Our Partner - Percolate
This is the first of 3 posts about our Ogilvy Notes partners this year.
For those of you unfamiliar with Percolate, now is the time to get to know them. We all consume, live, and perhaps work in the world of content. Creation is one end of the content spectrum and we sometimes forget that there are other ways of leveraging content to tell narratives.
Curation is a bit of a buzzword of late, but there is a ton of value that it can play in helping individuals and brands express their point of view. This is where percolate comes in. They answer a simple but critical question … how can I find the most relevant and valuable content in a world full of noise?
I’ll let their words do the talking from here.
Calibrate - To be a content creator, you must be a content consumer
The first step is to map the brand’s interests and campaign goals against a subset of the five million sources Percolate scrapes daily. By answering a series of questions we turn a brand strategy into the interest engine that will power your brands Percolator.
Filter - Separating the signal from the noise
Unlike most systems, Percolate gets better at filtering as you give it more information. We use our proprietary algorithms to sort all the stories from your calibrated sources and bubble up only the most relevant and interesting content for an editor to comment on.
Curate - People are more interesting than algorithms
One of our core beliefs is that nothing a brand presents to consumers should go out without first being touched by a brand representative. Without Percolate this can be a daunting task. However, Percolate presents the top stories as simple prompts for a brand editor to comment on.
Publish - Push content to social platforms and websites
Once the brand’s editor has added their stamp, the curated story is ready to be pushed to social platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr as well as a brand’s .com. We format everything for the channel so all the editor needs to worry about is being interesting.
Learn - The more you use Percolate, the better it gets
We look at everything an editor does in Percolate to help make the system better. By learning from what you post and how your audience reacts, we are able to find new sources and additional content to help you engage consumers across all channels.
We worked with the team at Percolate to create the graph below. We wondered, what the implicit and explicit connections between the speakers we were documenting might be. This is showing is the sites they have in common (based on content sharing) in orange, what are the pieces of content that they shared in grey, and finally all of their connection to SXSW.
We hope you find this interesting. Be sure to check them out. We’re big fans!
What’s new this year?
Last year was big for us. We had an idea about how we could add some value to SXSW and Ogilvy Notes was born. We were overwhelmed by the response to the project which only made us more excited to come back in 2012.
One of the things a lot of people commented on was the fact that at its core Ogilvy Notes is quite analog. There are a few reasons we went this route:
- Visual notes are compelling to see made, consume at any time, and keep as a reference.
- There is so much going on digitally or otherwise at SXSW. We wanted to add value and if the best way to do that was analog, so be it.
- In years past but noticeably in 2010, visual notes were becoming a more recognizable part of SXSW and we had to opportunity to turn the amps up to 11.
It deserves to be said that none of this would be possible without our friends and partners at ImageThink. Heather and Nora have an amazingly talented team who help us bring this to life. Be sure to check out their website.
So that brings us to some more exciting news. This year we wanted to build on the momentum from 2011 but challenge ourselves to bring some more digital to the party. We got some great new partners in the fold to help us realize a bigger and better Ogilvy Notes.
Based in New York City, Behance is a rapidly growing technology company that is changing the face of the creative industries. We believe that great ideas are made to happen through great execution, and we practice what we preach (see our team tenets). Our incredibly talented team of designers and developers work hand-in-hand, leveraging the latest technologies and design-thinking to create revolutionary products that empower creative professionals.
We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame. And when you read BuzzFeed, you’ll always know the movies, music, and products that are on the rise and worth your time.
Percolate is an engine that consumes the world for a brand: Bubbling up the most interesting stories and making it easy to comment on those stories and push them out to a brand’s .COM, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, or even ad units.
Over the next few days we’ll be sharing deeper looks into how we’re leveraging each of these partners. For now we hope you’re all ready for a fun ride!
About
Whether it's your first time here or you're a longtime SXSWer there's no arguing with the fact that over the next 5 days you'll be overwhelmed with the amount of information thrown at you. Last year we introduced Ogilvy Notes to help tame some of this insanity. Ogilvy Notes is a series of visual summaries of the biggest and best keynotes and panels at SXSW. Every day at the Day Stage on the 4th floor of the Austin Convention Center, prints from the previous day's keynotes and featured speakers will be available.
Theme created by 
