Our EMEA managing director Ash Coleman-Smith recently spoke to the The Times journalist Carly Chynoweth on how to make pro bono work for UK companies. Along with other communications industry experts, Ash gives so very useful top tips. In short, pro bono has to be right for your company’s line of business and has to sit in well with your company’s long-term plans. Last but not least, it has to be an organised process.
In 2010, businesses will come under pressure like never before. COP15 has unleashed a barrage of debate about the environment, encompassing scientific claims, political pressure, economic arguments, challenges and promises. The media, governments, NGOs and expert consumers will be demanding evidence of CSR principles.
In fact, the easiest target for politicians and regulators will be big business. If a business wishes to portray itself as a responsible citizen, it shouldn’t wait to see what happens when pressure comes bearing down at thunderous speed. It should act now, and move ahead of compliance.
With that goes the fact that consumers’ trust in business is also fading at a frightening rate, which is having a negative impact on the bottom line. There could be a major reappraisal of business’ CSR commitments by everyone from employees to unions, governments, consumers and pressure groups. Big businesses could prove to be the ideal scapegoat for the lack of action on environmental issues.
In the post-COP15 era two big shifts need to be taken into account. Firstly, the conversation has changed from a general, large-scale discussion of what has to change to one that centres on making a profit while behaving in a way that sustains the environment. The second major trend is the growing realisation that CEOs generally perceive one-off, feel-good CSR / environmental projects as a cost. Instead, the focus should be on how sustainable business practices can save money and improve the bottom line.
To demonstrate that companies are embracing sustainability it must be hard wired into the business. As a result, corporate communication teams are likely to be spending much more time with R&D and finance teams, looking at supply chains and working with partners. The relationship with NGOs must shift from the 80s model. Now NGOs should become serious business partners who can help you achieve sustainable objectives and advise on making responsible business decisions.
It will be crucial to understand the cycles, shifts and changes in influences in the global conversation between those three major pressure points of business and money, geo-politics, and the environment and science. Companies will need to recognize their own timelines in terms of how they reinvent their business and products to be more sustainable, and to anticipate the moments when they are most likely to come under pressure. It would be wise only to promote or talk about achievements when they are based on hard, measurable evidence.
As a matter of fact, comms directors should be ready to experience the same type of pressure felt by compliance officers in the world of financial services. It means to be aligned with the organisation’s lawyer and the finance director, and being on the board. It also means helping the organisation to monitor, adapt and shape itself around a new swathe of regulation, and ensuring that communications are moving at the same pace as all these developments.
The global discussion is now so broad and quick-moving that the old style approach of trying to monitor and understand the conversation is irrelevant. Organisations need to prove continuously that all the little initiatives are adding up to a move in the right direction, which ultimately starts to rebuild consumers’ trust. Then, instead of being an easy target for politicians, scientists and NGOs, businesses can get back on the front foot and start to have more of an equal engagement in this global conversation.
2010 is the year when corporate communications directors can decide how and where they will invest in sustainable activities. If you can take advantage of this opportunity and hard wire sustainability into your business, you are much more likely to help your organisation maintain its bottom line and also maintain the momentum of communications and reputation in the harsh influencer and media environment of 2010 onwards post COP15.
2010 is set to be the year that social media marketing graduates. The year when it will be included, as a matter of course, in 360 communications plans. We have seen many brands in the last year turning to social as an answer to stripped down budgets. And only to be surprised that creating an engaging voice in the social web is not as “free” as first assumed.
The 2010 graduation will bring with it a host of changes - technical, communicative and cultural. All of which will contribute to the marketing mix becoming ever more integrated. However, that true integration is not only dependant on the structure of agencies and businesses but on cementing a true social media approach in both PROs’ and clients’ attitudes.
As the web becomes ever more “real time” the inevitable question is what will happen when it can anticipate our movements, thoughts, feelings and wants before we actually have them. Brian Solis started discussions about the “Predictive Web” this month on his blog, and he may well be hitting on a point of interest for 2010. Services such as PlanCast, that allow us to update followers ahead of time about what we will be up to, are likely to be a focus of 2010 and beyond.
2009 was about getting involved with social media. Many brands were grappling to develop their online presence by tacking social media amplification at the end of a campaign, rather than adopting a fully integrated strategy. 2010 is the year of measurement and social media’s full integration into communication plans.
