360DigitalInfluence

This week’s social media controversy is brought to you by: Youtube. 

Mashable broke the story earlier in the week, noting that thousands of videos that feature copyrighted Warner music have been silenced on the video sharing site, literally, by muting the audio tracks.  A message below the videos reads : “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”

This is move is being positioned a compromise, the other solution being the full removal of the video itself.  It’s there’s anything we’ve learned in witnessing the growing pains of Youtube it’s that music licensing is a pretty complex swamp.  This post is in no way an attempt to untangle the legal implications.  However, one thing is clear, music is a big part of Youtube, bigger than you may think on a video sharing site. continue reading

So we go running off the edge to jump back in (with memories of the hot summer day, the swimming hole and the cool, yet not cold, clear water - nice thoughts in the dead of winter) 

Blogs matter. They are a foundation of the social media phenomena that will not pass in the night like CB Radios or printed ezines. While we add Twitter, Friendfeed, Tweetbacks, iPhone apps and more to our digital lives, blogs remain the relevant platform for sharing opinions, insights and knowledge that require more than a 140 characters or a smartphone interaction.

Our blog has just relaunched with a new design that will continue to evolve. We have been blogging and applying social media to our lives for years now - this is just the next iteration of our “blog platform.” This is our team’s “homebase” on the Internet. Our 360° Digital Influence team at Ogilvy PR, uses this platform to share knowledge with our global team, our clients and anyone interested in the strategic use of social media in marketing and public relations. We have a lot of smart, insightful people so we created the tools and the channel to share those points of view.

It is more than blog posts
We use this platform to aggregate more of our digital activity and to create that homebase of social media for our team. Here’s what you will find and what you can expect in the future (near as we can tell - remember, it’s evolving….)

• Multimedia-rich blog posts: we have integrated our YouTube and Flickr channels here and simplified our own publishing interface to help us tell richer stories
• Aggregate Twitter feed: we have pulled together our twitter streams into one to make it easy for us  to stay tuned to our team.
• Our Blog Network Feed: we have a lot of blogs hosted by Ogilvy thought leaders in Public Affairs, Technology and globally. Now we can all see a composite feed and get to those platforms quickly.
• Events calendar: we speak, host, attend and pay attention to real-world events in our space an now we will be able to list them in a more accessible place. You can also know where we will be this year and which events we feel are more relevant than others.
• Careers as a Digital Strategist: okay “careers” is not the right label but we are looking for new team members and we wanted to simplify how we could let people know about these jobs.
• Our portfolio of client work: rather than drive people to another web site just to see best practice cases, we will put them all here over time. The format will evolve too as we do more “How-to” content and try to share our experiences as learning and skills-building cases not simply “look at the great work we did” cases

Our blog is a our own town square (with a swimming hole), a place to launch a thousand ideas and conversations. Many of us will maintain our own personal blogs while remaining members of this community platform, as well. Personally, I believe one of the biggest benefits of our blog platform is encouraging the voices of everyone in the team to come through. We have a deep, global bench.

• Hearing Kristin Foster’s ideas on using Twitter for business
• Brian Giesen’s interviews with Search Engine Strategies leaders or coverage of our Government 2.0 event
• Laura Halsch’s coverage on the WOMMA Summit
• Sarah Marchetti’s thoughts on the Motrin episode
• John Stauffer’s point of view on Change.gov
  

And so much more.

Join in the conversation here - the water is fine - or wherever the links take you.

(Photo credit, gullevek, via flickr)

This weekend, we’ll be launching a brand new look to 360 Digital Influence Blog. This new design, same URL, will go live in the next few days.

In meantime, between now and Sunday evening, we’re going to put a temporary hold on posts and new comments. Bear with us over the weekend as we work to unpack and get settled in our new home.

We’ve had a great 2008 on the 360 Digital Influence Blog and look forward to new content and new readers in 2009.

Stay tuned…

We observed a very interesting trend in social media in Europe : there’s a deeper integration between online identities and “real life” identities. This is the consequence of the convergence of at least 2 parameters: growing technologic concern for open IDs and data availability : when you’re online, you need more and more social tools in order to share, discuss, work with your peers and your communities of interests.

