In 2012, we told you about BrandLIVE, a new agency model and technology suite that creates relevance and value for brands every day. In 2013, we've teamed up with Sprint to bring BrandLIVE to CES as their social media content hub. A dedicated team is monitoring headlines and social buzz to bring CES attendees (and those just following along on their social networks) the best content in real-time.
What does that entail? One of the big themes is about eco-innovation. In fact, if you've got an idea for green technology, share it with Sprint (use #SprintCES) and they'll illustrate some of their favorites. For instance, CNET's Brian Cooley wanted to see a self-driving car.
Follow Sprint on Twitter and Facebook to see more. And if you'd like to learn more about BrandLIVE, check out this quick video with Anne-Marie Kline and John Robinson below.
*Digitas is a part of Team Sprint (comprised of Digitas and Leo Burnett)
Relevance has a deadline. That's why we've launched BrandLIVE™, a proprietary agency platform that creates relevance and value for brands every day. Combining social and content strategies with the agility of a news organization, it's a real-time, brand relevance approach to participation and publishing.
BrandLIVE™ is both an agency model and technology suite, with a stable of 25 open and collaborative partners including BrandWatch, Topsy, and Skyword. You can learn more about it here, and get commentary from Colin Kinsella, along with BrandLIVE™ Managing Directors Anne-Marie Kline and John Robinson.
The three part process and client service model includes:
The Wire: The source for discovery · Social listening, translation, and interpretation · Trend analysis · Real-time analytics · Audience Design · Brand Intelligence · Content consumption and sharing
The BrandLIVE™ Newsroom: Ideas. Impact. In Real-Time. · Proactive and reactive content and content strategies · Dedicated, creatively-led teams · Consolidated social engagement across all owned assets
The Multicast: Targeted publishing and distribution · Feeds owned channels to drive earned media and identify amplification opportunities for paid · Analytics that feed back to The Wire for real-time tracking, enabling real-time optimization
Couldn’t make it to SXSW? We’ve got you covered. Digitas was on the ground to live-tweet and recap sessions. Check out our session recaps here, and read on below to see what some of our experts had to say about their experience overall.
“You’ve got to think conversation, not control. The best panels I attended created a real dialogue between the speakers and the audience. But at the worst one (though I won’t name names), the panelists refused to answer pointed questions from the audience. The attendees was clearly disappointed, and the whole thing was an example of what happens when you try to control a conversation instead of adapting to people’s needs. Ironically, it was a session on social media and how the medium gives people unprecedented access to big events - but it was one of the most closed panels I went to. The lesson here is one of the most important rules in marketing—your brand needs to engage and connect with people, instead of just pushing out messaging and trying to control everything. It just won’t work.” – Anne-Marie Kline, SVP, Marketing, Digitas
“Help your clients to be bold. At SXSW, so many of the brands that attended spoke wistfully about wanting to do bigger things in social. You could see that the intent is definitely there, but that they’re being held back by caution and fear. It’s our job to give clients guidance and partnership in the space—to help them to do great things. Be it social or any other aspect of marketing, you have to have your client’s back, and in turn, they’ll be bold.” – Eric Korsh, VP, Group Director, Brand Content, Digitas
Can’t make it to SXSW? We’ve got you covered. Digitas is on the ground and we’ll be live-tweeting and recapping sessions all week. See the first recap here.
Instant feedback is critical. That was one of the main takeaways from “Gamify and Socialize: Beyond the Buzzwords”, a session with Bing Gordon, legendary video game pioneer and leading investor in Zynga. The under-35 generation has grown up playing games and interacting with rich media, and it’s had a profound effect on the way they interact with the world. Gordon even takes it one step further and argues that our brains will adapt to the idea of multi-tasking. It may seem like an illusion now, but as we continue to try to make it work, our brains will adapt, and the multi-tasking illusion will become a reality.
