Recently a fan of a major beverage marketer was inspired to write the following on the brand’s Facebook wall: “Not only do we love this product. We live it.” She included a photo of her kitchen in Germany, where a banquette is wrapped in the brand’s logo.

“We love this product. We live it.” Sounds like the germ of an ad tagline. Branded furniture? Why not create more? Or, perhaps, roll out a “Pimp Your Apartment” contest for other enthusiastic brand fans. At the very least, the company could respond to the woman with a comment, product coupons, or a T-shirt.

Several thought starters from one 10-word post. This was just one of thousands of comments on brand sites that day. Who, at companies with a social media presence, was paying attention? Who, if anyone, helped connect the dots from social media chatter to various departments that might have turned her simple post into ideas and interaction?

For all the talk about listening to what people are saying about brands online, there’s little said about turning insights into action. Sure, there are rock-solid virtual customer service teams. Dell’s @Dell Cares is one. But other departments can benefit from the information offered up via social media outlets. Clorox, for instance, invites customers to submit ideas for new and improved products.

Other constituents should be included in the social media loop. What’s missing at many companies is a social media conductor who can make sure various departments within a company—from investor relations to product development—know what’s being heard and shared online so they can respond in an organized way. This should be an executive who oversees a cross-functional team with members from senior management, PR, marketing, customer service, product management and innovation so that ideas and content from social media outlets can be identified and mined company-wide.

Say Twitter is burning up with gripes about a new product offering or a bad customer service experience. As the PR team springs into action, a social media conductor will make sure information is delivered to research and management. How about the sales team? Do they know what’s being said and how it is impacting conversations with prospects? And, by the way, are customers making suggestions for product improvements that make sense?

A social media conductor would understand and analyze social media findings, inform appropriate constituents in the organization and oversee programs to make sure the company’s reaction and response are in synch.

The way most companies are set up–multiple product units, marketing, PR, and R&D functions — practically guarantees inconsistent consumer experiences in the social space. But with a centralized conductor, one person would manage the company’s brand and how each product unit interacts with customers in social media. This person would also share insights across the entire company. The result: better consumer experiences, which in turn lead to more sales, better market share, and increased profits.

Who to appoint to this critical role? It should be a leader with a marketing background and a strong understanding of the connection points in a company. The individual should understand the rapidly evolving social media world and how people are engaging in social conversation. He or she should be fluent, too, in measuring and analyzing sentiment or have an outside company that can help with that.

From day one a social media captain should be brought into big-picture vision-setting brand discussions. This executive would set the framework for what the company’s social presence will look like, from marketing to sales to retail to customer service. He or she would then define who that impacts internal and external communication, determine what measurement criteria is being considered as they employ social listening, and develop a reporting technique for the insights gathered.

When it comes to social media, listening is just the beginning. A social media conductor can make sure a company’s social media response is organized and that its efforts are in harmony.

This article was originally published on Forbes’ CMO Network blog found here.

Marita Scarfi is CEO at Organic

Marita Scarfi rose through the ranks at Omnicom Group digital agency Organic to become CEO in 2010. Organic is one of the few digital agencies to boast of a woman at the top, particularly now that Laura Lang has moved on from Digitas to Time Inc. According to Scarfi, the reason so few women are on the CEO track is a complicated one that can’t be resolved with a few extra recruiting tables at college job fairs.

Are you surprised that there are so few women in ad tech boardrooms?

I’m not surprised, it’s unfortunate, but not surprising. This reflects the numbers of women at the junior levels in these companies and then the number rising through the ranks.

So what are some elements that are behind the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles, besides the usual suspect, sexism?

I kind of break down the world in terms of the creative aspect and then the technology aspect. I had this conversation one time with Phil Rosedale the co-founder of Second Life. We talked a lot about user-generated content, and he said that women are like the architects and men are like the builders. In technology, there’s a fair amount of building that goes on. There’s not that many architects that are needed; more builders are needed basically. I kind of bring it back to cultural socialization. Women tend to be more about nurturing and providing support to allow something to happen. Men tend to be a bit more about who they are and what they are trying to do in the world; they tend, generally, to be a bit more individualistic. It’s interesting because I participate in a group for women CEOs in Silicon Valley, and one of the things that has been talked about is something that often comes up for women CEOs in their first year, and this is this whole self-validation process. In many cases, we as women are socialized to look to others for validation that we’ve done something right. If you are a CEO, you don’t get any validation from anyone else. The board will tell you what they expect, but they are only going to rarely call you and tell you you’re doing a good job. So there is a high rate of women CEOs leaving their jobs in the first few years. I think this is because it is a very significant shift from who we are personally (as women) and how women have been socialized to look at themselves and their careers.

