The National Hockey League has launched the next phase of its long-term strategy of taking hockey beyond the NHL.com hub to social-media and complementary sites. The League has begun using new Facebook tools that it hopes will make NHL fans advocates and promulgators of league content and opinions. As of this week, visitors to the NHL.com site can sign into NHL.com with their Facebook login and access a number of plug-ins that carry NHL content to the people friended by the social site's members who express their opinion, share or comment on NHL. The new program is part of the league's "Hockey Marketplace" syndication strategy, wherein over the past year the League has put video widgets ("windows into NHL") on 3rd-party sites like Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, SonyPlaystation, MySpace, NBCOlympics.com, The Hockey News, Ticketmaster, SB Nation, Bleacher Report, Yardbarker.com, Sportsnet, MSN.ca, Metacafe and Synacor. Alex Simon, senior director, digital business development at the NHL, says tools placed on team pages and player profiles and on the home-page allow people to "Voice their affinities, and how they feel about the NHL. The philosophy behind it from is that when a brand incorporates functionality like this, it both drives engagement on their sites and also builds their Facebook following." He explains that Facebook members who click on, say, the "like" or "share" button on NHL, or on NHL's Facebook site, or anywhere else the League has integrated the tools disseminate that content and their opinion about it across their network of Facebook friends. "About two months ago we started incorporating "share" so there would be a way to post links to the articles on Facebook. And as Facebook rolls out other tools that allow members to do things like comment, we will build those into NHL engagement areas, so that even people who don't visit NHL.com will get that content. Simon, who says brands that integrate these tools (part of the Facebook Connect kit of tools that puts Facebook on non-Facebook sites and lets Facebook members have social-media function without being on their Facebook page), are likely to see their Web traffic double. He says it is a logical step forward for the NHL. "Three years ago the idea was we would build a 'mothership' here on our own Website, load it with the best content we could find and wait for avid fans to come. But that gets you so only far," he says. "We know a lot of our fans consume content on platforms other than NHL.com, so the next step was to speak to them on sites they were using rather than waiting for them to come to us by building up NHL fan pages on sites like Facebook and Twitter. But if phase one and two is really us speaking to fans -- one to many -- phase three is a 'many to many' type model: not just us communicating to them, but our fans advocating for us to their friends."
Havas' MPG Mexico unit was named Media Agency of the Year during the closing of the 2010 Festival of Media Awards in Valencia, Spain. MPG earlier this year was named Media magazine's Agency of the Year. Havas also was awarded a special "Service Award" for in recognition of the, "consistent quality of the work submitted for the Festival of Media Awards and its agencies' commitment to providing innovation and service across a wide range of countries and marketing challenges," the organizers said. The festival, which has gained steam among the global media services community in recent years, was challenged by, but persevered amid air travel problems caused by the volcanic plume in Western Europe. Many of the delegates were forced to take trains, extended bus or car rides, but the festival's organizers said attendance was "much higher than anyone would have anticipated under the circumstances," and that social media platforms - especially YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flip Video and WebEx - were utilized to allow some executives to participate "virtually" and remotely despite their inability to attend. Other top awards went to WPP's MediaCom for "network of the year," and Publicis' Jack Klues, managing partner of VivaKi, who was named "Media Professional of the Year."
