Hasta La Creative!

Yup. OgilveyOne Athens, the agency behind the amazing Lacta Chocolate work, has created a bra that will send a tweet each time it is unclasped.

Why? Well to encourage women to perform self-exams from breast cancer detection. Sponsored by Nestle, The Tweeting Bra uses a mechanism that is connected to a smartphone via bluetooth and automatically posts a tweet every time it is unhooked. The campaign features Greece’s popular and well known television personality/celebrity Maria Mpacodimou. For 15 days, Maria will wear the bra and each time she unhooks it, it will post a tweet to her hundred of thousands of fans/followers about breast self-exams.

Hmm. Seems parents of teens might want a device like this for their daughters to who may be taking their bras off for reasons other than to simply undress.

Ad agency Twitter feeds are, as a rule, about as interesting as a couple at Home Depot debating which paint chip would best match their duvet. One consistent exception has been R/GA, which serves up fun links and clever insights with a biting wit. The man behind the feed is Chapin Clark, evp and copywriting chief based in the agency's New York headquarters. We spoke with Clark about how he keeps @RGA's tweets interesting and whether he offends any peers or potential clients in the process. He also shares some advice for how agencies and brands can turn their Twitter feeds into something worth reading. Check out the Q&A below.

@RGA is probably the most consistently sarcastic and opinionated agency account out there, at least from a major shop. Has this ever raised any hackles among the execs or with clients?
I've only gotten positive feedback from clients. If there has been any hackle-raising, I have not been privy to it. I don't think I'd still be doing this if I were alienating clients. I can just imagine the conversation with [R/GA CEO] Bob [Greenberg]. "So let's see, this Twitter thing. It doesn't affect sales. Our paying clients hate you. But it's amusing three or four times a week! What do you think we should do here? …"

It's not for everyone. I'm pretty sure there are people within R/GA who don't like it, and I'm OK with that. Wanting to be liked by everyone is what's wrong with a lot of Twitter. However, I do prefer affection to contempt. If the majority of your audience loathes you, you're probably doing something wrong. If that were the case, I'd be looking to adjust my approach.

Vice Media worth $1.4 billion, according to the company that paid $580 million for MySpace.

— R/GA (@RGA) August 16, 2013

Why not just dump the daily tweeting on to low-level staffers or agency PR flacks?
That question perfectly captures what's wrong with a lot of corporate and brand accounts! I mean, yes, it's Twitter. We're not mapping the human genome. But it has emerged as a pretty important communications channel, and this is what we do.

If you were in a room speaking to an audience of thousands of people, you'd take that pretty seriously, right? I don't see how Twitter is all that different. If you're going to bother having an account, I think it's worth taking a bit of care to say something truly informative, or differentiated, or funny, or whatever. Whether it's a junior person or a senior person, someone in PR or creative, whoever it is should be someone you trust to do a good job and give it some love.

"Where you go to have lunch has to be on brand with your brand." An actual human apparently said that in the presence of a reporter.

— R/GA (@RGA) September 4, 2013

You're not above calling out other agencies or non-client brand work. How often do you get a response from the other side?
Well, that's something I try to do sparingly. I know how hard it can be to birth a project, and all the things that can happen along the way—things often beyond your control—to alter the final product. I also have praise for other brands' and agencies' work. But sometimes I see something that is so perplexing or appalling that I feel I can't not say something.

Happy #TalkLikeAPirateDay! Let's set sail for Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrby's! http://t.co/PxLBiB8mhi

— Arby's (@Arbys) September 19, 2013

You can set your watch by these Arby's tweets.

— R/GA (@RGA) September 19, 2013

A lot of the critical things I tweet are not aimed at singling anyone out but at ourselves collectively as an industry, including R/GA. Like, can we please be a little more thoughtful, a little more suspicious of received wisdom and groupthink? We're all guilty of it. But I think every time we use the word "innovation" for something that makes ordering a pizza easier, or reflexively refer to the simple doing of something as a "hack," we die a little.

