Propagation Planning

AdCast: Good Ideas in Advocacy

Last November PSFK and 22squared teamed up to host a Good Ideas in Advocacy Salon. The unpaid speakers came to Tampa out of the goodness of their hearts to talk about their experiences with advocacy. I believe that advocacy is a very important part to propagation planning and advocates are the brand managers of the future. 

The group of speakers included the following:

Sabrina Caluori, Director of Marketing and Promotions for HBO
Darcy Raymond, VP of Brand and Fan Experience for the Tampa Bay Rays
Chris Perkins, President of Blitz
Ben Allen, Co-Founder of Think Conservatory

(Moderator) Brandon Murphy, EVP Chief Strategy Director at 22squared

We also invited AdCast Tampa to come film our speakers prior to the event and this is the video that they created from those interviews:

Vogue recognizes BBH Account Planner

A few weeks ago Vogue Magazine recognized a number of fashion Bloggers including BBH Account Planner Mary Tomer. She has been the engine behind Mrs. O, a Blog that follows the style and fashion of Michelle Obama. 

Mary is somebody that Grant McCracken would call a Chief Culture Officer (also the title of his new book which I recently finished), somebody who is at the intersection of anthropology and economics. By focusing on a cultural insight she was able to curate content around Michelle Obama and add value to her fans. Below is the case study of the Mrs. O project:

Ms O Case Study from black sheep on Vimeo.

I've always said that those who have account planning skills make the best community managers and running a great community is the first mark of being a propagation planner. Social Networks are the worlds largest focus groups and if you have moderating and recruitment skills you will do well as a community manager just like Mary has done with Michelle Obama fashion fans.

What are people really buying online?

Found on the Digital Buzz Blog. What I found really interesting was the clothing and Beer & Wine stats:

This beautifully designed infographic from Permuto visualises some of the latest shopper data from the US Census Bureau. What’s interesting to see, is that eCommerce (including phone & catalogue sales) is starting to “out sell” many of the traditional bricks and mortar categories in the US. There is some debate as to the exact numbers being used in this chart, but overall it tells a pretty important message to brands and retailers.

  

Social CRM Presentation

This is another great presentation by the Altimeter group (via What Consumes Me) on developing a social strategy that fits your business needs and cuts the hype out of the equation. 

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Chat Roulette: If you turn your head I win

I found this on Gerald Hensel's Blog and I loved to see the change in emotion. I think marketers can learn how to do hoax based storytelling to provoke emotions like this. 

Paying for Fans on Facebook

I'm a big fan of the digital agency Deep Focus and what they have done for their clients and their employees over the years. Everyone that I know who works or has worked their is top notch. 

That said, I was a little disappointed to hear that they provided an incentive to the gamers of FarmVille that earned them Farm Cash if they become a Facebook Fan of Microsoft's Bing. 

The incentive worked, according to an article in Adweek they earned 425,000 new fans in one day. That's very impressive but what is the value of the fan that was bought? Sure the cash was only virtual money but don't you want true advocates in a Facebook community? I don't want to have to pay my loyal fans every time I want to engage the community. I want fans that want to be fans of a brand or a branded movement for the sure pleasure of being involved with a bigger community of people. 

Tipping Point Labs performed an excellent study on calculating the long term effect of buying Facebook Fans by studying TGI Friday's you bought fans with a real life free Hamburger coupon. TGI Friday's rested on volume alone and created a community of jaded fans who are only interested in the next coupon. 

It will be interesting to watch what Bing does with all these new 'fans'. 

A Time for Builders

A few great snips from a speech by Rishad Tobaccowala (via AdRants) at the 4A's Transformation 2010 conference about importance of talent and an opportunity for talent to succeed now. 

Measuring the Impact of Social Media

I thought this was an interesting chart that measured how companies measure social media:

 

For additional research data and insights about social marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.

Hobo Symbols

I'm always fascinated with symbols of meaning and I came across a website that shared a collection of Hobo symbols. These are symbols that the 'Riders of the Rails' would use to communicate with each other and help each other out. 

An early form of social networks where symbols connected this fringe group of people. As we use social networks like Twitter we sometimes complain that 140 characters isn't enough but imagine what these Hobos could have shared with that amount of data. 

  Propagation Planning could use more symbols of meaning like this.

BBH Bound

I have some exciting news to announce. I have accepted a Strategy Director position at Bartle Bogle Hegarty New York. In this position I'll have the opportunity to work on different facets of planning including Engagement and Propagation Planning. BBH is an agency that is rich in account planning tradition and has been a staple at account planning conferences for years. It is not uncommon for BBH to showcase multiple winning case studies every year and I'm honored and humbled to be a part of that team.

That said, I can't thank the team at 22squared enough for helping me grow into this position. The last three years in Tampa Bay have been amazing. Over that time we performed some innovative research techniques on multiple clients, we shocked the industry with an open Live Streaming new business brainstorm and we became a 2010 Effie finalist in the Retail category. My personal life changed during this time when I was married and had two beautiful children. On top of that, our bowling team wasn't half bad either.

I thought I would share a few examples of BBH work if you were not familiar with the agency: 

Anyone who grew up with me knows that I have a soft spot for the LEGO brand. This is an ad that BBH recently made for LEGO that highlighted a powerful insight as LEGO architects have different points of view.

This Google Chrome commercial is interactive and looks completely different than any other technology piece.

Finally I love the idea of leaking four songs to street performers and then engaging Oasis fans to seek these street performers out to learn about the new songs on the upcoming album. A brillant execution that I use as a case study in Propagation Planning.