Here’s a list of some things that have changed in the new version of Digg, so you can decide for yourself:

• Added the ability to “follow” your friends as well as brands/publishers
• Connected with Facebook, Twitter and Google so it’s easy for you to find your friends
• Included a suggested user list that makes it easier to find brands/publishers you want to follow
• Added a “My News” stream that shows the stories users you’re following digg
• Put a “Digg It” submission bar at the top of your homepage to make it easy to submit content
• Included new tools to make it easier to share content via Twitter, Facebook and email
• Added some new features, including one that lets you save a story for later

Plus, Digg is also working to improve its content by recruiting big brands, promising to “help publishers drive traffic and revenue, including improved analytics and reporting, additional incoming feed capabilities, and improving the discovery process to ensure all publishers are being found and followed on Digg.”

Read more

So, what’s the verdict? Will you use Digg more? Less? Do you think Digg will be more successful overall?

The key here is that the this is the easy part of a social media strategy. It’s what comes next that really matters to driving success in social media.

The premise of the campaign is simple. Someone posts a comment, request, or question and the Old Spice man responds. The success and strategy however is complex. With a team of social, creative, and technical minds, coupled with complete freedom, the campaign was able to launch to new levels never seen in social media before.

By activating the already cultivated Old Spice community, distributing real time video content, and seeding responses to key influencers across the internet, Old Spice was able to take a simple conversation to new heights. The campaign itself is not a social phenomenon but a succession in an ongoing social strategy. Below is a summary of the campaign, how they got here, and why it was so popular.

What is it?

Old Spice has created a 2 day campaign that amassed over 180 videos in response to requests and questions from the Old Spice Social Community. Old Spice monitored internet comments to create a video response for as well as opened up for questions and requests from their fans, followers, and friends to have the “Old Spice Man” create a video response. Once the response was filmed, edited, and completed (which took a matter of minutes), the Old Spice Social Media team created strategies to distribute the response and video across the internet by activating their robust social media community.

How it Worked

The Old Spice Social, Creative, and Technical team worked together to develop, create, and distribute the content that has taken the social world by storm. They worked in concert on the following Tasks.

Social:
Identified comments to respond to: The social team scanned the internet as well as their own social and digital properties for relevant comments, questions, and requests that aligned with the brand/campaign positioning. A major influence for this strategy was identifying the influence of the commenter, friend, or follower. By identifying key influencers to respond to, they increased their chances for distribution success.

Distributed content where relevant: Once the comment was identified and the video response was ready for distribution, the social team created “real-time” strategies to distribute the video content where it had the most chance of being shared and distributed. By integrating the Old Spice social properties with the influencers and distribution channels, the social media team was able to create virility through multiple relevant touchpoints.

Creative:
Crafted branded responses: The popularity of the Old Spice man began before this campaign through other TVCs and online videos; the community knew who he was and what he stood for. With that being said, the creative team had to craft short responses that aligned, not only with the brand character, but also with the voice of the comment, request, or question.

Technical:
Fast turnaround: The success of this campaign relied heavily on the ability to find a comment, craft a response, shoot and edit the video, and distribute it in almost real time. The technical team worked consistently to edit the video and ensure it was shareable in a matter of minutes.

Why it worked

This Old Spice campaign worked for several different reasons. They have slowly built their brand to be in position to pull off such a huge viral and social success. The pieces were in place and the community was nurtured to a point for campaign activation. Below are the key factors for the tremendous success this campaign had:

Community: Old Spice has built a solid social following and community. With a robust Facebook page, an active Twitter account, and a highly trafficked YouTube channel, Old Spice has been able to create a culture of virility and conversation prior to the campaign.

The success was derived from the activation of those relationships to engage in the campaign and distribute the videos to and through their community.

Real Time: The video responses were practically distributed in real time. The social space has created a need for real time, individualized communication. This campaign fulfilled that need by having such a fast turnaround.

Format: It’s one thing to craft a text response in the voice of the Old Spice man; it’s another to create video responses. Video has long been the most shared format on social media. Allowing for more engagement and interaction, the Old Spice social team decided to use video to drive distribution.