What do you think should be the primary goal of an agency's Twitter feed?
Don't be boring. Don't assume that because of your name and reputation people who are chatting with their friends, sharing photos posted by their favorite celebrities, and watching sneak previews of hotly anticipated movies are then going to be interested in reading your press releases. The first goal is for the account to establish a reason for its existence, other than your existence.

Do you ever have trouble keeping up with Twitter postings while dealing with agency projects? Do you go out of your way to make time for it?
Even on my busiest days, it's not hard to work in a few posts. You know, "keeping up" implies that there is some kind of daily expectation on the part of @RGA's followers, which I don't think is the case. I don't think the world is really feeling the loss on those days when I can't push out more than a couple of things. Often, less is more anyway.

I do believe there is a rhythm to Twitter that you develop a feel for. On the days when I have more time to focus on it, I definitely feel more in sync with that rhythm. The things I write feel sharper and better timed, and they get more of a response. My least effective days are when I'm busy with other things and I tweet stuff just to remind people I still exist. Those things are usually out of step with that rhythm, and they die quiet, lonely deaths.

For connoisseurs of the worst of both FM radio DJs AND tech blogging, check out CNET's live stream of the Apple event now.

— R/GA (@RGA) September 10, 2013

How would you advise brands to be more engaging (or at least interesting) on Twitter?
It's a challenge, for sure. As awful as most "real-time marketing" is, I sympathize with the people charged with making, say, Snyder's pretzels interesting and relevant on Twitter. I guess my first piece of advice would be to pick your moments. I loved it a few weeks ago when the Weather Channel replied to someone who said watching TWC made her "feel like a granny" with "Oops, you misspelled 'baller.' " There's a big difference between that and, crap, it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day so I have to tweet something in a pirate voice.

I think brands could do a better job of finding a space that's connected to what they're about and mining that. Somehow I started following the Little Caesars Bowl. For the potential humor value, I guess. At first I thought, this is going to be good, because what are they going to talk about the other 51 weeks when that event isn't taking place? Well, duh, they talk about college football. It's college football season, and on game days they're really active, and the tweets are OK, and it makes sense for who they are.

And completely aside from brand voice or being entertaining, I don't think you can ever underestimate the value of good customer service, delivered promptly.

I like the Charles Schwab takeover ad on WSJ's homepage today because it makes me feel as if it's 2004 and I am a youthful 35 again.

— R/GA (@RGA) October 9, 2013

—Chapin Clark is evp and managing director of copywriting for R/GA. In addition to @RGA, he posts to Twitter as @chapinc.

Carmichael Lynch has created an interesting tweet-to-grow social media campaign for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science to support MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition. The initiative, called Talk to a Plant, invites everyone on Twitter to help test the myth that talking to a plant helps it grow stronger and healthier.

Here’s how it works: People can go to talktoaplant.com and send the plant a message. It doesn’t matter what you tweet. A custom tweet-to-speech technology, developed by the agency using an Arduino-based device, will then read the tweet aloud to one of the plants. The other plant, as a control, sits in silence.

The plants run on 12-hour light cycles and are watered by an in-house lab technician. People can watch a 24/7 live stream over the next couple of months to see if the myth might just be busted.

There’s been a lot of talk about social media influence and its role in the new consumer decision journey. Big brands are not only buying into the concept of leveraging people with influence, but are spending serious money. From Polaroid actually hiring Lady Gaga to a study showing that the majority of marketers are allocating budget to influencer marketing, it’s clear that companies are keen on figuring out how to leverage “influencers.”

But what many brand marketers don’t realize is that influence doesn’t matter unless the influencer is willing to endorse your brand and its products. Jay-Z won’t promote your phone charger unless you pay him (a lot) and bloggers are starting to demand the same.

Moreover, brands don’t trust social scoring tools anymore, as they only measure potential influence.

So what’s a brand to do?

Not All Influence is Equal

First, recognize that influencers don’t necessarily affect consumer decisions, even if they are willing to endorse your brand. A person may have the highest Klout score, the strongest blog community or 200,000 followers on Twitter, but why does that make him an authority on your product? The lifeguard at your local pool might have a whistle and big loudspeaker, but he still can’t convince ten-year old kids to walk rather than run along the edge of the pool. Influencers might create awareness of a problem and solution, but not all awareness leads to new actions.

