SMWSF Event Summary – What to do with the Social APIs? Part 1

I was able to attend the Ogilvy “Beyond the Like Button” event as part of this week’s Social Media Week-SF festivities.  This event provided a unique view of how the powerhouse PR/advertising agencies are using Social Media tools, specifically APIs, to connect brands with their audience in ways beyond the ‘like” button.  In this event, the theme was leveraging the measurement of the social “like”.

For Part 1, we will summarize presentations by Brian D. Johnson from the Intel Futurist group discussing the future of TV and Mark Binkowski from Ogilvy on the digitization of a brand.  In Part 2, we will summarize the Panel discussion on the future use of the Social APIs and audience engagement and finally a presentation by John Manoogian of 140 Proof  on the application of APIs for targeting the audience.

Impact of Social from the TV View

Brian D. Johnson, an Intel Futurist, describes his vision of how social will impact us from the TV media side – of course, through a Skype video chat.  TV has always been social, as a meeting ground for friends, neighborhoods for general water-cooler types of discussions.  He sees the future of computing as a way to use TV in a social way.  An interesting stat he put out there was that “by 2015, there will be 500 billion hours of video on the internet”- just staggering.  So what’s next?  He pointed to 4 ways that TV in the future can impact us

1) “Informative TV” experience – more info about the TV we are watching and ways of collecting the information- from visual to data an analog to digital.

2) “Ubiquitous TV” – Move the TV experience to whatever or where-ever you want it- desktop, wall, phone, etc.

3) “Connected TV” – Could your devices help you manage what you watch – your device is with you all the time. Can it be shaped by what you are feeling that day?

4) “Social TV” – “TV has a rich, long, history & culture.” “TV has always been social gathering point or a “point of conversation” in one’s world.”

The Digitization of a Brand

Matt Binkowski, SVP @ Ogilvy takes a perspective step back and discussed the digitalization of a brand.  He emphasized figuring out and anticipating what you clients’/customers’ experience and what they expect your brand to be like – the customer’s “social experience.”

The customer’s experience is all about “a different way of thinking” for the marketer.  The questions you have to ask yourself – Which behaviors do you want to affect? How do you capture their attention?  The Goal is to “design a social experience by connecting familiar objects in a novel way to embody a unique idea that retains the user’s attention and affects behavior.”

It makes an interesting discussion of the way our digital footprints of our social web travel is used for our behavior modeling and how we ultimately feel about it if it solves problems for us in our daily lives.  Part 2 will go into this a little deeper.