The agencies have very few women leading them. Why do you think that is?

I think this not only brings up the socialization issue but also the balance between time and family, work and family. That is a really hard balance for someone to maintain in the role of CEO. Your whole life is basically consumed by your job, and it’s hard to balance personal relationships and taking care of kids, and those responsibilities don’t go away. Unless you are single or married without kids, the balance can get too hectic after a while. If you are a mom, you want to be able to have some interaction with your kids. When I look back at PriceWaterhouseCooper, there were lots of women who never moved up to partner or dropped out because of that life balance issue.

But there aren’t a lot female entrepreneurs starting companies in Silicon Valley either. Why?

I think women discount themselves more often than men. They self-select themselves, so to speak, out of the running. Men tend to create something and then present their ideas and they will come off sounding like experts, even without the credentials. Women tend to feel that they not only need credentials, testing, support, and then they will allow themselves to try, even after they’ve created something that is viable. They discount themselves a lot more than they need too. A lot of that is a lack of mentors within the community. Again, this is socialization. Women also tend to view a failure in a business as a failure, men tend to see it as experience. Women leaders have a bit of the other mentality. What they are is risk takers. They tend to look at it as “everything that I’ve been through is a valuable experience.” Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman — they have more of a risk-taking mentality, an intelligent risk-taking mentality.

Does this lack of diversity cost the industry?

In my business, I see a lot of women going into the services side of the business because they can balance their lives better. You can walk into a room and see that 50 percent of the people there are women, and then at the agency, there are a lot of men. So when it comes to the business and actually getting business done, you need to develop relationships, and you can’t continue and grow relationships without a balance in your organization. We’ve all heard stories about startups that were all male and then a woman joined and it was very uncomfortable for her. You can lose really great talent if your company doesn’t have an environment where 50 percent of the population might not want to work there.

This interview with Organic CEO Marita Scarfi was originally posted on Digiday here.

This article is by Marita Scarfi, CEO of Organic, a digital ad agency unit of Omnicom Group with clients that have included Kimberly-Clark, Chrysler, American Express, Sony PlayStation, Sprint, and 20^th Century Fox.

With so much emphasis on attracting friends and followers online, little is worse for a marketer than losing millions of fans.

In 2006 Organic, the agency I now lead, launched a campaign for 20^th Century Fox’s X-Men: The Last Stand movie on MySpace. It was huge: It was the first branded MySpace page, and users could activate an exclusive feature by friending the page. In just a few weeks two million MySpace users were our friends. I’m confident the effort helped make the movie’s $107 million opening the largest Memorial Day weekend opening ever at the time.

But not long after the movie left theaters, the number of followers on the X-Men MySpace page dwindled to 1.7 million fans, meaning 1.3 million fans vanished. I don’t blame them for bolting! The page went from an alluring online hub about characters they loved to a page where they could do little more than buy DVDs. Sure, that’s fine for a lone film, but X-Men was a burgeoning franchise. Losing 1.3 million fans was devastating when you think about how valuable their continued support would have been going into the promotion of 2009’s X-Men Origins:Wolverine or this year’s X-Men: First Class. These fans could have been used as influencers for the follow-up flicks. The buzz factor from this community could have been used to measure in advance the potential success of each sequel. Marketing budgets could have been accessed based on the buzz. The cost of this effort? The salary of a community manager.

Most marketers and agencies, including Organic, have learned a lot about social marketing since then. But some have not. I’m surprised when I hear marketers ask: “How much Facebook do we need to buy?” It’s as if they think marketing online is the same as putting a message on a roadside billboard—a boring, static ad you hope people will see as they flit from here to there. I see too many boring Facebook brand pages that were created and now look abandoned.

Social marketing takes a lot of work if a company wants to appeal to and engage distracted consumers. It isn’t an ad buy. It’s a commitment play.

Some rules of the game:

Solicit feedback and opinions.

Consumers want to share their thoughts and opinions online—I’m shocked by how much they say—and this impulse is good for marketers.

A few months back Organic launched “Ban the Bland” for Kimberly-Clark’s U by Kotex asking customers to go online to design a new line of sanitary products and vote on the most innovative ones. In just two weeks, there were more than 270,000 visits to the website and 185,000-plus sample requests from social media awareness-boosting efforts alone. On Twitter, there were more than 2,300 Tweets about U by Kotex. Since the launch there have been upwards of 2.7 million visits to the U by Kotex brand website and nearly 1 million sample requests.

Consumers often have good ideas. They just need outlets for them. Consider My Starbucks Idea blog.  There, consumers can suggest new products, customer experience improvements, or new ways for Starbucks to get involved in the community. It’s engaging and ever-changing: Readers can peruse the most recent suggestions (vegan brownies, please); check out cool ideas (hey, add a pin feature to the Starbucks mobile app); interact with other coffee lovers; and communicate with Starbucks employees who are responsible for listening and offering feedback.

