360° Digital Influence

360° Digital Influence
A New Marketing & Communication Discipline

How are marketing and communications changing?
The emergence of social networks, blogs, and the wave of consumer generated media has created new patterns of influence. No longer from the center, or top down, we find communications evolving towards a culture of two-way conversations and away from the established model of one-way messaging. “Digital” is bigger than just a new channel or format. Digital is part of a larger transformation of how people get information, who they listen to, and are ultimately influenced by.

Today, it is an understatement to say that we are influenced in new ways. With the explosive growth of online media, consumer word of mouth and new technologies springing up every day, we needed a new discipline to understand these changes and put them into practice for ourselves and our clients to reach business objectives today. That discipline is Digital Influence.

What is 360° Digital Influence?

Our 360° Digital Influence team is a global, word of mouth marketing discipline that uses new technologies and social media methods to create new communications strategy and programs. We have a methodology for identifying and engaging influencers - important bloggers, online community members, traditional influencers and a new breed of influencer that looks like you and me. Successful social media programs are more than connecting with the most popular bloggers. We also activate networks of people – social networks, groups, communities and affinity groups online - to participate, share and recommend products, services and issues. By creating engaging experiences and inviting influencers and networks to participate in a way they find valuable, we can amplify the most trusted form of communication today – word of mouth.

What do we do for clients?

We create comprehensive digital strategy for clients who want to engage customers or constituents in direct conversation. We both plan programs, and we design and build. While our programs are custom planned for each client there are 4 fundamental parts to every Digital Influence Strategy:

• Listening
• Planning
• Engagement
• Measurement

Listening
All of our programs start by listening to what people are saying about a brand, an issue or a set of brand-related topics in blogs, message boards, social networks and review sites online. This intelligence is key to deploying any program online and can provide invaluable insight into how consumers think and talk about brands and issues.

We have three basic listening programs:
• Conversation Snapshot (Conversation Map)
• Live Listening Post
• Crisis Monitoring

Planning
Like the tradition of strategic planning in communications firms and connections planning in advertising agencies, we have a process for planning influencer and word of mouth programs. Based upon listening to conversations online, we plan an engagement strategy – how we can authentically involve people online so they will “care to share” with their peers and spread word of mouth. Engagement plans focus on providing value to users and inviting them in to participate with a brand or organization in some way. Engagement plans are highly creative yet firmly based in strategy.

The biggest step in the planning process is our Influencer Audit and Network Mapping. Influencer Audits identify the people with the most potential influence for our engagement program. These can be high profile bloggers, individual mom bloggers somewhere in the world, or proam (part professional, part amateur) experts in a B2B market. Anyone can be an influencer given certain context. We look well beyond the obvious. Network Maps do the same thing at the social network and community level – what affinity groups exist that we can connect with? Both the Influencers and the Networks are mapped to specific engagement plans. We not only identify who is important but how we will reach and involve them online.

Search has changed the way everyone finds information online. Every Digital Influence Strategy includes a Visibility Plan that combines SEO with an overall content plan including multimedia (audio, video, images) distribution. The goal is to make our content and supportive third-party content as visible as possible via search engines

Engagement
Engagement programs all involve users in different ways from very simple and superficial participation to the deepest levels of engagement in co-creation and community. “Engagement” describes our ability to hold a conversation with people, invite them to participate with a brand or issue, motivate them to co-create a product, service or experience. It’s what sparks sustained word of mouth.

http://ogilvypr.com.au/Ogilvy-360/