bigger deal. According to John, a number of groups are involved in crafting ethical guidelines for disclosing compensation and freebies for product reviews. In October, the FTC released its set of guidelines, and organizations such as WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) have developed ethical guidelines. John follows this rule of thumb: If the bias is clear to you, it’s fine. If it’s not, that’s not fine.

5. Search Intent Modeling (SIM). Search must be core to all of our online marketing campaigns. SIM prioritizes keywords and aligns them to business goals and consumer interests. Search intent modeling is now essential to everything from SEM/SEO to messaging to consumer behavior research to tagging. As John describes in an article on Ogilvy’s Web site “The state of the art starts with search intent modeling, a process advanced by our SEO experts, Global Strategies International13. Not only do we listen to what consumers are talking about in relation to our brands, we are also paying attention to how they are searching. Using the language that our customers are using is the key to creating highly relevant owned media that pops up high in Google search results.”

These five trends are important ideas to keep in mind when developing a strategy for social networking within your brand.