Second, while influence plays a role, the influence of a “celebrity blogger” might not be the best type of influence. Friends, family members, co-workers and neighbors are simply more trustworthy. They are members of our tribe, and therefore they are the preferred sources of brand knowledge. We trust them to steer us right. They endorse a brand because they actually believe in the brand and its products, unlike the arch-influencer who is mainly in it for financial gain. Who do you think is going to stop more ten year old kids from running alongside a pool–the lifeguard or elder siblings and parents who recognize the danger and want their siblings or children to be safe because they love them?

Don’t discount influencers completely–just acknowledge that they are one or two small trail blazes along the path to a purchase. The rest of the blazes are word-of-mouth endorsements that social media experts now call advocate marketing.

Advocate Endorsements Are the Goal

So influence is not necessarily dead–it’s simply migrating from the big shots to people we actually trust and identify with. Some people call it influence marketing, others call it word of mouth, and I call it advocate marketing.

Endorsements can come from multiple types of advocates: customers, employees and bloggers. Brands first need to shape programs that focus on harnessing the affinity that all these groups have for their products.

Advocates are effective because they are friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances, not paid celebrity influencers. According to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising report, 92 percent of consumers say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising. Further, Nielsen has found that 77% of consumers are more likely to try a product when it is recommended by a friend or family member. No one wants to be paid to share a product they would share anyway–it feels insincere, and it destroys the credibility of the recommendation. Instead, a good advocate marketing program can reward advocates with deals, exclusive events and opportunities to test or preview new products.

Still, advocates can be difficult to motivate, scale and measure.
If brands could overcome these cons, would they be more likely to leverage advocates?

Technology Puts Advocates Front and Center

With the proliferation of social media and advent of cloud computing technology, there’s opportunity to scale massively. As Social Media Today reports, 2.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook and 400 million Tweets are sent out every day. There is plenty of raw volume to build advocate networks.

These networks scale advocate marketing from a 1-to-1 to 1-to-hundreds or thousands conversation. Whereas influencer marketing ran top-to-bottom, “blogger celebrity,” to others, the advocate conversation is peer-to-peer. It’s natural.

Further in the past, you could never really tell if advocate marketing was working for your brand. Today, integrations to social networks, tracking and cloud technology make it easy to measure success. Technology, however, only facilitates the conversation–brands still must start the conversation and keep it going.

Align Brand and Advocate Goals to Motivate Thousands of Advocates

There’s a myriad of great research on why people share, from the wonky Ernest Dichter, which Harvard Business Review reminded us of recently, to the practical steps that companies like Marketo provide and prove everyday. Regardless of your audience, there are easy ways to figure out what will motivate them to share, but they all seem to come down to a few key principles:

Make the advocate look smart. No one wants to be ridiculed or mocked for sharing. No one wants to receive unintelligent marketing jabber. Make advocate sharing about the advocates–your brand is secondary.

Give them something funny or entertaining to share. We don’t thank friends for forwarding bad content. We get annoyed with brands that pepper social media waves with standard marketing jabber. Make your advocates eager to share your content because of the inherent value of the content.

Give them something that helps their friends. Brands win by helping advocates and advocates win by helping their network. Only plugging your brand is not being helpful. What can your brand share that will make your advocates’ friends feel appreciative?

Give them a way to express themselves. Do not control advocate expression with an iron fist. You can suggest messaging and content, but ultimately the choice should be up to your advocates. Let them figure out the best way to reach an audience.

Listen to your advocates. If your advocates push back against your messaging, listen carefully because you have an opportunity to learn. Remember, these are people who already appreciate your brand. So if they’re not happy with your content, who in the world will be?