As users will require ways to access all of the sites they are involved with from one place and manage them all at once. This will lead to the rise in the popularity of lifestreaming tools and the management of online presences.
The popularity of applications, widgets is rising as consumers require easy-to-use tools to navigate the social web. Brands are increasingly likely to adopt this way of interacting with consumers by producing something of use and interest to their customers.
Sending a DM tweet to a contact whilst out for lunch and updating your Facebook status on the way home from work is nothing new. However, the idea of being in contact wherever and whenever is set to reach new heights of popularity this year as more and more people choose internet enabled mobile devices for staying connected 24/7 with GPS and location based capabilities to tie into new services such as Four Square.
The words ‘Achilles’ and ‘heel’ often come to mind when PR professionals discuss measurement. How do the self-proclaimed owners of ‘earned media’ evaluate effectiveness when we are often perceived to measure output rather than outcomes, even in a digital age?
For those who are implementing social media, citizen journalism, digital PR campaigns – call it what you will, this has become an even more urgent question – and for too long have responded with a most dissatisfying answer. As the digital opportunities form and reform with each new blog post, video upload and 140 character musing, we’ve steadily moved towards the classic moment when a big question has to be addressed. How will we measure it?
In these difficult economic times, where budgets are being re-evaluated and ROI is even more scrutinised, we as an industry need to justify our slice of marketing budgets by focusing not solely on output (CPM, AVE, etc) but on the ability to measure effectiveness like never before. As an agency that has turned inside out to transform itself into an organization where Digital Influence runs through everything we do, this has been at the forefront of our mind. The fact that 84% of social media campaigns are not measured1 is a huge opportunity for those of us who focus on evaluation when analysing the digital fruits of our labour. How we measure the impact of social media is a question that is not only fundamental, but is answerable in the here and now, with software doing a good proportion of the legwork.
We do have an opportunity to be more rigorous given the rise of technology solutions. At a tactical level, the adoption of social media releases (SMR) for example has proved invaluable in shaping the way we now engage with stakeholders and measure the impact of our outreach. Whilst working on the 50th anniversary of Barbie earlier this year, a project targeting multiple international markets, we were able to shape the campaign around the creation and distribution of broadcast and online video content via the SMR, ensuring the story reached a global audience in a cost effective, measurable and impactful way.
The ability to tag, monitor and measure the impact of video content in particular is also shaping the way brands are leveraging this most powerful of communication tools. As the thirst for video continues to grow, so has the need to demonstrate its effectiveness to clients in helping to communicate the brand’s key messages. The adage that ‘good content will always find an audience’ still rings true, but now is the time for us to embrace the ability to demonstrate the impact of this content rather than focus disproportionately on the ‘perceived’ effectiveness and output of our campaigns. The rules of third party engagement have evolved rather than revolutionised over the last few years, providing PR with the ability to tangibly quantify behavioural change through more scientific metrics.
The Holy Grail is simplicity and comparability in media measurement. As a result, John Bell, President of WOMMA worldwide and an Ogilvy digital leader, developed the Conversation Impact™ model. Born out of a need to align closer to widely accepted marketing and reputation building models, particularly the ‘purchasing funnel’, it places a bigger emphasis on measuring behavioural change rather than solely focusing on ‘traditional’ metrics. This has to be way forward in my view. The challenge is for us all to focus on the big objectives and outcomes while forensically exploring the granular range of new digital tools to support us in this process.
It’s about time that we who deal in social communications do the same. We need to come together and take an “open-crowd-wiki-sourced” approach to it and set some benchmarks and agreed parameters we are all happy with. We should be able to shouldn’t we? It’s called SOCIAL media after all…
1E-marketer, August 2009
Hot on the heels of the recent launch of OgilvyEarth, our sister sustainability practice, we’ve commissioned a study about businesses’ and consumers’ current views on CSR commitment. What it shows us is that regardless of the fears in the business community, consumers’ loyalty to ethical and social issues is holding up during the recession. We believe that now is the opportunity for business leaders to prove that they’re sincere and truly committed to CSR promises.
