Social Media Blog

First of all let me say thank you to @spolem for the invitation to this blog, and add a few words about who I am! I work as Ethicist and Regional Development Coordinator at 1000heads, a UK-based, global word of mouth agency. I am responsible for overseeing our business ethics, for establishing cooperation with agencies and other social media specialists outside of theUK, and for coordinating our regional projects.

We’re delighted to be participating in ‘Friends of Spolem’ because the ways in which word of mouth works differently across the globe is going to become an increasingly visible issue as rapidly growing local markets break the hegemony of westernised social platforms. Social media has given us an unprecedented opportunity to connect with likeminded people across the world, but it’s also emerging as an important tool for regional differentiation and collaboration. Here in the UK we’ve seen local communities join together through crowdsourcing, citizen journalism and peer-led action and debate; last weekend’s Talk About Local conference is just one example.

This is why it is so important that word of mouth marketing embraces both the local and the global, finding ways to generate advocacy for brands that are regionally specific but also consistent and inclusive across a number of countries. One example of how we’ve approached this challenge is the work we did for Castrol last year, when they asked for our help to amplify discussions around their newly launched Castrol Performance Index, a football ranking system which was created to support Euro 2008 in the UK, Poland, Russia, Spain and Germany.

Our approach always starts with listening to the conversation already out there – what is getting people excited? – so we conducted some in-depth analysis of discussions around Euro 2008 across all five regions. We then helped Canon to design a strategic social site map for the project, by setting up various platforms where fans could engage with the Index – a multilingual blog, Twitter accounts (Poland here), and photo and video sharing sites, each coming into play at different stages of the project.

Our social media presences played a key role in establishing sustained relationships with football bloggers in all mentioned countries, such as Football Freak in Poland. Our multilingual team spent months preparing for the actual tournament by liaising with both global as well as local bloggers on how they could benefit from CPI stats. We provided our readers and blogger friends with on-going guidance, as well as additional assets related to the CPI site itself (downloadable content, an info pack on how to use the CPI stats, t-shirts to give away to their readers). To cross-pollinate the sporting communities in the different countries, we featured the most impressive blogs on our sites and encouraged international debates.

As believers in integrating on and offline experiences, we also sent a few of the most influential voices to several Euro 2008 games, resulting in magnificent reports and brilliant content for their sites. Our tribe of social media football fans really lived the excitement of Euro 2008 games in all five countries throughout all tournaments – watching the games, tweeting, blogging about them and of course making their own bets. You can imagine that we were extremely happy to see one of our countries win and actually have one of our friends in Spain watching the last game and recording the euphoria afterwards.

For me this case study was a lesson in how brand WOM flourishes when you find a common passion – in this case, football – and use it to connect voices from different cultures and countries. And when the conversation is being driven by independent individuals deeply embedded in their community, it becomes translated and contextualized so that it is relevant and inspiring in each area.

However, there are still many challenges around local/global WOM marketing, and more will emerge. Is the concept of what makes something ‘conversational’ international, common to all human beings, or are there certain attributes and memes that work in one culture and not another? The very ways in which we socialize and share change from place to place, and what is inspiring for a grandmother in Poland will be very different to what excites a teenager in Hong Kong. And the emotional place that certain types of brands occupy in people’s lives will differ regionally too. Word of mouth specialists from across the world will need to share their native expertise and insight if we are to design truly innovative and integrated WOM campaigns.

This seems a great place to start.