If advocate marketing works, platforms to scale it exist and the measurement technology to prove the business benefits are available, do potentially influential celebrities and bloggers still matter? Yes and no. Their influence is not dead, but perhaps it’s best saved for something other than endorsements. Let celebrities go back to being professional entertainers or athletes. Let bloggers go back to writing well. And let the people we trust help us figure out what brands we want.

This article was written byDave Hawley, Sr. Marketing Director of SocialChorus.

Social media is great. It’s great for marketing efforts but what about your business as a whole? That’s where social business comes in. Today, marketing teams have to work smarter and faster across a growing range of activities and an increasingly diverse array of participants. Improving cross-functional collaboration is the new marketing mandate, and social business is the enabler, allowing marketing teams to drive more leads, increase sales and cut operational costs.

Download this Jive whitepaper now, part of the Adrants Whitepaper Series, to learn how marketers are achieving success with social business technology.

UPDATE: AT&T's CEO has added his own apology. Scroll down to see it.

After getting bombarded with hate tweets for about an hour this afternoon, AT&T removed an image from Twitter that had been meant as a 9/11 tribute—a photo showing a hand holding a phone up in front of the Tribute in Light searchlights. "We apologize to anyone who felt our post was in poor taste. The image was solely meant to pay respect to those affected by the 9/11 tragedy," the company wrote in a follow-up tweet. (As of this writing, the photo remained up on AT&T's Facebook page. UPDATE: The photo was removed from Facebook as well, about another hour after the tweet came down.) An AT&T spokesman later reiterated that same statement when reached by Adweek.

The episode highlights yet again the difficult task of doing any corporate messaging around 9/11. For AT&T, Wednesday's reaction on Twitter was an especially stinging rebuke, considering the company posted quite a similar style of photo last year on 9/11—and got much better feedback.

The difference? Last year's image showed the Freedom Tower, and the headline read, "Standing tall." It was simply a more forward-looking, patriotic execution. The Tribute in Light is a more sacred image, and this year's headline, "Never forget," is incompatible with any hint of a sales message, even one as simple as the image of a phone.

In the end, 9/11 may not be totally off limits to brands—American Express and many others posted well-received tweets today. But you'd better be careful, especially if you want to throw a product in there, too.

We apologize to anyone who felt our post was in poor taste. The image was solely meant to pay respect to those affected by the 9/11 tragedy.

— AT&T (@ATT) September 11, 2013

UPDATE: AT&T's chairman and CEO, Randall Stephenson, has now posted his own apology on the company's blog. It reads:

We're big believers that social media is a great way to engage with our customers because the conversation is constant, personal and dynamic.
     Yesterday, we did a post on social media intended to honor those impacted by the events of 9/11. Unfortunately, the image used in the post fell woefully short of honoring the lives lost on that tragic day.
     I want to personally express to our customers, employees, and all those impacted by the events of 9/11 my heartfelt apologies. I consider that date a solemn occasion each year, a time when I reach out to those I was with on that awful day, share a moment of reflection for the lives lost and express my love of country. It is a day that should never be forgotten and never, ever commercialized. I commit AT&T to this standard as we move forward.
     —Randall Stephenson, AT&T Chairman and CEO

What do we mean and understand by the term “social good”? This is the first question brands must ask themselves before incorporating social good into their business model. It is not a homogenous and neatly defined entity. Rather, social good is an umbrella term that incorporates many business practices, effects and outcomes.

Because social good is a fluid and evolving concept, it is up to each startup to set their own definition of “social” and “good.” If you don’t have parameters for social good, you can’t thoughtfully incorporate it into your business model.

Google came up with a well known answer: “Don’t be evil.” No one can deny that there are genuinely non-evil (or good) aspects of Google: most services are free, the company strives to make page ranking democratic and Google is completely transparent about what content is sponsored or not. When Google does something deemed shady, the public holds them to accountable to the motto.

In companies with a clear sense of social good, social good-driven actions are unmistakable. For example, Tom’s “one for one” founding premise means that the company donates one pair of shoes for every pair of shoes customers buy. Deloitte is known for training its employees on volunteerism and nonprofit management–not just consulting skills for Fortune 500 companies. Dell ensures that none of the minerals it sources from the Democratic Republic of Congo are being used to fuel conflict in the war-ridden country.

