Over the last few months we have been busy developing Face Wired and we are now proud to say it has officially launched.

What is Face Wired?
 A department within Face that specializes in co-created communications planning, with social media at its core.

Why did we create Face Wired?
 Face has a great track record of co-creating with consumers to add real value to projects, whether it is insights or new product development. We have now decided to develop this and apply our expertise and co-creation processes to communications planning. And social media is at the heart of all this.

Social Media isn’t just another marketing channel, it’s the main platform where all media contents converge in terms of distribution and consumption, from tv to gaming, from press to radio, and, most importantly, to personal communications. That’s why Social Media has become today the main platform connecting brands with consumers and that’s why it should always be at the core of the brand strategy and of all brand communications.

Using social media as the environment and the tool to manage and foster brand-consumer collaboration, we designed a three step process to engage consumers and influencers into co-creating communications planning concepts:

- Listening: this is the social media immersion stage where we use Pulsar, our proprietary social media monitoring technology, to map and analyze the buzz about the brand, chart the topics, the issues and the perceptions associated with the brand and identify the influencers that we should involve in the co-creation process.

- Plan: we then bring together a group of users, experts, influencers and brand stakeholder to kick off the actual brand-consumer collaboration. A set of online crowd-sourcing tasks helps us defining the agenda and generating the initial concepts. The most interesting and popular ones are then taken to a smaller sample and a set of co-creation tasks, online and offline, allow us to build on the initial concepts, further develop them and finalize the outputs.

- Engage: Once we have co-created the strategy Face then work closely with the brand to make sure the strategy is implemented correctly or to directly manage the execution. We then train the brand team so they have the skills to manage social media engagement with communities once we have gone.

We have already worked on two very successful pilot projects with Dr Pepper and with Lynx on the Dark Temptation variant launch, which has been their most successful variant to date. We are currently working with Carphone Warehouse on a project about social media strategy that will have organization wide implications and Boots, to co-create marketing insights and communications plans.

Stay tuned for more info and juicy social media case studies!