In partnership with research firm Populus we’ve interviewed over 2,000 British opinion formers and consumers. An overwhelming majority of those business leaders (67 per cent to be precise) see trust in companies’ CSR issues as a key aspect for corporate success. At the same time, over a third of business leaders think that companies, which scale back on CSR during the economic downturn, will regret the decision come the recovery.
The survey results also prove that recession has done little to curb consumer demand for products with social and environmental credentials. Nearly 40 per cent of consumers are actually more concerned with environmental and social issues than they were before the recession began. There is also a growing trend to put business under more scrutiny. Some 29 per cent of consumers admit to paying more attention now to a product’s environmental and social credentials compared with 12 months ago.
In our view one possible victim of the recession is consumer trust in businesses’ commitment to sticking to their word on sustainability. Surprisingly enough, only one third of consumers expressed confidence in UK companies to remain committed to their social and environmental promises.
To see what the papers and trade’s have being saying about this check out the Financial Times, The Independent, PR Week or UTalkMarketing.
In these times, when we are all under pressure, a few simple questions can help us focus the mind.
We are all under pressure - to do more for less even more creatively and faster; to push teams and/or the agency harder; and yet, at the same time, to wire into shifting consumer attitudes that have shifted spectacularly, thanks to the recession.
It’s easy to lose focus and edge in these ‘interesting times’. Also, easy to lose ones conviction about basic on-going truths when it comes to engaging consumer audiences.
Here, in no particular order, are three questions which I have recently noticed myself, and others I work with (clients and agency colleagues), asking more often since the credit crunch. They seem to have helped maintain focus and edge. Hopefully at least one will be useful to you.
There may be some short term shifts in consumer attitudes but what, given the campaign objectives, is the on-going relevant long term consumer ‘truth’?
Here’s a recent example where asking this question brought clarity around the issue of austerity versus ethical brand behaviour. Some clients and industry commentators argue that recessionary pressures fundamentally erode consumer attitudes in this area. In June we commissioned a survey into consumer attitudes to CSR. In fact the research has shown that consumers are actually slightly more sensitised today to CSR when it comes to brand preference. However, their trust in brand’s/companies’ commitment to maintain standards in this area during a recession has declined. Consumers have not suddenly changed how they judge brands and businesses on the basis of their ethical behaviour even if their spending behaviour short term has. The ‘truth’ remains that differentiated and well communicated CSR will become a point of competitive advantage as the economy turns.
Are we sure we reached the target consumer as efficiently as possible?
In today’s digital and social media world, consumers are finding it easier to become part of communities. Calculating ‘opportunities to see’, ‘reach’ or ‘penetration’ is fine but look for at ways of gaining added value momentum. Search out consumer communities via partners (media, other symbiotic brands, NGOs etc) that can grow organically. Here is a great example. The Comfort fabric conditioner brand wanted to reach out to mums about its baby product. National media remain important but, for longterm and cost effective results, using ‘word of mum’ communication to reach and build communities was also critical. The efficiency question pushed fresh thinking. The team linked with media on-line creating the ‘Comforteers’ – an incentivised community of like minded mums. In weeks over 7,000 mums signed up to take part. The activity and on-going community has now touched millions via other relevant communities - it has become self sustaining.
Are the solutions we are developing over complicated?
Faced with the pressure to do more for less and fit more in to communications it can be easy to develop over complicated solutions. Simplicity differentiates – especially if it comes from the heart of the brand. Recently Welsh Lamb has been challenging not only New Zealand Lamb but also English and Scottish Lamb. The competitors have used a queue of celebrities (Beefy and Lamby), chefs, experts, DJs etc. Welsh Lamb needed to keep it simple and differentiate. Welsh passion lies behind their brand. This became the clear centre point for the campaign - who better to represent passion for quality than a Welsh Lamb farmer! The launch and hunt for the this farmer ambassador has attracted extensive coverage - a simple idea cut through the noise.
Everyone is asking the other obvious ‘interesting’ questions about value and measurement but these have been in our faces for a while – good luck in interesting times!
Some of you may be aware of that little publicised facts that newspaper readership is on the decline, people are sharing music without paying for it and the movie industry is being crippled by illegal downloads…
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief at Wired UK’s new book Free: The Future of A Radical Price looks at the idea of how consumers are expecting more and more of their content for free, and with advertising spend on the way down the road to ruin, the future is uncertain for much of our mainstream media.
