Category Archive: Live from BlogWell
Last week’s BlogWell in Chicago — hosted by the amazing folks at McDonald’s — was fantastic. We had a great time at Hamburger University; the venue was perfect for a day of awesome case studies from some from the smartest marketers in social media.
We’d also like to extend a big thank you to our sponsors from ICUC Moderation Services, Compendium, Radian6, and Marketwire.
Finally, a huge thanks to all the attendees who asked brilliant questions and helped blog, tweet, and share ideas from the day.
And in case you missed it or are looking for a recap, you can check out our live coverage here:
- Kraft Foods: How Oreo Learned to Fish Where the Fish Are
- Verizon: How We’re Building Brand Awareness Through Social Media
- Chevron: Pulse Report: The State of Online Conversation About Energy Issues
- Alberto Culver: Making the Most of Facebook for Brands
- Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of Trouble
- CME Group: From Financial Currency to Social Currency
- Whirlpool: Building Communities Online and Offline with “Building Blocks”
- McDonald’s: Finding the “Voice of McDonald’s”
- General Motors: Using Social Media to Avert a Crisis
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4:30 — Kurt Vanderah thanks our sponsor, ICUC, and introduces Kraft Foods‘ Digital and Social Marketing Lead, Beth Reilly.
4:32 — Beth: Once upon a time, a brand URL was the place to go for brand communications. Today, Facebook has become the de facto brand destination
4:33 — Beth: Oreo is one of many Kraft brands in social channels right now. Oreo launched in 2009 with 2.8 million fans (via migration of existing fan pages). Oreo created a single focus for all IMC efforts, with a sign-off that explicitly drives consumers to Facebook. Today we have 8.4 million fans, and tens of thousands of fans are added daily.
4:35 — Beth: Our early investment in Facebook has led to dramatic increases in growth in Q3. Our monthly growth is six times higher than that of the average Facebook page.
4:37 — Beth talks about “reaching Mom where she is.” Beth: Since moms are on social networks, it makes sense for us to reach out to them via Facebook.
4:38 — Beth: Oreo is one of the top Facebook pages, worldwide. Oreo is a social cookie
4:39 — Beth: A little about our digital vision — Facebook is still at the core. We are focusing on brand love and our community by implementing things like “Fan of the Week.”
4:40 — Beth: We also use Facebook for product innovation with trials and sampling. We really only use coupons if they are related to a new product launch.
4:40 — Beth: All of our promotional communication is done through Facebook — it is the center of our integrated marketing communications.
4:41 — Beth gives some examples of various promotions the brand has done through Facebook.
4:42 — Beth: So What does this mean? Fans are open to engaging in dialogue with our brand. Fan engagement drives brand advocacy.
4:43 — Beth: Making the most of the Oreo ecosystem — we have YouTube, Twitter, Oreo.com, and traditional media. We try to have consistent messages across these platforms, but each channel is unique. Facebook is in the center of this matrix. It’s the core of what we’re doing.
Q&A
Q: Martha from Fidelity Investments: You have so many fans, how do you manage expectations that you can respond to and interact with everyone.
A: We’ve found that people in the community responds to each other. We do monitor and respond to incorrect information about our brand, issues with product, etc. I don’t feel there’s a need to respond to every consumer. It is something that would be hard to do — and this is only one of our many brands. We rely on a lot of collaboration with our consumer relations and branding teams.
Q: Richard from Dell: Can you clarify what you mean by organic growth on Facebook?
A: Kraft works with Facebook quite a bit, but we haven’t done any advertising on Facebook for Oreo. We do use Facebook advertising for other brands though.
Q: Ramon from Domino’s Pizza: What are your thoughts on adding links to social media sites on packaging?
A: We’ve done it once, but we tend not to do this. Unless it’s some huge promotion, we’d rather not link to separate entities on our packages.
Q: Tom from Abbott: You mentioned you only use coupons for new products on Facebook. Can you talk more about why?
A: Our fans go to our Facebook page for information and to be entertained. Our current strategy is to only use coupons with promotions. We don’t feel there is a need to do it regularly, but it’s a good way to get trial with new products.
Q: What other kinds of metrics are you using to show ROI?
A: We don’t approach social media as a short-term sales generator. We see it as a long-term, brand-advocacy strategy. Oreo’s sales are doing well, but we can’t attribute that directly to Facebook. We look at things like the number of people responding to judge success.
Q: Is there a downside to driving all traffic to Facebook?
A: Facebook is kind of like how TV used to be. It’s always on in the background. That’s where everyone is. This approach won’t make sense for all brands, but for Oreo, it makes sense to drive people to our Facebook page. There doesn’t seem to be many downsides.
