PepsiCo: "Connecting On and Offline Using Social Media" — Live from BlogWell

4:20 – Bob Pearson introduces Josh Karpf, Pepsi’s Manager of Digital Communications.

4:21 – Josh: PepsiCo digital and social communication consists of two people, myself and Bonin Bough. Both of our backgrounds are on the communications side, so we sit within global communications.

4:21 – Josh: Focused on how to spread best practices across the enterprise. So, if Pepsi is doing something great with Twitter, we’ll try and bring that to Quaker Oats.

4:22 – Josh: How do we go from the campaign mentality to the mentality of constantly growing fans and followers? How do we move from one-off content creation to an editorial plan and strategy? How do we leverage digital storytellers to spread conversations about our brands. These are our primary focuses.

4:23 – Josh: Must Meets:
- SxSW
- Internet Week
- BlogHer — Connecting with Mom

Must Participate:
- Embassy strategy (personalities on Twitter, Facebook, etc)

4:24 – Josh: When Pepsi announced their logo change last fall, we asked, how do we build a conversation in social media? Pepsi created a blogger outreach program, and sent classic Pepsi cans to 25 bloggers and influencers. We invited them to have a conversation with us on FriendFeed — really, what we wanted to do was build some buzz and get some conversations going about these products.

4:25 – Josh: We were on Twitter long before we launched our Twitter handle. Two issues:
1.) Last year, one of our brands ran an ad around Pepsi Max highlighting the one-calorie aspect. It ran in Germany, depicting a calorie committing suicide. Online, it got to the US, and a fast moving conversation developed around, “How could Pepsi do this?”
- Pepsi posted an explanation on a blog and immediately reached out, acknowledging the issue.
2.) More recently, Pepsi has a Twitter handle, PepsiCo has a Twitter handle, a gentleman from the UK launched a fake Pepsi handle. They were tweeting, saying they were about to announce new information. What was frightening: The speed at which they were adding followers and confusing our genuine fans and followers. We let Twitter know, and within 20 minutes they were offline.

4:29 – Josh: We do a lot with video. So, how do you take a video you post to your website and get that content into social media and get people who aren’t going to Pepsi.com to see our video? Taking it a step further, how do we partner with bloggers and influencers to share our content?

4:30 – Tropicana invited a key green blogger to Florida, showed them how they produce the product.

4:31 – Pepsi decided to go to SXSW to make their splash in social media — but in a way that they respected and supported the space. First thing: They set up a podcast playground, a studio where bloggers could come and produce content.

4:33 – Other piece of Pepsi’s SXSW strategy was their PepsiCo Zeitgeist which tracked conversations related to SXSW.

4:34 – Josh: Part of our challenge: How do we bring part of this experience back to the company? We identified 20 key individuals from multiple departments within the company and gave them tools to cover SXSW.

4:36 – Josh: Some of us are in PR, some of us are in marketing, but in reality, social media is everyone’s job. Not a day goes by that I don’t get asked: “What should my Facebook page look like? What should I blog about?”

4:37 – Josh describes Pepsi’s “S.C.O.R.E. Decision Support Tool” with a backend framework to help determine which tools and tactics you should consider using depending on what you’d like to accomplish.

4:38 – Josh’s key points:

- From impressions to connections
- Define the cohorts
- Lift and shift
- Collaboration
- Experiments

Q&A

Q: How do you deal with detractors?

A: The key is to just bring the right people along, and not be apologetic. We don’t want to do anything that puts us at risk from a legal perspective. I think the key, for us, is to not be defensive, and continue to push forward and engage with the people who want to engage with us.

Q: How did and how does PepsiCo deal with the real-time issues that come up on Twitter, for example, on weekends, at all hours of the day?

A: We’re not used to dealing with the speed of social media. We have the apparatus in place to deal with consumer questions — we put the phone number for each brand on the products. Our best practice is 24-hour turn-around — that’s not going to cut it in social media. We have to get our consumer affairs people using Twitter, so when a consumer affairs issue comes in, they can use it and respond as needed. I think it’s getting people comfortable with the tools.

Q: What has worked well for you on Twitter?

A: With Twitter, it’s really becoming more about your editorial and your tone, and your speed. PR and marketing — they both need to be at the table, and it hasn’t always been that way. An issue can come up on Facebook as quickly as it can on Twitter, so part of it is figuring out your editorial tone — and your transparency. Transparency is something that we’re just beginning to get our arms around on Twitter — whereas with Facebook you didn’t necessarily have to identify who was speaking.

Q: You’ve got a lot of bloggers at SXSW, for example, what is your message? How did you measure ROI for that?

A: At SXSW, a lot of it was just building connections — almost thinking, how do we build a database of influencers who we know are fans and want to hear from us. We were also able to get buy-in from brands and actually launched two products there — but it really was an experiment.