I am one month into my new role as Emerging Media lead for Microsoft. It's been a busy and fascinating time. It's so interesting to start a new group and I'm just scratching the surface of areas this team could have impact across the company. I will use this blog to report on how the team is growing, learning and the main areas of responsibility we will have.
A couple of areas we won't be covering in the short term due to bandwidth (I'm hiring) and overlap with other teams. Those two areas are;
- Best Practice Sharing; we have another team in the Central Marketing Group that is serving as the lead for Social Media best practices. I support them as a v-team member but my team won't have responsibilities for best practices sharing and playbook creation. These are definitely important functions and I'm glad to see Microsoft taking a lead to support these learnings.
- Social CRM; I think this is super important and will hopefully have more time in the coming year to staff for this but as of now I don't foresee this team having resources to begin thinking about Social CRM
What we WILL do:
The majority of the world's technology consumers are living online every day through social networks, video websites and mobile devices. Entertainment is being consumed through multiple channels – often all at the same time; music, gaming, TV, PC and phones. This revolution in portable entertainment presents a whole new way to reach consumers where they are living and playing. Working with the global campaigns team the Emerging Media team will bring insights, best practices, and creative media ideas that will help deliver Microsoft's global campaigns across all platforms consumers are using today with specific attention to understanding and connecting the synergy between earned and paid media; how investments in media can be leveraged and amplified to build ongoing earned media engagements through fan connections on Facebook, Twitter, Que Que and other social networking sites across the globe.
The Emerging Media team is committed to bringing new, creative media ideas to CMG's global campaigns. This team will serve as SME's and partners for the global campaigns team looking to:
· Build connections between creative execution and earned media; how can global campaigns work to build long term engagements for the brands in the social networks.
· Extend mobile as a platform into the global campaigns; focusing on emerging mobile trends like location based networks and augmented reality
· Build case studies and proof points for emerging media concepts such as
o in-game advertising
o mobile app network advertising
o video embed
o location based networks
· Define the value of earned media as a portion of a campaigns marketing mix through new KPI's and reporting dashboards
· Provide a menu of earned media amplification options for campaigns including but not limited to:
o Off-network MSFT communities such as Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc
o On-network engagement opportunities such as Xbox & Windows Live
· Strategy for MSFT social media
· Leveraging resources (tools, upfronts, etc) to get economies of scale with vendors and consistency of approach across BGs and geographies.
One of the first challenges we are diving into is creating company wide contracts with some of the global social networks, the first one being Facebook. MANY groups across Microsoft buy engagement ads on Facebook today but because they are all bought in 'one off' programs there is no opportunity to bring economies of scale and value ads. We are working with Facebook to scope our investment in FY11 and build stronger values into engagement buys since the little buys aren't able to receive the same benefits the big buys get today.
This should keep us busy for awhile anyway. I'm planning to review a new emerging media partner at least once every two weeks or so on this blog. If you have a media partner you would suggest I look at please let me know. As said by Oprah, "Here we go…"
Windows7 Social Media Case Study
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