Because of this new usage, you need to remain connected as a hub for the various people trying to reach you. It’s more and more complicated to manage 3 or 4 anonymous accounts, all simply because it’d be too time-demanding cultural habits : it becomes now more and more normal to send a request for a Facebook / MySpace friendship to people you’ve met in your private or professional life. This new border of what privacy means explains why the public online space is now inhabited by “real” people with real names and real interactions. continue reading

The two things I love most about practicing Public Relations are promoting a great cause and the urgency and quick thinking required when responding to a crisis. So, when I watched Gary Vaynerchuk’s latest vlog on his personal website I just had to share, because it is such a great example of how to respond to a potential public relations crisis using social media. Gary’s wine social network, Cork’d, was hacked, but through a quick, personal response to the news, he was able to turn what could have been bad PR into good PR very quickly. He explains it much better than I ever could, so I hope you appreciate how great the response was as much as I did:

Any thoughts after watching the video? Is it realistic for a large or average-sized company to do this or is it much more feasible for a smaller organization with a very social media savvy CEO like Gary. I have my opinion, but I’d love to hear yours.

This is a great visual outlining how those commenting on blogs on behalf of the Air Force should respond in various situations.  If it were all this easy… can I get one of these for my life? 

Via Global Nerdy, who reports that the Air Force has appointed a Chief Emerging Technology Officer “whose job is to develop strategy, policy and plans for the Air Force’s ‘communicators’ and whose mission is to use or build web applications as a means of engaging Airmen and the general public in conversation.
The goal is to make every single Airman a communicator.”  Nerdy also shared links to existing Air Force social media efforts including:

• Air Force Live
• A Twitter account
• A YouTube page
• Widgets and podcasts

In my travels on the Interwebs I have discovered that other defense oriented agencies, such as the Department of Defense and the Department of State, are out in front when it comes to adoption of social media and are using it as a way to connect and maybe even, umm.. market… themselves.  DOD’s site is especially impressive and gets beyond the block and tackle social media tools (like social bookmarking, embedable video, etc.) with forays into sites like BlogTalk Radio.  It will be exciting to see what comes next, especially with the new administration paving the way.

Several weeks ago, BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine shared a term in one of his predictions for 2009 that was intriguing because of how it describes a growing phenomenon in media today … the rise of the shadow media. The shadow media are the professional journalists, writers, editors and thought leaders who have been displaced either by choice or necessity as part of the upheaval that traditional media has been going through over the past few years. While before, these content creators may have just moved to a new role within traditional media (as Josh Quittner did when Business2.0 magazine folded) - but today more and more they are branching out on their own.

The result is a big trend that may start to redefine social media as we currently see it: namely that blogs, social networks and other forms of “new media” aren’t just for amateurs anymore. For some time now, respected journalists like Om Malik, Kara Swisher, Erick Schonfeld and dozens of others have been actively blogging. Engadget is the official media source for the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, and arguably will be the defacto media source of coverage for the event though there are many traditional publications attending as well.

It may seem like a stretch to refer to all of this as “shadow media” - and indeed some of these classifications are artificial to start with. But regardless of what you call these new sources of news and information, the indisputable fact is that in 2009 there will be many social media examples to point to where the quality is as good if not better than traditional media sources. So if you’re working in a communications role and you’re not yet focusing on social media … consider the shadow media phenomenon your wake up call to start in 2009.

Although the phrase, “the customer is always right” has been around forever, and good customer service has always been valued, 2008 was the year that companies really took that message to heart and not only built up their listening capabilities, but became proactive about responding and changing.

Companies that found themselves in tougher times - Starbucks, SouthwestAir, McDonalds, and Comcast - used new media to return to basics.   They’ve started to abandon their big-bad corporate images by putting faces and names to their companies, inviting influencers behind the curtain, and putting the customer first.

This trend seems like it will only continue in ‘09 as companies demonstrate successes that are a direct result of crowdsourcing, responsiveness and open communication.

While personalized search was officially launched on Google in 2005, I believe 2008 will be remembered as the year that the concept of “personalized search” went mainstream. I’m making no claims about the usefulness of personalized search itself.   The reason I’m calling it out as a best of 2008 is the fact that increased knowledge of its existence, via Google’s SearchWiki, will help to shift the focus of SEOs, online marketers, and most importantly, the client, from search rankings to website analytics and conversions.

Throughout the year, we saw a global increase in brands using mobile to foster word of mouth or support offline campaigns.

No one demonstrated the power of mobile better than our next President.   Sent in the early morning hours on Friday, August 23rd, the VP text has described been single largest mobile marketing event to-date.   Best guesses put the number of opt-in text subscribers at around 2.9 million unique mobile numbers.

While most brands won’t have the star appeal of Barack Obama, the possibilities for a branded mobile play in 2008 grew exponentially, due in no small part to the campaign.