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4:30 — Bergen Anderson introduces Verizon’s Portfolio Leader, Laurie Shook.
4:31 — I’m Laurie Shook and I’m a product geek at Verizon. I don’t come at this as someone who’s full-time job is 100% in social media. I’m involved in blogging, I’m our lead on the Social Media Business Council, and I’m involved in a cross-department social media steering council.
4:32 — Laurie says that you often hear it’s OK to test the waters in social media — that it’s OK to fail. She says she sees a lot of big brands in the room, and thinks they all know that an epic failure really isn’t an option.
4:33 — Laurie talks about their strategies for social media:
- Build brand equity
- Grow sales and revenue from social media
- Provide online customer support through social media
4:34 – Laurie: To be honest, the online customer support part has been a challenge for me. I think for any company that has a large customer base and established customer support channels, you have highly established process and systems in place. But looking at social media, it’s a challenge to figure all this out — but we’re working on that.
4:34 — Laurie says that sometime last year, they realized that with all the energy and excitement and jumping in on social media, they suddenly had a lot of disparate, decentralized social media platforms. People didn’t know who to follow or who was authorized.
4:35 – Laurie says they established a cross-departmental social media steering team to guide this.
4:36 — Laurie says one of the first things they did was set up a process for establishing a social media property. They also created a set of social media guidelines and did a lot of training with practitioners and made this training available to employees who were interested.
4:37 — Laurie says the people who were active in social media said they needed guidelines to know when to respond and how to respond.
4:38 — Laurie talks about their idea of a single, unified Facebook page and how it was one of the things they really wanted to do — but it turned out not to be a good thing. Their plan was to have customers come to one page, ask questions, and then send them where they needed to go.
4:39 — Laurie says they launched this page and found that it had a ton of followers — and were excited until they discovered that the conversation was dominated by Verizon Wireless discussions. Morale of the story: You don’t decide what your property is, your customers do. They went back to the drawing board and came up with new strategies on what each division needed for Facebook.
4:39 — Laurie says they found that different departments needed different Facebook elements (tabs, white papers, geeky elements, tech, etc.)
4:40 — Laurie shows how Verizon FiOS has a tab exclusively for customer support — and how they have a team of 9 that monitors and works with that page.
4:41 — Laurie says they never tried to aggregate their Twitter strategy behind one account, and that it’s been a big benefit. Laurie adds they’ve found that Twitter users understand you won’t be available all the time.
4:42 — Laurie shares how their focused newsletter that’s simple and text based has a passionate fan base and drives a lot of traffic — while their fancy, more general newsletter covered such broad topics that it was hard for fans to follow, and because of this, doesn’t have as passionate of fan base.
4:44 — Laurie says that in the BtoB world, new content drives engagement. She talks about their Data Breach Investigations Report — it covers all the security breaches they investigate and offers their analysis — which they promote through Facebook, Twitter, and blog articles. When they send it out, they see a huge spike in visits because of this content.
4:45 — Laurie talks about their Ambassador Team Pilot made up of employees who weren’t in social media, but were interested in helping Verizon get their message out. There was a lot of concern over control of the message and having people mistake them as representatives of the company. Laurie says that if you want to try something, call it a “pilot”, give executives plenty of visibility in it, and provide plenty of training. For this pilot, she says several benefits occurred:
- Employees got more involved with the company
- Employees learned to grow ears and help leaders in different business units learn of important issues
- The “rogue employee” issues never materialized
- Don’t expect significant results if you don’t put forth significant efforts
4:47 — Laurie’s concluding lessons:
- Customers ultimately define the property
- Customers decide what content they choose to consume — we don’t control the message
- Customers drive the support channel mechanism — and can’t be oslely driven by efficiency metrics
- Hypothesize, control your experiment, test, and repeat
Q&A
Q: Do you have a mechanism to mobilize your internal ambassador team during a crisis or big event?
A: My concern has been that I don’t want Verizon to sound like we have a bunch of employee automatons that are out there tweeting the message. We’ve done things like say, “Hey, here’s a cool post about a phone” — but we never tell them how to say or share it.
Q: We’re also thinking about similar things as your ambassador program — can you tell me about your training process there?
A: It was interesting — we were all selected and ready to go. Meanwhile, there was some training that was in development for social media practitioners. There was concern that people shouldn’t get started until getting training — even though it was something many of these ambassadors had helped to create. That was the main thing — let’s get this training done.
Q: With the multiple sites you’ve got under the Verizon banner, have you ran into consistency issues?
A: We had a big issue with consistency before we started with this centralized effort. We got everyone on the same page — and the corporate branding folks were very involved. As you can see from my example, some of those properties have started to veer away from that same look — and you know what? I’m OK.