Starbucks is using social media to empower consumers, keep them engaged and give them a voice. That’s smart online marketing.

Encourage and incorporate user-generated content.

Pringles’ Facebook page has more than 15 million fans.  Why all the hoopla over potato chips? Because Pringles invites fans to use the page as they do their own profile pages. The brand encourages them to upload photos—many feature a Pringles can—share videos, and express opinions by answering poll questions. The page draws in digital natives and makes them want to engage.

Starburst is another savvy online marketer.  Its “Contradictions” campaign on Facebook asks fans expound on their “juicy contradiction” slogan by submitting personal contradictions. (Example: “I clean other people’s rooms, but my room is a mess.”) The 600-plus fans who have submitted their ideas get their name on a donation to VH1’s Save the Music Foundation—and their words and faces become part of an engaging interactive feature.

Use social media as an extension of offline ad efforts.

Domino’s took a risky but refreshing approach when it came to marketing its product overhaul in late 2009. The pizza maker launched an offline and online campaign blitz centered on its effort to improve its pizzas. The $75 million campaign included national TV and radio commercials. The company also set-up pizzaturnaround.com to chronicle the responses and development of the campaign with videos and gave consumers behind-the-scenes access to the new recipes on Facebook. This company is cooking: Its stock price jumped more than 60% in the months after the campaign launched.

Employ search engine marketing.

Google is the starting point to so many online interactions, and advertising based on questions typed into the search engine will only become more important. Some marketers, including Converse, are buying ad space on Google against seasonal or common searches—“how to kiss a girl” is one Converse has used.

Eventually, marketers will be able to search based on the opinion of online social connections. When that happens, companies that don’t have a grasp on social media will be forced to start over again with each campaign.

I can cite 1.3 million reasons why that is a total loss.

This article was originally published on Forbes’ CMO Network found here.

A few Organics recently attended the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity late last month, you may have seen us!

Here’s a roundup of videos and links from their activities in and previewing Cannes in case you didn’t.

Bloomberg Radio: “Organic’s Scarfi Discusses Cannes Festival”

“Organic CEO Marita Scarfi talks about the lack of women in creative”

“Organic team interviewed by Juliet Blackburn for AdForum Red Carpet”

“Organic the meaningful matchmaker between brands and consumers”

“It was the best of Cannes, it was the worst of Cannes”

“Vegas Hotel Experience Takes Design Grand Prix”

“Cossette wins two Design Gold Lions, Sid Lee wins one”

“The Creative Effectiveness Lions Set To Debut; Film Craft Lions Enter Their Second Year”

I had a new Facebook experience this week that I hadn’t experienced before, or ever even considered.  My Facebook friend Joe G. was not one of my best friends.  We had mutual friends from college and had only socialized together in person a few times.  But we knew enough of the same people that a few years ago Facebook recommended that he was someone I might know, and we “friended” each other.  By then, he had moved from Detroit to Seattle to work at Microsoft, so Facebook was the way a lot of his friends now kept in touch with him.

We both made regular posts on our home pages, or on our friend’s home pages, and we would comment to each other from time to time; mostly just typical Facebook banter.  It felt like we were keeping in touch, and maintaining a distant friendship, even though I don’t think that I actually spoke to him in years.  Two nights ago I heard from one of our mutual friends, through a Facebook message no less, that Joe had suddenly, and shockingly, passed away.

This is my first experience with the death of a “Facebook friend”, and the first time I have been notified of the death of someone I knew through social media.  Strangely or not, one of the first things I did after I read the message that he had died was to revisit my connection to him, and I went to his Facebook page.

Several people had already written kind words of tribute; about how he was smart, funny, and creative.  Most people expressed their astonishment and grief.   Someone had already posted a link to his obituary, and for the funeral arrangements.  As I kept scrolling down, I flinched as I got to his last post that he made a couple weeks ago.  It was jarring to see someone I knew that had just died writing in the first person.  As I kept scrolling down it was even more jarring to see my own comments I had made on his wall a few months ago.  (A quote from “The Princess Bride” that I barely remember even writing.)  But I kept clicking the “older posts” button and scrolling down, reading more and more of his comments and posts, almost reliving a record of our friendship from the past couple of years: I reread his remarks about local and national politics, re-watched videos he had posted from “The Daily Show” and other TV shows, and looked again at pictures of his condominium.  It was sad, kind of heartbreaking, and yet at the same time incredibly cathartic.

I checked today, and I read that Facebook will set a profile to “deceased” with proof of death and family consent.  I don’t know what will happen to his Facebook page, but I hope it is retained as a memorial to Joe.