I think it's very possible that we have this whole social media thing wrong. We, as an industry, spend oodles of time focusing on social media and trying to unearth the special ways to "crack the code" of motivating consumers. I attend conferences with "social media" in the headlines and I even help program content at these events, trying to identify how marketers can use social media properly, but the fact is that social media is just media, plain and simple. The real issue lies not within the media, but within the creative -- so maybe we should be referring to the wave of interest as "social creative" rather than "social media." Social media, no matter how you slice and dice it, is just media. Media is nothing more than a distribution platform for messaging, and social media is not really that new when you break it down. Facebook and MySpace may be very large sites, but they are still just media vehicles. What is of real value is how you harness the power of the audience itself and create or utilize buzz. That is something done by the power of creative, not by the location of the placement on the page. The creative story that needs to unfold is the interesting component of social, which I feel gets overlooked. I recently engaged in an exercise for a client where we hypothesized how to change the perception of the brand by using social media placements. It really came down to developing a strong creative concept that spoke to the needs of the brand and then utilizing social media as a distribution vehicle for that message. The distribution was twofold; balancing paid media with earned media. We uncovered that the earned media component, which is typically a barometer for the performance of the effort, is truly driven by the accessibility and intrigue of the creative. The media placements are secondary in that kind of an effort, but as an industry I feel as though we focus our attention on the distribution because the creative is subjective and difficult to discuss one way or the other. When developing a social media strategy you need to start with the creative concept. The creative concept must take into account the target audience (as all effective campaigns must do) and then look at social media as a tool for one of two things. You are either going to provide a hub for consumer interaction, or you'll create a series of spokes for transferring the message outward through the network. This "hub and spoke" model is how you generate reach in social media. You create strong consumer touch-points on a one-to-one basis and then arm those consumers, who have hopefully had a positive experience with your brand, with the ammunition to distribute virally on your behalf. The hubs for this model are either the established presence (what I call the WTF: Website, Twitter, Facebook strategy) or paid media. The spokes are what are driven by creative and take into account interaction and pass-along tools with messaging and content that stimulates that sort of action. The creative concept here fits into a bigger picture and provides the reason for social activity in general. Without the creative concept and the stimulus for the user, you just end up with a paid media buy and a standard ad unit, neither of which exploits the inherent strength of social media. The social media user is a person who responds to creative messaging more than he responds to placements and location. The creative message is what drives the discussion, and the distribution model is what fosters its growth. I hope that in the coming weeks this message will resonate and I will see more discourse around the marriage of media and creative in social media. Maybe even someone will take up the term "social creative" and run with it. Do you agree with my assessment? Let me know on the Spin Board!
I never thought I'd say such a thing, but Mark Zuckerberg just rocked my world. And, whether you know it or not, he just rocked your world, too. I just finished watching the keynote at Facebook's F8 Developer Conference -- from the comfort of my dining room table -- and it became pretty clear that the Web as we once knew it is about to change dramatically, from a place where much of the experience is disjointed and almost completely determined by those who publish content, to being much more about how the content connects people -- and how people connect to content. (You can watch the archived Webcast here.) Let me explain. The main thrust of the keynote -- which was delivered by Zuckerberg and Friendfeed founder (and FB director of products) Bret Taylor -- is that Facebook is going to transform the Web into a social being, where the footprints of you, and your friends, the brands you like, and the band you love will all be part of the experience, all of the time. The Web has been showing a few signs of socialization for some time, but we're not talking about simple old Facebook Connect here. We are talking about something that socializes the Web in a much deeper way. Hyperbole? I don't think so. There are three reasons why: 1) Becoming part of Facebook's Open Graph requires next to nothing on the part of the user. Assuming you want social to be the default switch, so to speak, when you're online, you will automatically see, for instance, who else among your friends has "Liked" a certain Web page when you visit that page. Go to Pandora (which was a frequent example used during the presentation) and it won't just recommend music for you that you've shown an interest in elsewhere on the Web, it will also tell you what friends of yours who are also Pandora members are listening to, without you lifting a finger. 2) From a technological perspective, enabling the site for Facebook's new "Like" button is brain-dead easy, even for an English and Latin major like myself. I could go to my own Web site right now and merely paste in a line of code to integrate "Like" buttons (think of it as the new "Become a Fan") into my template, and that feature would be good to go. Anyone who stops by my site who likes my content would be sharing it to their Facebook stream automatically, without doing a thing. It would also enter that person's profile, automatically, with a link back to my site. Suffice to say, this will make copying and pasting hyperlinks look like drawing on cave walls. (Based on ease of use alone, Zuckerberg predicted that Facebook will serve one billion "likes" today.) 3) Facebook is closing in on 500 million users, per comScore. Even taking into account what may be a relatively large percentage of users who will not want to be quite so, well, open, about their online behavior, Facebook has critical mass that no other social network can match. That, and the defaults, will ensure Facebook's vision for an openly social Web will happen. (It also is launching these features with major partners including Microsoft, CNN and ESPN. That doesn't hurt either.) There's so much here that it's a little hard to synthesize within the time that a tight deadline allows. All I can say is that something major just happened in our business, so be forewarned. The Social Media Insider says so. (Editor's Note: We have posted the agenda for OMMA Social NYC, scheduled for June 17. Take a look.)
