Nine months sure feels like an eternity to a 38-week pregnant woman a swollen belly and swollen ankles to match, but to the public relations, marketing and legal teams at Graco, nine months seem to fly by in a wink.
Funny enough, 9 months is how long it took the Graco corporate blog, and greater social media strategy, to come to life.
In that time, there were [sometimes painful] meetings with legal, deep, introspective meetings with my boss, the Global Vice President of Brand Marketing, meetings with the larger brand team, meetings with our social media agency, Converseon, meetings with would-be blog contributors, and even a thousand “meetings” with myself (those were really just reminders on my Outlook calendar to take my head out of the blogosphere). Believe it or not, while we were doing all that meeting, planning, debating, strategizing and talking, we were also listening. And that listening, coupled with a shift in the way we would approach “PR,” was the catalyst that helped Graco to dive headfirst into the world of social media and corporate blogging.
Before we started, we needed to identify what we hoped to accomplish for the brand through social media. We knew that first-time expectant moms often turn to other experienced moms or parents for advice so we knew that we wanted to enable advocacy of the brand to happen from parent to parent. We also knew that within the baby product industry, trust in a brand is paramount. The Graco brand is over 50 years old and we are fortunate that our brand has a very high level of trust with parents but we wanted to make sure we maintain that level of trust as well as build on it.
Lastly, we wanted to understand the needs of our consumers even better. That is the fundamental shift we took on from “doing public relations” to quite simply “having a relationship with the public.”
(To be continued with details on how Graco accomplished their goals in Part 2)
Learn more about Lindsay Lebresco:
- Employment: Public Relations and Social Media Manager at Graco
- Blog: Graco Blog
- Twitter: LindsayLebresco
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