Freedom: The social team was given a tremendous amount of flexibility from the brand to create the real time videos and distribute socially. This action displayed a level of bravery on the part of the brand to allow the social team full freedom for the success (or potential failure) of the campaign. However, the social team was provided with a set of guidelines and guardrails to stay inside while making the responses and distributing them.

Success

The campaign, although short-lived, showed tremendous results.

Twitter: Old Spice added tens of thousands of Followers

YouTube: The video responses amassed nearly 6 million total views within the first 24 hours (more than President Obama’s victory speech).

Comments: To date the campaign created over 25,000 comments across the internet.

What it Means For Marketers (Key Takeaways)

The combination of brand voice, video format, an active social community, and conversation created a tremendous amount of momentum for the campaign. This shift in what is possible creates some great learnings for marketers.

Community: Having such a large, engaged community was a driving success for the campaign. If Old Spice launched this campaign without this community, the campaign would not have been a success. Building our communities based on our brand voice, message, and mission, we can create trust, loyalty and advocacy for our brand. And as we build this community of loyalists, we can activate for future campaign success.

Conversation: Another driving factor for success is the fact of simple conversation. Consumers are continually needed two way dialog, whether from their peers or from brands. Building a culture of conversation and discussion in the correct tone and voice, we can begin to build lasting relationships and trust, ever driving toward loyalty.

Content: Building off the social success Old Spice has seen with their TVCs and branded videos, they created a campaign that was solely based on relevant content. Not only did they provide responses relevant to the conversation but the video format allowed for better engagement and interaction. By creating content that is timely and relevant based on what is being said we can solve problems and fulfill needs that arise.

Distribution: Not all of the campaign lived on the Old Spice owned properties; some of the content was seeded and distributed on other sites. The team went out and distributed the content where the conversation was happening. By integrating content and response to where the conversations are happening allow us to better fulfill the need and solve the problems; creating thought leadership and better positioning for the brand.

Now here’s the question… Chances are your brand(s) advertise on Google based on keyword searches… Everyone does it simply because of the targeted nature of search and the expanse of reach that Google provides. It’s a no brainer, go where the consumers are. But what now; Now that the consumers are shifting to Facebook? We should be on Facebook. It seems like another no brainer right? Are you on Facebook?

Now I’m sure if you’re not on Facebook, the thought of it frightens you. The small loss of control, the conversations that people are having, and actual interaction with the customer can all be very intimidating, even to the most seasoned marketer. So much so, many companies are staying away from the platform and social media all together. It’s new and hard to define. We have no idea what will happen in the social space. However, we should know what we’re missing.

Enter the second article… In the article “Social Fans More Likely to Buy,” eMarketer points out reasons people become fans of brands on Facebook and the driving forces for them to purchase. As we can see in the graph below, Social Fans are very likely to not only purchase from the brands they are “Fans” of but also recommend those brands creating a level of trust, word of mouth, and earned media that static platforms like Google cannot offer.

So now you’re probably asking, “why would anyone become a “Fan” of my brand on Facebook?” Simple… it makes their life easier and more involved. As we see from the second graph the top reasons for “Fanning” a brand are:

•    To receive discounts and promotions (become a more empowered consumer)
•    I am a customer of the company (show loyalty and enhance advocacy)
•    To show others that I like/support the brand (allow your brand attributes to define them as a person/customer)

It’s an amazing shift in why people become a fan of a brand, but shows the realization of individualized, personal marketing that a platform, like Facebook could allow.

If you’re a marketer of a brand, your goal is to get your brand in front of as many eyes that you can, as well as persuade toward a purchase. Google may give you an opportunity for the reach and allow you to display an advertisement, but Facebook offers you much, much more. It not only gives you the eyes you want and the advertising you desire, but also provides you with a platform to interact with customers and communicate on a regular, semi-intimate basis; to give them discounts and promotions; to enhance loyalty and build advocacy; and provide an outlet to let your passionate followers shout to the world that they are your customer. It’s a simple thought… communicating with your customers. One that should NEVER be scary.