Some of you may be more familiar with the works of Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, he’s recently entered the ring with his own opinions, and the digital battle for the answer is well and truly on.
This is an issue that will inevitably effect us all, but will put PR in an exclusively pertinent place for our clients if the model of free content that Anderson is pushing comes out on top - the idea that we earn media placement rather than buy it has never been so well positioned in this new (to use Anderson’s words) freeconomy.
Take a look at Antonia Senior’s piece in The Times this morning for some more info… http://bit.ly/4Oq2H
Let the battle commence!
I had the pleasure of filming an interview with ex-dragons den, current investor at large – Richard Farleigh. A man who has made his millions through taking risks in the post-dot-com-fallout and has worked with hundred of companies to drive business success.
This video was filmed as part of the wider work we are doing at Ogilvy for IBM’sFuture Focus programme, looking at how businesses can work smarter by utilizing advances in technology and communications.
Smart technology is a funny one, some of the simple things that we as the “young digerati” take for granted are the very systems and practices that will become the future of business communications. Talking with a friend who is far more clued up on the subject (@gemmapercy for more info), it dawned on me that so much of the tech that forms the discourse around “cloud” computing and “viruslisation” is not tales of future technology, but present technology. Facilities such as Google Docs, delicious and Amazon’s S3 storage are already changing the way we work.
Far more of our everyday data is being stored in “the cloud” rather than on our hard disks, from our databases, contacts and bookmarks to our personal data such as photos and increasingly video. As Russel M Davies points out in his article on Amazon S3 in this June’s issue of Wired UK – I too would rather trust Google with my contacts than my own ability to sit on my assortment of handheld media centres (the less fortunate of which glare at me every time I open my desk drawer). It is more or less a weekly occurrence that I get invited to a facebook group of one of my clumsier chums who has sat on / dropped / digested in drunken stupor their phone and now require me to send them my number. Which proves a number of things a) my friends are stupid, b) there are many people that I am very glad now have no ability to call me (not that they ever had reason to before hand) and c) that we may all be better of outsourcing our personal lives to the likes of Google or Amazon.
See this week’s PRWeek for the full article and quoted comments from OPR’s MD of EAME Ash Coleman-Smith, click here.
In tune with the economy, PRWeek decided to run this survey and it is a great moment for them to have raised the issue of how recenssionary pressures are challenging some of the green assumptions about consumer habits. We should all be thinking about where we stand on our clients position on this and how they should be positioing their green credentials. I think the message is that ‘greenwashing’ will still be spotted by increasingly cyncial consumer and business audiences. I agree with the tone of the PRWeek piece which is that environmental campaigns are moving down the agenda against given economic pressures.
PRWeek’s exclusively commissioned and just published reearch was carried out with Populus and they surveyed 1,999 adults in the UK. PRWeek said: “It showed that 81 percent of respondents paid more attention to cost/value than to environmental credentials. Asked about how concerned they were and whether they were more concerned now than 12 months ago, respondents were evenly split: 49 per cent were no more or less concerned and 50 per cent were more concerned. The findings suggest communicators need to focus on value when crafting their environmental messages”. The research goes on to show that small easy green steps are still interesting to consumers “94 percent of respondents said they would take green steps such as buying energy saving lightbulbs” (PRWeek).
Finally, as PRWeek point out in their feature, there are some brands who have led on a green/environmental positioning such as Green and Black’s, Innocent Smoothies, the entire organic sector etc who are currently paying the price. Maybe now is the time for marketing teams and their agencies to be developing creative and clever strategies for how they re-ignite consumer interest/purchase driven by ‘green’ preferences.
It has come to my attention that I am literally inhaling media. I know I work in PR, and am a “Generation X”er and all that Jazz. But doing this little log over the past 24 hours is quite startling when you look at it all laid out like this. The little subconscious checks of twitter, the musing of blog posts yet to be written, it wouldn’t suprise me if I start unwillingly speaking in 140 character sentences!
So much of this media has just become 2nd nature, a part of the stream of our consiousness, and so little of it we actually question. Monday Morning. Office. Sit Down. Boot Up. Log On. Tweet. Eat. Tweet Again. Blog. Read. Digest (Digitally & Physically). Google. Email. Tweet Yet Again. Tag It. Digg It. Cast it. Download. Power Down. Go Home.