Tech Superwomen
The next day, the “Tech Superwomen: Mentors and Mentees, FTW” panel explored feedback of a different kind. Featuring a strong group of successful women (including Intel’s Ekaterina Walter and renown author and corporate director Nilofer Merchant), the panel discussed how critical mentors can be to your success. A good mentor isn’t just someone who can provide knowledge, but someone who will have faith in you—someone who will encourage you to succeed. What’s more, a good mentor will also give you tough love—they’ll tell you when you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and just get something done.
The panel also shared some unfortunate numbers: right now, women represent less than 20% of speakers at conferences, less than 10% of corporate board seats, and less than 3% of venture-backed start-ups. Finding good mentors and developing networks is key to changing that. A woman’s mentor doesn’t need to be another woman either—if women hold less than 10% of corporate board seats, then that means that a lot of men are in a good position to guide others.
The Lawyer-Social Media Manager Divide
If you manage social media for your company, chances are that you’ve run into issues with your legal department at one point or another. There were a lot of useful insights to be found in “Bridging the Lawyer-Social Media Manager Divide,” a presentation from Sprint’s June Casalmir, Counsel, Consumer & Marketing Practices, and Capital One’s Richard Pesce,Senior Manager of Social Media & Digital Communications.
For starters, the duo emphasized the importance of communication and cooperation. Your legal team isn’t trying to make your life harder—they’re trying to look out for the company. There’s actually a lot of legal issues that social media managers should consider when launching a new social campaign:
Trademark & copyright (think about what’s been happening with Pinterest)
Publicity rights (such as the right to use someone else’s image)
Advertising law (FTC guidelines require that you disclose blogger relationships)
Sweepstakes & contests
Another piece of valuable advice: don’t just think of your legal team when you need a last-minute approval. Bring them into the process earlier, and explain the goals that you’re trying to achieve. If each party is respectful and educates one another, it’ll lead to great work. June cited the Sprint Social Media Ninja program as an example—social partnered with legal and found a way to turn employees into social media ambassadors.
After the panel, we caught up June for more takeaways.
Special thanks to Anne-Marie Kline, SVP of Marketing, for her insights on the Bing Gordon panel.
Can’t make it to SXSW? We’ve got you covered. Digitas is on the ground and we’ll be live-tweeting and recapping sessions all week. Below, Digitas’ Anne-Marie Kline, SVP of Marketing, recaps “A Crash Course in Becoming SuperBetter.” You can also check out a recap of the "Brands as Patterns" panel from Joe Lozito, SVP of Technology, on Digiday.
Jane McGonigal is the world's 36th most influential person in gaming (for context, the guy who invented Angry Birds is 37th). In 2009, she suffered a concussion-inducing blow to the head. After being restricted by doctors from doing most anything and being confined to bed, she said to herself, "I'm going to kill myself or turn this into a game."
That game was SuperBetter. Here’s Jane talking about the first version in 2010.
What Jane did was incredible. She took a personal tragedy and turned it into something much bigger than herself. Soon people began adopting it to overcome their own issues: battling cancer, losing weight, quitting smoke – the list goes on. She partnered with Ohio State University and used gaming to help treat people recovering from illnesses and accidents.
The SuperBetter game hits on the four categories of things people need to recover from major difficulties or trauma: physical, mental, emotional and social resilience.
Those four things require:
Courage: you have to feel ready to do something hard, and be ready to fail
Agency: we must believe that the actions that we take have an impact on the outcome
Time: we need to commit time and energy to the things that mean the most to us
Jane also talked about Posttraumatic Growth (the opposite of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), where you actually feel energized to become a better you.
Ultimately, the success of SuperBetter represents a shift away from the pursuit of happiness to the happiness of pursuit. And while it’s a new area of gaming, there’s already a lot of different variations popping: Lift by Biz Stone, Mightybell, Dailyfeats, Google's Schemer, Cadre, and Dream (a Boston-based aspirational advatar project), to name a few.
To learn more about Jane, check her out on Twitter: @avantgame.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 05:58PM 