Map out the entire Global Ecosystem: Understand where subsidiaries sit in what markets. Identify key internal team members to perform and manage social strategies for those subs in those markets. Build solidified Roles & Responsibilities and Policies & Procedures for your team to follow when engaging online to ensure communication, engagement, and a proper content distribution model.

Identify your social rock star: I know the term “rock star” is overly used when discussing social media, however the persona around it is a great definition. We need to identify the individuals within the organization, within the subsidiaries, and within the local markets to monitor, manage, and maintain the social platforms. Simply having a platform set up for all locations and for all brands won’t equal success… However having a “rock star” leading the way to stardom will make it that much easier.

Cultivate your community: Empowering your social rock stars to facilitate a community within the roles and responsibilities of the global strategy, you can give more weight towards the actual engagement of the community. By allowing for two-way communication and having an active response and content plan, your rock star can cultivate the community towards a great level of trust within that community.

By mapping out the ecosystem and setting guidelines, parameters, and content creation and distribution plans will allow for a more streamlined system for social media. Give that to a local, brand advocate social rock star and you are on to something that leans towards success. Finally, giving power to the community to be engaged and excited for the cause, you can cultivate relationships and build the trust that is needed to create advocates and passionate followers.

Building a global strategy for social media may seem like a lost cause. But take a step back, think about the aforementioned ideas as it pertains to your organization and move closer to success. What are your thoughts? What strategies do you see working within multinational organizations?

Here I am, sitting in my hotel room in our Nation’s Capital putting the finishing touches on my presentation for tomorrow and staring 1:30 am in the face (with a crisp wake-up call off 5:30am). Tomorrow I’m presenting social media to the Cycling Industry advocates at the National Bike Summit 2010. I’m very excited and pleased to be a part of such a great cause, however I didn’t feel satisfied with my presentation. I felt there was something big missing. So i decided to take a step back and think, “Am I just presenting the same big numbers and mindless strategy that everyone in the industry is presenting? What is the meaning behind my message?”

While debating this and turning my mind off with the mindless humor of The Office I had a thought… everyone knows that social media is huge, everyone knows they need a strategy, but not everyone has the confidence to move forward with that strategy. Not everyone understands the “Do” part of social media… This is it… This is my differentiator, this is the thing that will get the attendees excited! This is what needs to be discussed now. Without the “Do” there is no success.

After looking through the presentation deck for the gazillionth time, with this new mindset, I entered a new slide after the numbers and strategy (which are still important), to simply say… “DO.” All of us in the industry can talk the talk, but there are only a few of us that are actually walking the walk… actually “Do”ing.

What a great epiphany… So I’ll leave you the same way I will leave my attendees tomorrow. Planning and strategy are essential to success, however without the “Do” there is nothing.

Just building a Facebook fan page or Twitter profile is not a guarantee that you’re going to have thousands of fans or followers. There is a need to think through how you plan to activate your social media properties.

While there is a wide variety of methods, they almost all fall into the below spectrum.

Organic:
This is where most people start. This includes those users who find you without prompting and those users that you drive through integrated touch points, such as having a “Follow us on Twitter” call to action on your website.

The upside: These are likely to be your most loyal fans and to cost you the least to accomplish.

The downside: As a standalone approach this is more effective for brands that have an innate ability to drive consumer association; however, for most mass consumer brands this may not be enough.

Community:
Through connecting users (or distinct sub user groups) to each other, brands have the ability to leverage the community to drive the social media activity.

The upside: Once started, users may be able to lead the online activity within the branded community space.

The downside: This requires a true investment from the brand to help establish the community activity. It will likely only work when the users have a high level of interest in the topic, not just for casual consumers of your products and/or services.

Influencer:
Often times a brand already has a network of key opinion leaders and partners that have a strong presence online. By reaching out to these influencers and/or through identifying new influencers a brand can gain a halo effect of connecting to consumers through a relevant voice.

The upside: Allows the brand to gain access to consumers through a valuable third-party endorsement.

The downside: There is the risk of the endorsement coming across as disingenuous or that the opinion is not as favorable as one would hope. Either may turn consumers off.

