Digigen & The TinMan

Brussels doesn’t really have alot going for it. Soulless, bland, it could be any city in any part of Europe. However, for one night it lit up brilliantly for The Brooklyn Brothers as we romped home at The Euro Effies. Having secured and been delighted with our Gold in the category of Social Media Effectiveness for Inspired by Iceland (Promote Iceland), we were stunned to then win both the Grand Prix and Agency of the Year. Of course it wasn’t just us, our friends at Islenska in Iceland were a collaborative and brilliant driving force. Extremely smart, extremely inventive, both Islenska and The Brooklyn Brothers have a superb fit through our ways of working.

Inspired by Iceland was an incredibly inspiring campaign to work on. It was a campaign that we found out we had won on my first day in The Brooklyn Brothers office, so it’s success or failure would help to define my role within the agency. Fortunately, the campaign was a global success, pushing Iceland from brink of despair to thriving tourist destination.

This is how we did it:
The country of Iceland had transformed itself from one of Europe’s poorest countries to one of its wealthiest in the space of a generation. After the financial crisis in 2008, Iceland suffered yet another blow when that volcano unexpectedly erupted and sent plumes of ash into the Icelandic air.

The negative press and sentiment surrounding Iceland was turning potential tourists off. The effect of the volcano was felt immediately with tourism numbers plummeting 30% in the two remaining weeks of April, a decline that continued into the start of May.

This campaign involved Icelanders in telling their stories to the world. In July 2010, Iceland hour was created during which Icelanders went online and told the world how much they love their country. Even the Prime Minister got involved!

Within 2 weeks of the launch, over 85% of Icelanders were aware of the campaign. After 6 weeks, over half of the Icelandic public had contributed stories. Within just 10 weeks, the country was perceived as a safe place to visit again, visitor numbers were up 27% against forecasts. The first quarter of 2011 has seen Iceland’s highest tourist numbers ever.

On Facebook alone over 45,000 fans were recruited and over 2 million stories were seen and sent out by fans. Between June and August the live webcams were viewed 60 million times.

In total an additional 73 thousand tourists visited the country from Europe, worth an additional £127.4m to Iceland’s economy. The total campaign expenditure was £2m within this period, giving a short-term ROMI of 62.7:1.

Inspired by Iceland demonstrates how a new model of Social Participation can change both attitudes and behaviours, and deliver impressive commercial results.

Trending everywhere at the moment is Intel’s fantastic Museum of Me. It is the one thing that I have seen consistently in my news feed over the last few weeks. It is actually the one thing that many contacts have used and showcased, something that can’t be said for all internet memes or phenomenons. Here’s why: personalisation.

Personlisation has been one of the subjects madly quoted by users from search experience experts to social media “gurus”. Yet, personlisation has never been done on a significant, mass scale, thus creating a flurry of personalised responses. It is here where Intel’s Museum of Me has managed to break the mould, it is easy to use and easy to personalise on a mass scale. Hence, the frequency that I am seeing people’s personalised museums in my news feed.

It feels like what Intel has tapped into isn’t just social, but highly personal. A cherised moment of creepy personalisation perhaps as some have said, but still fascinating nonetheless.

Additional note after discussion with @gougher: The beauty of the Intel Museum of Me is that it makes it easy for users to personalise, by making the technology easy to use and creating a simple point of entry. Therefore, it isn’t about the brands personalising the experience and content, but making it easy for us to do so.

A dedicated focus on Mass Personalisation

Apparently, this is how you calculate the ROI of social media. But let me expand further below the jump…

It was the moment people in the room had been waiting for. The presenter was at the start of his presentation into Social Media Effectiveness. The slide was a picture of a cup of tea. The accompanying summary “Trying to find the ROI for Social Media is like trying to find the ROI for a cup of tea”. Silence descends on the room. People leave. Social Media slowly dies.

If this is genuinely what we think about Social Media ROI, then the industry is in big trouble. I know there are exponents thinking differently about ROI, trying to approach it and create a smart way of looking at how Social Media contributes. We all talk about “effectiveness” but what we show is “affect”, not actually a ROI. How come we can’t get there any quicker?

When I first started in the industry, the year 2001, we were attaching margins to search keywords for clients like Expedia. It was simple. We knew the page people landed on and could assign a value to that page, then link back to the keyword. We can create goals in Google Analytics and link that back to unique URLs, so we should be able to link a video view to a visit to a sales page.

The problem is we focus on engagement. Engagement is simply the first stage in a consumer journey. Yes, we should be producing content that is engaging, but there are different types of engagement as highlighted below.

We need to start taking the lack of proven ROI seriously. Otherwise Social Media might just be left on the side as “something we tried”, I’m looking forward to the next IPA Social Media Effectiveness conference where we have genuine case studies about ROI, Effectiveness, and some award winning effectiveness campaigns.

This could be my Jerry Maguire moment. Putting my neck on the line and saying, I don’t agree with alot of what goes on within the social media industry. There is a lack of clarity in what we do, even though we tell clients to be open and transparent. There is a lack of rigid and reliable understanding of effectiveness, with little use of the genuine meaning of effectiveness e.g. business, campaign, advertising ROI.
It also feels like the planning side of things is covert, meetings I have been in have talked about “complicated tools”, “dark arts” and some clients I am close to refer to it as “smoke and mirrors”. They also complain of agencies putting the same outreach blogs and partners sites on their plans everytime.

In the aim of being open, I thought I would share something which I have called The Social Planning Framework v1.0. 1.0 because I want people to feedback on it, to make it collaborative. To be honest, alot of people might not view it as completely groundbreaking, but groundbreaking isn’t always best.  Some people may think it is basic, but for me it feels like the right framework to build a social plan from. Its based on a number of things which I have found interesting and relevant, others which I have simply found frustrating.

None of it is based on traditional social media theory and if you look at books like “Business Model Generation” you might find some very similar traits. It is effectively a business planning model but with a social twist. I think we need more of this sort of thing; planning frameworks and social tools which create a long-term credibility around the industry. Something which I believe we are in danger of losing if we don’t continue to prove ourselves, demonstrate our brilliant planning capabilities, and stop that “close our eyes and hope” mentality which alot of clients talk about.

Shock horror, a really “insightful” report from Radley Yeldar has highlighted that not all of the Top 100 FTSE companies have a Facebook presence, and even more tragically some don’t even update their Facebook page enough. Aaaaargh run for the hills, the world is falling apart, and businesses are going to fail!!!

The problem with this sort of report is that it sheds meaningless light on the real need for a social strategy. The mute point that Richard Coope raises as “The survey raises the question as to whether companies are really committed to open and trusted dialogue.” is quite frankly ridiculous.

This survey doesn’t raise the question as to whether they are committed to open and trusted dialogue, it raises the question that perhaps these companies don’t actually know how they should respond to this need for openess. How can he tell from this report that they don’t want to open up? how can he say based on somebody not filling a twitter feed with the sorts of information he thinks it should be filled with? After all, if they are in the top 100 FTSE companies being “closed” has certainly seemed to have its benefits hasn’t it. A quick reminder that they don’t hand out entry to the FTSE to anyone, you need to be one of the 100 most highly capitalised companies in the UK.

So if they aren’t that social yet, lets give them a bit of credit there may be other stuff they are busying themselves with. At least some are trying even if some are failing, everyone moves at their own pace after all. Yes, lets be more open as brands, lets ask brands to be more transparent, lets get them to engage, but lets not forget for some businesses they simply don’t see the need to open up, can’t open up due to restrictions, or are simply failing fast and failing cheaply, trying things along the way.