cardboard heads simulating a packed room at Minibar, London

Over the next few weeks Face Wired , Face social media planning sister agency, will be speaking at a couple of workshops and seminars in London and Milan. If you are around and want to catch up, here’s the low-down.

The first one is a two-day workshop at Multimedia Management series hosted by Mediaset and IULM University in Milan, where we will be talking about Social Media Monitoring, Data Visualization and Social Media Planning. Access to this series is unfortunately closed but if you are in Milan and want to talk to us give us a shout or DM me on twitter @abc3d

The second one is Open Business “Web Business Toolbox” in London, where the focus will be more on Social Media Strategy for web companies and startups in general. This series is open but the organizers told me it’s already sold out. However there’s time (apr 14) and someone might drop out so if you are interested do sign up to the waiting list.

Also, this coming Friday is Minibar time again, the monthly face to face for internet professionals in Shoreditch. The coming one is all about Augmented Reality. We will be there enjoying presentations from Micazook, Worksnug, Augmented Planet, Ambient Industries. And having a few friday beers. If you are planning to make it, make sure you RSVP on meetup. See you there.

End of Face wanders bullettin.

wom uk espresso briefing @face

Brands are increasingly realising the importance of integrating word of mouth into everything they do. They get that it’s essential for nurturing consumer relationships. They understand that referrals are key to ROI. They’ve heard exciting examples of companies who’ve built their success on conversational strategies. But how on earth do they fit WOM into their existing marketing mix?

On 8.30am, Tuesday 24th November, we will present on‘Monitoring and analysing WOM in real time to enable adaptive brand planning’.

CEO and Founding Partner Andrew Needham, and Head of Social Media and Planning Francesco D’Orazio, will look at how to:

- Measure and monitor online conversations about brands to assess brand influence and brand visibility
- Apply qualitative analysis to determine research parameters and add meaning to quantitative findings
- Identify conversation hubs and influencers across a wide range of channels
- Use crowdsourcing and co-creation methodologies to achieve research, innovation and planning objectives
- Build iterative models for feeding real-time insights and consumer inputs into the existing marketing process

As always, the briefing will be totally FREE and kick off with half an hour for coffee, breakfast and networking at 8.30am with the talk starting at 9am and questions and discussions afterwards until 10.30am, all at INSIGHT RESEARCH GROUP offices, 11-13 Charterhouse Buildings, London
EC1M 7AP. Last month’s presentation from Matt Morrison was a big hit so be sure to register for this one now via julian.ferguson@womuk.org – members get priority booking.

The video of the session will be uploaded in the next days on the WOM UK blog. Same for the news about the upcoming November Thought Leaders session that will feature Dr Martin Oetting, Chief Research Director at European WOM marketing network trnd, presenting his doctoral dissertation on ‘The Ripple Effect’ – how companies can spread WOM by treating their customers like their best employees. Watch this space.

Drawing on his own experiences in high tech as well as hundreds of interviews with consumers, researchers and marketing executives, Emmanuel will discuss proven techniques for stimulating buzz.

It’s another morning session lasting until 10.30am at Ogilvy & Mather, 10 Cabot Square, Canary Wharf, E14 4QB. Free to WOM UK members, £10 for everyone else; email julian.ferguson@womuk.org for a place

We will be attending, come by to say hi!

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!