Media:
This can include using more traditional media to drive to social media activity as well as paid media within social channels, such as Facebook Ads, to drive users already in the channel to your branded content.

The upside: Provides for a higher amount of guarantee as to the performance of the program and often allows for fairly specific user targeting.

The downside: Commonly represents a significant investment to get valuable reach and the ability to truly measure the effect.

Promotional:
Many brands create promotional activity as a means to engage users with their social media property. This can include sweepstakes, coupons, samples and/or an event.

The upside: Can be an entertaining and compelling means to drive awareness and engagement with users.

The downside: You may get users who are only involved for the promotional offer, but not the true brand fans you are looking for.

Summary:
The brands that are most successful are those that leverage and integrate each of these methods to activate their social media programs.

Last week I had a quick conversation on Twitter that started off with one of my random brain droppings… But the 3 sentence conversation really made me think about what is needed to be successful in social media. The tweets go like this:

Me: What does “social media” mean anymore… Isn’t it just simply using technology to communicate?

@vabike: Bike advocates’ problem isn’t web and social media skills, it’s laziness & lack of inclination to communicate

Me: @vabike I would imagine a lot of communities are like that. Then it comes down to relevant content to spark the interest to communicate.

I wanted to call out the response from @vabike… It’s not the skills but the laziness and lack of inclination to communicate. Simply tweeting or posting a Facebook message doesn’t equal communication or conversation. So the question becomes, what would give consumers, (in this case, bike advocates) the inclination to communicate with what your brand is saying online? The short answer… Relevant and entertaining content.

Insights

Scanning the interwebs for information and conversation is a crucial first step in creating this elusive relevant and entertaining content. Understanding what is being said, where its being said, who’s saying it, and how it’s said will give you context as to what is relevant to your consumer base as well as the channels used. Continually managing and monitoring the ecosystem will give you a real time updates on the sentiment shifts in the market.

Test

Knowing what information is important, relevant, exciting, educating, and entertaining for your consumer base will give you the knowledge to create engaging content and entertaining interactions. To further define the engagement level of content, we need to test messaging and content strategies, monitor the engagement, and track what happens. Getting a global view of the engagement levels of differing content provides concrete information in how to engage online and how to give your consumers inclination to communicate back.

Adapt

As with anything you monitor, test, and track we need to have the ability to adapt. The world in social media is in such an infancy stage, growing at the pace of nothing we’ve ever seen, so we have to adapt to whatever this behemoth turns into. We have to be nimble to market values and sentiments. We have to continually monitor our ecosystem and account for changes as well as our strategies.

In social media, content is king. With the amount of information available to our consumers, we have the task given to us to, not only differentiate in our product/service offerings, but also differentiate in what content we deliver, how we deliver it, and how we interact with consumers once they engage. Following the aforementioned steps will give you the foundation for success in this crazy social world.

Photo courtesy of Flickr – neonihil

Traversing the social space right now, for any organization, could become very confusing and treacherous, but especially with multi level, multi-brand companies. With new platforms and information launching daily, constant shifting consumer behaviors, and the ever-growing disjointed, siloed environment where many of our organizations live, we, as marketers, are in position for complete and total social devastation… if we don’t play our cards right and build a roadmap to traverse this dynamic Social Ecosystem.

Siloed Companies

Many companies we work with have a hierarchy of brands with many different subsidiaries. All of whom, have their own agenda and strategy for marketing, separate from any “global” brand messaging that should ring true through an organization in its entirety. This type of ownership and siloed-thinking, has created disjointed communication, not only within the organization, but also in outward, consumer facing communications. The innate need for a separate marketing strategy for sub brands and brands alike, we are seeing a tremendous confusion when it comes to communication, let alone social strategy.