Q: How were you able to do an audit to see everything out there and reign it in?
A: It was hard. We just had to search and discover, and we just had a tracking sheet. We would just find out about weird things going on out there, like a “Verizon Guru” — and had to reach out to some of these properties and have them remove their Verizon affiliation if they weren’t actually doing it on behalf of the company. It was a very manual process.
Q: You mentioned you had to develop different presences for different properties. Did you also have to develop different strategies for BtoB?
A: Definitely. Consumer is much more offer oriented, while BtoB is more customer specific. BtoB tends to focus on content — white papers and interesting tech behind the products — whereas consumers are much more offer oriented.
Q: How did you decide to implement those strategies?
A: Well, trial and error really. That’s why we’ve gone through some changes. Some things worked, some haven’t. You know, test and repeat.
Q: When you were first starting and had a bunch of little independent sites going on, did you just end up starting over or did you continue on?
A: The answer is probably both. There are some that stayed. There are some that the intention was to get rid of it, and it ended up being that it just made a whole lot more sense to transform it into a national page. You want to be careful about eliminating anything that has a loyal following — you want to kind of tune it up and head it in the right direction.
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3:50 — Kurt Vanderah introduces Chevron’s Manager of Corporate Interactive Communications, Robert Raines.
3:51 — Kurt: This case study is sponsored by Compendium Blogware.
3:52 — Robert talks about Chevron’s social media monitoring program. Robert: In 2008, we started monitoring social media. We did real-time monitoring and used quarterly reports. RFP was our monitoring vendor, and we worked with Edelman and SM2.
3:54 — Robert: In 2009, we started to think about the data we collected and how it would be useful. This turned into the Dashboard Project. It would be something that would pull data together — a unique resource to build awareness of energy issues. The target audiences were energy experts and social media mavens.
3:56 — Robert clicks through a series of slides showing the type of content found in these reports.
3:57 – Robert discusses project challenges. Robert: One challenge was with scope — size matters. When we first started, we had tons of data and we wanted to build an interactive tool that let people build charts, pick topics, etc. After brainstorming, we came up with a 7-headed elephant that was too much to take on. We decided to use the report we already had and publish it for people to use.
3:59 — Robert: This led to some challenges with identity and branding. We did some research on how people name whitepapers. We came up with Chevron Pulse Report. In doing this, we had to consider trademarks and domain names.
4:00 – Robert: We then designed a wordmark around the report name, and included “prepared by Edelman” to give it some additional credibility. We also created a description in the wordmark to give people more information. We now use this wordmark on Twitter, YouTube, report covers, and in other areas.
4:01 – Robert: In terms of content, layout, and format, we had to get rid of the “Inside Baseball” jargon. We had to redesign charts and tables for consistency.
4:02 – Robert: In terms of interactivity, we produced a couple of videos and infographics and created an email alert to let people know when new reports were published.
4:04 – Robert shows a series of slides as examples of what distribution channels look like (Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, Scribd, etc.)
4:05 – Robert: It takes a village. Many people and resources go into producing this report.
4:06 – Robert: We launched the report on April 30 and have since had 15,000 reads, 3,000 landing page visits, 2,000 downloads, and 1,000 video plays of our 2 videos.
4:07 – Robert: We have also gotten some third party endorsements, which has been nice.
4:09 – Robert: To recap, the Chevron Pulse Report is a social media monitoring whitepaper used to engage and inform.
Q&A
Q: Keith from Rogers Communications: When you launched Q2 and Q3 reports, did you touch on the problems happening in the Gulf?
A: It’s not about us. We try to minimize the editorial comments we might make. You can expect the discussion volume to increase because of these problems. Issues around the Gulf spill will likely spike the charts, but we try not to editorialize.
Q: Have you done any type of monitoring specifically for the Chevron brand?
A: Yes, we do monitor the Chevron keyword, but we decided this was not something we’d include in these reports. These reports are about showing Chevron as a thought-leader in the space.
Q: Kurt: Can you touch on your YouTube videos?
A: We used YouTube as a sharing platform, to show people what’s in the report, since it’s not intuitive based on the name. The videos let people know what the reports are all about.
Q: Paula from First Tennessee: How do you define energy experts, and what do you expect them to do with the information?
A: It’s a pretty broad audience — it includes anyone who is interested in the energy business, people who talk about it and who could potentially touch Chevron. It’s not so much from a retail product standpoint as it is from a corporate standpoint.
Procter & Gamble: Swan dive… into Old Spice’s remarkable social media campaign
Alberto Culver: Managing promotions on Facebook
UnitedHealth Group: Success in social recruiting
BlogWell: How big brands use social media