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.

Barbie’s 50th birthday broadcast project (Mattel)

2009 marked the 50th birthday of the world’s favourite doll and Mattel asked Ogilvy PR London to help kick off the party in Europe with a big bang at the International Toy Fair, Nuremberg in February  this year. We combined visually compelling broadcast content with innovative digital tools, including a social media press release, to provide the media around the world with an engaging story package of Barbie’s birthday.

Future Focus digital campaign (IBM)

Ogilvy PR supported the series of ‘IBM Future Focus’ events for mid-market businesses through a social media campaign. This campaign was a first for IBM in the UK, bringing together social media interaction, video content creation and live publishing across multiple platforms. Through a programme of harnessing key influencers to contribute to the content, and integrating social media in to the onsite activities, through video, live blogging and micro blogging, IBM was able to bring an audience with relatively low social media engagement into the heart of a social campaign.

Corporate digital survey project (LexisNexis)

In order to raise the profile of information service provider LexisNexis as a corporate sponsor of the Online Information 2009 event, a survey was conducted examining people’s perceptions of the importance and influence of online information in determining their purchasing decisions.  The survey results served to establish LexisNexis as a thought leader in the online social media space. We achieved positive coverage across multiple outlets, such as Brand Republic.

Rightmove iPhone app launch (2Ergo)

This trade campaign for mobile technology provider 2ergo involved working with a select number of key online influencers, technology press and mobile analysts to give them a preview of the product before it went live at an exclusive event. We also created a YouTube channel to host video content.  As a result of the coverage generated about and the app, the Rightmove iPhone app shot up to first place on the UK downloads chart within days of its release. You can view some selected trade press articles on the Mobile Choice and IT Pro websites.

The Brazilian food journey campaign (Brazilian tourist board Embratur)

The campaign aimed to endorse Brazil as a tourist destination via one of its most unique cultural offerings; its food. We invited a restaurant reviewer to experience the Brazilian restaurant scene at first hand by setting up a trip to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro with an itinerary that took in a mixture of top-end restaurants, markets, juice bars and bakeries in order to show the full spectrum of Brazilian eating. As a result of the press trip to Brazil, coverage was generated in the Financial Times, Guardian online and Evening Standard twice.

The examples above provide a small insight into the type of work we have been involved in during 2009.  Here’s to what promises to be a fantastic 2010!

As heads of states and governments are entering the final stages of negations at the UN conference on climate change COP15 in Copenhagen, people from around the world are recording their messages of hope as part of the global Hopenhagen movement.

Created by our sister sustainability practice OgilvyEarth, Hopenhagen is an empowering platform. It gives voice to global citizens in the climate change dialogue helping to express their opinions to the leaders from 192 countries attending COP15. It sets out to inspire people of the world to share their voice of support for a positive outcome on the climate change agreement.

Six million people have already signed the Hopenhagen petition and become citizens of Hopenhagen. Meanwhile our Ogilvy colleagues in Copenhagen have been working round the clock organising Hopenhagen events, such as concerts at the “Hopenhagen LIVE” stage in Hopenhagen Square and the WWF Earth Hour Hopenhagen in Copenhagen’s City Hall Square this week. To join the six million citizens of Hopenhagen and to see the latest messages of hope visit hopenhagen.org.

You can read more on the background of OgilvyEarth’s Hopenhagen campaign in the recent PR Week Hopenhagen feature.

UK conservation charity, Elephant Family, has selected Ogilvy PR London to help launch a major fundraising campaign to protect the habitat of the endangered Asian elephant. Our Ogilvy PR consumer marketing team will provide strategic counsel, creative programme development and media relations support to the in-house Elephant Family PR team as they prepare for a star-studded celebrity launch next summer.

The Elephant Family charity has a truly innovative approach to conservation. Londoners can look forward to spectacular and very striking visual display next year. For Ogilvy PR this new brief is a fantastic opportunity to flex our creativity in support of a worthy cause.

Elephant Parade will see over 250 brightly painted fiberglass elephants appear in London in May, June and July 2010. Each elephant will be decorated by an artist, designer or celebrity and sponsored by a business or individual, raising in excess of £1 million for conservation projects across Asia. Funds will go towards securing vital wildlife habitat and “corridors” that link patches of fragmented habitat together, giving the animals the essential space they require to roam.

Have a look at what PR Week are saying about our latest client win.

Earlier this month the B2B travel industry event World Travel Market (WTM) provided an outstanding opportunity for Ogilvy PR and its travel clients like the Brazilian Tourist Board to meet and network. For our travel PR specialists a particular event highlight was the Travel Blog Camp, a knowledge session on online PR and social media. It offered bloggers, journalists, travel industry and PR professionals the unique chance to discuss the impact of social and online media on the travel and tourism industry.

Run by Darren Cronian of Travel Rants (www.travel-rants.com), the Travel Blog Camp was first and foremost a forum for travel industry leaders to voice their opinions and share experiences on all things social media. As social media pros, we were pleased to learn that many of them have already embraced the new medium and its progressive possibilities.

Yet, what emerged during the session was the recognition of what social media in essence stands for – an extremely powerful and contemporary form of word of mouth marketing. With some serious commitment for generating positive word of mouth and best practice procedures in place, travel brands needn’t shy away from incorporating social media into their overall marketing strategies. As much as social networking sites like Twitter allow countless visitors to see a customer complaint, they also offer a democratic platform for eye-witnessing companies’ proficiencies in dealing with disgruntled customers. 

For more information on word of mouth marketing hot topics, visit the websites of Ogilvy PR’s global 360 Digital Influence practice head John Bell who is the President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) (http://womma.org/main/). He’s in fact opening the WOMMA Summit 2009 today. The Summit Buzz Room (http://womma.org/summit09/) is a great way to keep up-to-date with all the latest word of mouth debates.

So what did the Travel Blog Camp teach us? No matter if one is an advocate of publicly displayed criticism or not, the means of travel industry communications are changing fast. But the basic principles of customer service, right at the heart of all travel and tourism businesses, remain unchanged. Social media is another, and indeed very powerful, platform through which travel brands communicate with their consumers.

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!