A Roadmap

To combat this siloed approach and segmented communications in social media, we need to develop a global roadmap that would define the communication flow, brand/sub brand responsibilities, and information within, throughout, and around the brand and sub brand relationships. Where are the touchpoints for the parent brand? Where are they for the sub brand? What information is shared between the brand and sub brand? What impact does the global brand message have on the sub brands? All questions to ask while devising and building the global roadmap for the social space. Once we have these answers, we can build a strategy to visually map out what our Social Ecosystem looks like and on what levels we need to communicate in the social space as well as what to say on the different avenues.

sGPS  (social GPS)

With this roadmap created and the complete overall understanding of the entire organization throughout the social space, we can navigate accordingly to engage customers in the correct way, with the correct messaging. We would basically have a Social GPS (coming soon from Garmin) to give us control to not only navigate ourselves, but empower our consumers to navigate as well. This dynamic strategy would give us the power to adapt in the social space and ensure the path to conversion is illuminated for the consumer.

With a Social Roadmap, we will know where, when, and how to go and with whom to communicate. Without, we are lost, disjointed and segmented in our customer relationships, communications, and organizational objectives. One of the hardest things to do is to sit down and develop a strategy. We are in a culture of build now and strategize later… unfortunately later never comes. There’s no better time than the present to plan success.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr – ♥ China ♥ guccio

Courtesy of Flickr - JulianBleecker

While reading a recent interview with Social Media Guru Erin Byrne, something that seemed insignificant caught my eye and has really taken over my thoughts over the past 24 hours. The two opening questions alluded to a new way that we as marketers need to think about how we communicate with our individual customers:

What do you see as the biggest changes in the communications landscape in the last five years?
The most significant change is the change to a many-to-many dialogue. Companies can no longer have one-way conversations with stakeholders. To truly be effective, you have to create dialogue and larger conversations. At the same time, companies should stop trying to control their messages and must focus on real-time branding.

Define “real-time branding.”
Real-time branding is the ability to leverage social tools to react and respond to stakeholders individually-with the right message for the right person at the right time. But it’s important to note that, while people talk about online, online, online, it’s really about integration. Conversations go online, then offline, then online again. The most successful PR professionals use traditional PR to build awareness and then use social media relations and digital tools to drive from awareness to action.

Amazing, right? There are a few things I wanted to bring to further light and discuss in more detail:

“The most significant change is the change to a many-to-many dialogue”
An amazing revolution brought on by the Web 2.0 technologies and the communities that have been forming in the social realm. Everyone now has a voice if they want one; each and every customer, advocate, and cynic. We now have to provide relevant content for, not only the masses, but also each individual. The only way to do this is “create dialogue(s) and larger conversations.”

“Real-time branding is the ability to leverage social tools to react and respond to stakeholders individually-with the right message for the right person at the right time.”
Using social technologies, we can not only communicate individually with the right person, at the right time, with the right message, but we can also communicate in the right space. Not all of our customers are going to be on Twitter and Facebook, but we can still use some of the marketing technologies we have at hand to build and continue individual conversations.

Social Ecosystem

To build a Real-Time Brand and to fulfill these needs of continuous individual conversations, we have to create a Social Ecosystem. Gone are the days of putting up a corporate site and hope our customers find it. We now need to focus on multi platform, social conversations, real-time search, mobile strategies, CRM or Database Marketing, customer service techniques, infiltrating mass advertising with social aspects (ie QR codes, augmented reality, etc) and so on. Designing this type of conversation strategy and providing relevant information to the individuals participating within our social ecosystem will allow the user to take what is meaningful to them and build a personal conversation with our brand, on their terms, with their preferred communication methods. This type of Social Ecosystem creates, what I call, a malleable brand.

Malleable Brand

By giving the customer the power in the conversation, allowing them to take content and information (rather than having it pushed on to them) will create a level of trust and understanding that traditional marketing could only imagine. Knowing where, how, and why to communicate with customers on their level is the future of what’s to come; creating an even larger definition of Real-Time Branding.

Conclusion

I am a huge advocate of communicating to individuals through marketing. With increases in technologies like Social CRM, database marketing, QR codes and social slimming, we have all the capabilities to become relevant in an individual’s world. By creating and understanding the social ecosystem around each individual, we can build this malleable brand that provides highly relevant content and processes that the consumer can mold into their own personal lifestyle, increasing trust, advocacy and passion.

With this passion, our customers will begin to proudly “wear” our brands as badges and utilize our brand essence to define a certain aspect of their own personality… the pinnacle of any brand.