Not brand new but still good!
January 2010
January 27, 2010
P&G Embraces Facebook as Big Part of Its Marketing Plan
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Procter & Gamble Co. loves Facebook after all, and besides encouraging brands to develop a presence there, the world's biggest marketer has opened an office in Silicon Valley to help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities with the website.
P&G's outlook on Facebook and social media as marketing tools appears rosier.
"P&G's explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that," Mr. Hornik wrote. "And while P&G's thought leaders expressed some skepticism about the efficacy of Facebook's 'engagement ads,' they certainly view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building. They didn't quantify what they are paying for that exposure, but it is quite clear that the numbers are very big."
Mr. Hornik contrasted the enthusiastic outlook on Facebook to a less-enthusiastic one by P&G executives toward Twitter. "They described Twitter as 'much more like television than one might think.' To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium -- it is best for one-to-many communications that are short bursts of timely information," he wrote. "P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand-building and advertising side. ... They do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook."
Mr. Hornik, after being contacted by P&G over the weekend, did backtrack on one big number -- a projection he had attributed to P&G that Facebook would reach 5 billion members globally. That 5 billion is actually the number of consumers P&G hopes to reach globally, up from the current 4 billion.
By whatever count, however, P&G's outlook on Facebook and social media as marketing tools appears rosier than Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation, portrayed in a talk to a digital-marketing forum in Cincinnati in late 2008.
"What in heaven's name," he asked, "made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?"
"Who said this is media?" he said. "Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren't trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. ... We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it."
He went on to say, noting it was personal preference rather than company policy, "I really don't want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook."
He also expressed discomfort about the level of personalized targeting available through Facebook, though he said that Facebook applications are potentially valuable vehicles for advertisers.
In an e-mail, a P&G spokeswoman wrote that Mr. McConnell was speaking for himself, not the company, at the time. "P&G sees the value of digital and social media in consumers' lives and we want to connect with consumers in the environments where they are spending their time," she said. "For example, Facebook fan pages for brands [are] an easy way to engage with consumers in a forum where they've chosen to engage with us. (i.e. Pringles' fan page has over 2.8 million global fans). We don't have social media figured out, but we are encouraging our brands to include digital and social media into their holistic brand-building strategies."
She said the intended perspective on Twitter is that it's "a communication platform that is good for 'one-to-many' communication, similar to TV. Additionally, some of our brands are using Twitter to engage with consumers one-on-one when they have questions. We also view Twitter as a valuable listening tool."
She also clarified that what was referred to as an Innovation Center on VentureBlog is a "Connect & Develop" office near Palo Alto "to increase our presence in innovation hotspots," but is not the size of the sprawling complexes that P&G typically terms "innovation centers." Connect & Develop is a longstanding P&G program which seeks to solicit innovation from outside companies and consumers while also licensing its own technology to outside companies.
January 12, 2010
January 07, 2010
Forbes cover a great case study on how Threadless built a community. Interesting points made are that it is more about quality than quantity - and that quaity communities are grown organicaly, not by campaigns and media spends.
Need To Build A Community? Learn From Threadless Threadless, a Chicago T-shirt company, sprang to life a decade ago with the idea that employees and customers don't have to be two distinct groups. The Internet-based company asks consumers to submit shirt designs they've created--it gets as many as 300 submissions a day--and allows its large fan base to vote on the ones they like best. It pays winners, more than 300 each year, $2,000 for their creations. The company picks the best of the most popular T-shirt designs, screens them for copyright violations and obscenities, and sells them on its site within three to eight weeks for $18. It aims to release seven new designs a week.
The business model works beautifully for this 50-person company, which brought in close to $30 million in revenue in 2009. Threadless, with 1.5 million followers on Twitter and 100,000 fans on Facebook, is also masterful at using social media to promote its designs and designers--and to keep its community engaged.
Cam Balzer, the vice president of marketing at Threadless, shares more on the company’s community-building strategy.
Forbes: You stress "community" over crowdsourcing. Why?
Balzer: Crowdsourcing is antithetical to what we're doing. That's because crowdsourcing involves random sets of people who suddenly have a say in how the business works, but that's not how Threadless operates. We've got a close-knit group of loyal customers and have worked hard to build that. The people who submit ideas to us, vote and buy our products aren't random people, and they aren't producing random work. We work closely with our consumers and give them a place on our site, the Threadless forum, where they can exchange ideas with one another--ideas that go beyond designing T-shirts. We have consumers who have voted on 150,000 designs, which means they've spent hours interacting on our site. People who do that aren't jumping into a random crowd. They're part of the community we've cultivated.
How does Threadless use social marketing to promote its business and to generate sales?
Like other businesses, Threadless launched before Twitter and Facebook. We've embraced both sites by injecting our personality into them. We send out news to people when new T-shirts are available and information on new sales when they start. We also tell customers about the music playing in our warehouse and about the interesting people stopping by our office. The investment in Twitter has bumped our traffic. Sales from Twitter alone are in the high six-figures.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to build their social media strategies?
The secret isn't growing a huge fan base. We have 100,000 Facebook fans, but those fans have all come to us organically. We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.
The other key is that we act like humans on our own site and social networking sites. We act like we're interacting with our friends, posting videos of our employees talking about their favorite bands. It's not all direct promotion; it's human.
How do you keep your consumers engaged?
For us, the idea of fostering creativity is a key one. We offer design challenges. A timely example of that is that we ran a design contest around the Las Vegas consumer electronics convention, CES. The challenge we posed was to get consumers to submit designs that highlighted innovation. We looked for a theme that we knew our consumer base, who tends to be interested in tech and the Web, would love. We've done other challenges asking people for ideas on zombies and monsters, because we've seen from the forums and other popular T-shirts that our customers are interested in monsters.
The takeaway: Know what interests your consumers and build on it.
What are limitations for the business?
The community anchors us to a certain extent. They've got perceptions of who we are and how we'll act. They determine our future. With that said, they are receptive to seeing Threadless grow. We've been exploring retail distribution and we've asked our designers (who are the employees and customers) where they would feel comfortable selling and buying the T-shirts. We thought the options would be limited based on their answers, but we've found a sincerely open-minded group that is eager to see growth.
We've also learned that an important part of expanding is giving credit to our community members. We started selling specially designed iPhone cases last year and were very deliberate about our packaging. Each case gave descriptions of the product and its designer.
What was your best-selling T-shirt design last year?
It was a design called "The Communist Party" that featured Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro, in party mode. The designer was Tom Burns of Murfreesboro, Tenn.
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