Companies are spending billions of dollars trying to learn and measure how social media is changing the way we live our lives.  This is my first experience that social media will also change the way we deal with death.  Is this the way that we will now collectively come together to grieve and share memories of friends and loved ones?  It was definitely a different experience for me, and definitely got me thinking about Facebook in a whole new way.

Steve Iaquaniello is a Senior Statistician at Organic

The 2011 season of HBO’s True Blood is coming this summer and the vampire lovers in the office are buzzing about the possibilities of the opening episode. In last year’s season opening episode, the mobile phone carrying Vampire Queen ignores the advice of one her underlings to “discuss other options”. She promptly picks him up by the throat, issues her command and clearly explains the fatal consequences of disobedience. She departs in that swooshy vampire way and the camera zooms in on the underling. It is obvious – to him and viewers – that her hasty decision could lead to her downfall.

A few months ago, in the heat of business battle, I sent an email and then desperately searched for the ‘recall’ function on my iPhone (there isn’t one.) By contrast, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, aides found his desk drawer stuffed with letters expressing anger and frustration that he wrote – and never sent – to the incompetent General McClelland. The idea that we must reclaim think time and reflection as a stand against a culture that demands immediacy is a trend almost as big as the vampire phenomenon. In Rapt, Winifred Gallagher teaches us that by taking charge of our attention, we improve our experiences, increase our concentration, and lift our spirits. In Consider, Daniel Forrester shows us how the flood of data and the ease of communications afforded by technology have led to snap decision making and that our best insights, ideas and outcomes result when we take sufficient time to think and reflect.

Does this mean we should drop our keyboards and pick up quill and ink again? No. (Where would we find that stuff anyway?) These writers are telling us the same things our grandparents would tell us: Slow down. Take a few yoga breaths. Look around you. Remember the past. Remind yourself of the things that will be important next year not just next week. Then, decide and act.

When it comes to patience and a measured response, the Lincoln standard is beyond most of us. However, since I don’t have a desk drawer to store my letters and do want to avoid the true death, I think I will start using my Draft folder more often.

James Heughens, SVP, General Manager at Organic

I have an original work by my favorite designer hanging in my office. I actually had the pleasure of watching him create it. He is four-years old and lives in my house and as he was drawing it, I asked, “What is it?” He replied, “Just designs, dad, just designs.” Exactly. Just designs. What good are “just designs” anyway?

A great photograph of an automobile is not going to make me plunk down $30k anymore than a cuter-than-the-next image of a baby will persuade me to buy one type of diaper over another. So why do we bother? As marketers, why do we spend all this time, money and effort on getting a design just so? For me, the answer is simple: it something I call the gentle nudge.

I do not think a great design is the thing that drives a consumer to click the “Add to Cart” button but maybe that is not the purpose. Perhaps design, simple or grand, needs to be just enough to get the consumer to take the next step, to roam where they would not usually roam. It needs to be just enough to nudge past an initial thought and touch an emotion that is buried or dormant – just enough to tap into a feeling that, perhaps, they did not know existed.

On a recent flight, I was skimming the latest Atlantic Monthly, and came across an article titled “The Fortunate Ones”. The synopsis told me it was about research done into the anxieties, sense of isolation and worries of people with fortunes over $25 million. “Poor babies”, I thought sarcastically. I was about to move on when I glanced at the image on the opposite page. On a golden background, there was a perfectly poured glass of champagne with (pause for drama) two floating, bubbling Alka Seltzer.

Immediately, I hate to admit this, I felt a little empathy for these millionaires. Maybe it was empathy. Maybe it was morbid curiosity. Whatever the case, I started reading the article. Half way through I stopped and thought, “Why am I reading this?” It was that darn champagne glass. Well played, Mr. Art Director, well played. I had been officially persuaded.

“Dad, do you want to take this design to your work?”

“Yes, son. I will hang it up first thing tomorrow.”

“Dad, can I have a cookie?”

“Yes, son, you can have two.”

Just designs. Indeed.

IMAGE CREDIT: LEONELLO CALVETTI/BERNSTEIN & ANDRIULLI

James Heughens, SVP, General Manager at Organic
]]> http://threeminds.organic.com/2011/03/design-and-emotion.html/feed 0 http://threeminds.organic.com/2011/03/omma-global-madison-ave-stepping-up-to-social.html http://threeminds.organic.com/2011/03/omma-global-madison-ave-stepping-up-to-social.html#comments Fri, 11 Mar 2011 23:14:26 +0000 Stephanie Park digital marketing strategy,MediaPost,OMMA Global,social media, http://threeminds.organic.com/?p=18003