The question of what is social good, is complicated. It has been over 2000 years since the first philosophers debated the notion, and we are still no closer to finding an agreed upon definition that fits all understanding and practices of it. So don’t put too much pressure on yourself to find the right, one and only answer. As a startup founder, you just have to land on a definition that speaks to you and your company’s culture and value proposition. If you care about access to healthcare, global warming and gender equality, come up with a definition of social good that encompasses all three, and build them into your daily operations.

Second, ask yourself why you are incorporating social good into your business model. What drives you to have a triple bottom line business model, rather than a solely revenue driven model? What are the benefits?

From a business sense standpoint, contemporary startups need social good intertwined within their business model because consumers expect it–today, it is a sign of integrity and good practice in organizations people trust. When this assumption is shown to be incorrect, consumers can quickly become apathetic to a brand and business.

The backlash against corporate involvement in the NSA’s PRISM program is a perfect example of what happens when organizations violate expectations of socially conscious behavior. The BP oil spill in the gulf of Mexico threw into question the hydrocarbon giant’s commitment to environmental safety and protection. Nestle still suffers considerable backlash, including ongoing consumer boycotts, due to the baby formula scandal first reported in 1974 . In each case, there was a disconnect between consumers assumptions of what trusted organization’s social and good practices should be and what in reality was happening.

On the other hand, making social good the sole focus of a startup can be risky. Great socially conscious enterprises fail when they focus too narrowly on their social goal and lose site of the business model. Sustainable revenue and social good need not be mutually exclusive.

However you incorporate good into your startup, make sure the agenda is realistic and relevant to your enterprise. Don’t think of social good as compensation for your business practices that might generate criticism. Instead, focus on making those practices conform to your definition of social good, and let your customers know that you have made that conscious decision. In the short term it should help you build up a loyal and trusting customer base and in the long run it will help you stake your claim in the ever increasingly conscious-consumer world.

This guest post was written by Lucy Bartlett, Marketing Manager at VigLink, a technology company helping publishers earn from the content they create and the commerce they drive.

Verdade seja dita: hoje, todo mundo virou um pouco aquele estereótipo do turista japonês. Fotografamos tudo o tempo todo. E queremos compartilhar na mesma intensidade. Afinal, como bem nos disse a T-Mobile, Life’s for sharing. E é justamente para facilitar este compartilhamento que chegou Q. Segundo eles trata-se da 1ª camera social.

Funciona assim: a câmera já vem com um chip 3G. Então cada foto que você tira pode ser compartilhada imediatamente com a rede social da sua preferência com apenas um click. Ou, se você preferir, pode salvar automaticamente num arquivo online. De lá você controla tudo: de filtros a regulagens.

E como as fotos são armazenadas online você não precisa se preocupar com banalidades como espaço no cartão de memoria.

Feita na Escandinávia, ela é uma camera “modern vintage”. Já sabe, né? Toda modernosa, mas com aquele look meio retrô. Só quatro botões e segundo os fabricantes pronta para resolver todos os seus problemas: de péssimas condições de luz a fotos embaixo da água.

Achei bacana, bonita, mas, fora a grande sacada de ter um botão para fotografar com flash e outros sem, não precisando trocar nenhuma regulagem, achei ela meio supérflua.

Mas, como já dizia Oscar Wilde: “A mim dai-me o supérfluo, que o necessário todo mundo pode tê-lo”

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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"Boots on the ground" or not, let's not forget about sandals, pumps and loafers. #Footwear

— Kenneth Cole (@KennethCole) September 5, 2013

Kenneth Cole's February 2011 tweet about Egypt—"Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online"—became part of every case study on terrible corporate tweeting. But it seems Cole didn't learn much from the episode, as he just tweeted a reference to the Syria crisis—as a way to pitch his footwear. (The @KennethCole feed is written by the man himself and "not representative of the corporate @kennethcoleprd feed.") Repeating the mistake is so odd, it must be … intentional?