You get the picture…
So back to where we started - I decided to conduct little survey of my media diet. Consumption. Call it what you will. Let me take you back via the medium of blog (and some wavy scoobie doo effects) to Monday morning…
6:50 AM - *Beep Beep Beep… THWACK!* Alarm clock knocked lazy from bedside table, rolling over, pushing girlfriend aside reaching for iPhone. Missing iPhone. Rolling back over. Snooze Button. 20 Minutes of Chris Moyles drowning out my dreams and bringing me (not so gently) into the new working week.
7:00 AM - I take a second attempt at reaching for iPhone. More successful this time. Read/Delete Spam.
7:50 AM - On tube now, dive head long into the wonderous hub of investigative journalism that is The Metro… lose interest around page 13…
7:59 AM - Once again distracted by Twitter on iPhone… *silent wish that people would not keep writing “Good morning everyone!” tweets… the old adage rings true, if you haven’t got something nice to say…
8:00 AM - 8:35 AM … Listen to Podcast.
Monday: Friday Night Comedy - Radio 4 (Listen)
Tuesday: Relevant Magazine (Listen)
Wednesday: This American Life (Listen)
Thursday: NPR - Poetry Magazine (Listen)
Friday: Genius Playlist on iPhone… (Info Here)
8:37AM - 9:02Am - As i’m plunged into the darkness of the Jubilee line* (See More…) and am severed from my 3G connection to the world I revert to a analogue approach in the form of Blue Like Jazz - Donald Miller’s fantastic mini essay series on non religious spirituality… (He blogshere). Until I succomb to the inevitable release of a Amazon Kindle 2 UK Version, paper reigns supreme for sub-terrainian entertainment.
9:10AM - 9:45AM - Arrive at work, bum on seat, Latte in hand, croissant in front of keyboard and all is well. Boot up, Log In, wait for work Email server to get it’s act together, then begin to breathe in 1’s and 0’s in the form of Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail, Google Reader, Delicious Tags,Radian6 (our social media monitoring tool here at Ogilvy) and news source of choice (for usability not politics) Guardian Online…
11:00 AM 11AM jumps out from behind a bush at me, startling me somewhat about it’s urgency in getting through the day. It’s about this time (usually musing over a latte) that the latest round robin email from the London Ogilvy Interactive group catches my attention - usually in the form of a YouTube distraction or some other digital delight. Sip. Click. Sit. Click. Back to work. Wait. This is work.
11:10 AM Check back into the twittersphere… Not much happening. Does FollowFriday do anyone else’s nut in or is it just me! (As an aside it is important to bring to light the troublesome issue that the MacBook - wonderful that it is - doesn’t feature a hash key on the keyboard! Grrrr…)
12:50 PM As hunger strikes (cue the Shreddies soundtrack) heading for lunch deleteding more (and more) spam from personal email on iPhone - ooo. My next LoveFilm is on it’s way… Michael Macintyre!
13:45 PM - Stomach full, email inbox equally bloated. Quick twitter update before some serious digital digestion takes place, predominantly in the form of some Radian6 fishing and the odd blog inspiration from Google Reader.
2:00-5:45PM -As the sound of the neuvo-classical Flight of The Concordes hit thuds in my head, this point in the afternoon is officially “business time” - (for those of you unaquainted a little help from YouTube can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGOohBytKTU) The result of which means, that aside from the spiradic twittering and lingering tap of the iPhone, very little goes on here other that - as would be expected - work.
6:00 - 7:00PM - Pretty much a repeat of 7:45 AM - 9:15AM but in reverse order. After a fairly media heavy day I tend to tail off by the time I get home. Suprisingly I still remember how to speak to people face to face! (Those who know me well will know this has never truely been a problem however…)
So there we have it, that pretty much wraps up the day. And sadly (possibly not the case for you routine junkies out there) - most days it’s the same story. Living a truely digitally native life, as one of the first generations to have never known what it is to not have a PC in the house is quite a priveledge I suppose. However this does provoke an almost subconscious dialogue within me, that is constantly thinking of the angle, the wall post, the tweet, a constant desire to replicate my offline life digitally. So how do you describe that? Inhalation. Breathe In.
This blog can also be found at jamespoulter.wordpress.com where James blogs on all things digital from the wrong side of caffiene