The National Hockey League has launched the next phase of its long-term strategy of taking hockey beyond the NHL.com hub to social-media and complementary sites. The League has begun using new Facebook tools that it hopes will make NHL fans advocates and promulgators of league content and opinions. As of this week, visitors to the NHL.com site can sign into NHL.com with their Facebook login and access a number of plug-ins that carry NHL content to the people friended by the social site's members who express their opinion, share or comment on NHL. The new program is part of the league's "Hockey Marketplace" syndication strategy, wherein over the past year the League has put video widgets ("windows into NHL") on 3rd-party sites like Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, SonyPlaystation, MySpace, NBCOlympics.com, The Hockey News, Ticketmaster, SB Nation, Bleacher Report, Yardbarker.com, Sportsnet, MSN.ca, Metacafe and Synacor. Alex Simon, senior director, digital business development at the NHL, says tools placed on team pages and player profiles and on the home-page allow people to "Voice their affinities, and how they feel about the NHL. The philosophy behind it from is that when a brand incorporates functionality like this, it both drives engagement on their sites and also builds their Facebook following." He explains that Facebook members who click on, say, the "like" or "share" button on NHL, or on NHL's Facebook site, or anywhere else the League has integrated the tools disseminate that content and their opinion about it across their network of Facebook friends. "About two months ago we started incorporating "share" so there would be a way to post links to the articles on Facebook. And as Facebook rolls out other tools that allow members to do things like comment, we will build those into NHL engagement areas, so that even people who don't visit NHL.com will get that content. Simon, who says brands that integrate these tools (part of the Facebook Connect kit of tools that puts Facebook on non-Facebook sites and lets Facebook members have social-media function without being on their Facebook page), are likely to see their Web traffic double. He says it is a logical step forward for the NHL. "Three years ago the idea was we would build a 'mothership' here on our own Website, load it with the best content we could find and wait for avid fans to come. But that gets you so only far," he says. "We know a lot of our fans consume content on platforms other than NHL.com, so the next step was to speak to them on sites they were using rather than waiting for them to come to us by building up NHL fan pages on sites like Facebook and Twitter. But if phase one and two is really us speaking to fans -- one to many -- phase three is a 'many to many' type model: not just us communicating to them, but our fans advocating for us to their friends."
Havas' MPG Mexico unit was named Media Agency of the Year during the closing of the 2010 Festival of Media Awards in Valencia, Spain. MPG earlier this year was named Media magazine's Agency of the Year. Havas also was awarded a special "Service Award" for in recognition of the, "consistent quality of the work submitted for the Festival of Media Awards and its agencies' commitment to providing innovation and service across a wide range of countries and marketing challenges," the organizers said. The festival, which has gained steam among the global media services community in recent years, was challenged by, but persevered amid air travel problems caused by the volcanic plume in Western Europe. Many of the delegates were forced to take trains, extended bus or car rides, but the festival's organizers said attendance was "much higher than anyone would have anticipated under the circumstances," and that social media platforms - especially YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flip Video and WebEx - were utilized to allow some executives to participate "virtually" and remotely despite their inability to attend. Other top awards went to WPP's MediaCom for "network of the year," and Publicis' Jack Klues, managing partner of VivaKi, who was named "Media Professional of the Year."