"Hey Buddy, Wanna Buy a T-shirt?": Notes from Inside P&G's Digital Marketing Hack-a-thon - Jory Des Jardins - MediaBizBlogger

Earlier this month I embarked on a trip to Cincinnati consumerpackagedgoods country the hometown of PampampG not quite knowing why I had been invited to participate in an interactive education event for the company39s marketing leaders But they didn39t ask me to prepare a presentation they only made a request Bring your laptop I started to wonder who is going to get the educational experience here PampampG or meThe answer BothI entered the main building and was immediately ushered to a table with a lot of Tidebranded TshirtsquotYour color is redquot I was toldI slipped into the bathroom and put on my red vintage Tee The Tide logo was on the front and the words quotLoads of Hopequot on the backOMG it39s digital media day camp I wondered who else was going to bunk with meWe were asked to gather PampampG marketers and quotDigeratiquot as an Ad Age article called us in a leaked story about the event by colortribe red green blue yellow I was sitting next to leaders from social media networks online publishers and digital agenciesLucas Watson of PampampG issued the challenge invoking PampampG39s culture of competitiveness and penchant for learning by doing We were to raise money for the Tide brand39s charity for victims of natural disasters Loads of Hope by utilizing our various social media platforms and selling the branded 20 Tshirts We had until 9 pmfour hoursto make things happenWe were led to a lablike area of the company that was equipped with enough bandwidth to send small live animals across the Web quotWho here represents creativequot asked one of our team leaders Several agency heads raised their hands They were assigned to create compelling banners and messaging that the rest of the team could send outquotWho here can tap peoplequot I raised my hand as did folks from Federated Media MySpace Total Beauty SixApart and Forrester We were sent to a room to work our networks like the folks you see working the phones in the background of the Jerry Lewis telethonI pulled out my laptop with no real strategy and started barfing on Twitter Pinging influential Mombloggers various BlogHer contributing editors socially conscious bloggers then resorting to email when I didn39t get immediate answers Reason came to me and I realized I wasn39t following the advice I give companies like PampampG about reaching out effectively I pulled up my personal blog and wrote a post quotBlog for your lifeand save disaster victimsquot then tagged it and Tweeted it reaching out to 1 my personal readers who are interested in activities that I support and 2 people who know nothing about the PampampG event and might actually be interested in helping disaster victimsPampampG had some materials onhand on jump drives I grabbed one and uploaded them on my computer The largest one was 22 MBs Lesson 1 when creating a viral campaign Make something that you can actually send to people Better yet create a web page with all the info Send a link not an attachmentI selected some copy from the Word documents on the drive and sent it out to my cofounders our managing editor and our community managers hoping they would see something compelling enough to disseminate Lesson 2 when creating an outreach campaign especially among bloggers Have a blogworthy message something that will not only interest the blogger but that the blogger will think interests their readers Which actually leads to Lesson 3 Don39t endeavor to create a viral campaign create something that deserves to go viralI started to obsess over what was most interesting The charity angle The TshirtsquotHelp me defend social mediaquot I wrote in an email As if Tshirt sales would ultimately determine whether any of us would Tweet or blog againBy now various Twittermasters on my team had managed to set up small fiefdoms er businesses in their feeds and were selling tees in the hundreds The flatscreen in every room that showed realtime sales and page view progress showed that the winning groups were not generating sales in dribsanddrabs but rather wholesale purchasing of dozens of Tshirts at a time from a single buyer Team members were offering up free speaking and consulting in exchange for mass purchasesI contemplated calling my mother who years ago helped me game my Girl Scout troop39s cookie drive by buying out the boxes But then I realized I was supposed to be showcasing not MY OWN influence in this exercise but the ability of social networks to effectively mobilize Think quick Jory what39s the first way to get this done Spamming people on Twitter Running a site takeover on someone39s blog Offering to take our top blogger out for drinks Most importantly I began to consider that I wanted my network to still be my network long after PampampG39s competitive experiment wrapped upquotYou knowquot said Chas Edwards of Federated Media who had been sitting next to me likely coming to the same conclusion I did quotEgo is the largest untapped market resource onlinequot I finished the thought in my head quotBut it sure ain39t the most sustainable way to engagequotAt this point several quottop influencersquot had done what I39d requested and started twittering and pointing their audiences to my team39s sales site I was grateful but I realized they weren39t engaged and virally spreading a message they were doing me a favor Lesson 4 Favors are nice but they don39t move the needle for largescale campaignsI started getting reply emails and Tweets from our community One socially conscious blogger pointed to an article that had run in Huffpo that very day about questionable chemicals in Tide A PampampG team member immediately brought over a Tide marketing lead who thanked me for the info and left to see if there was more information I could provide for the blogger Then I started getting Tweets from women who went to the site and were rather put off that there were no size XLs for women I let the event planners know that this was impacting people39s interest It occurred to me that maybe THIS was how I would show off social networking by showcasing the dialogue it raised the questions that had to be answered virtual doorways into a significant authentic relationship with the customer And yes sometimes it starts with the little things like Tshirt sizesquotSomeone on the other team just put in a call into the Tonight Showquot I heard someone yell into our room All I could do was shrug So be itIn the end my team won the challenge One of our community managers forwarded me a spreadsheet the next day with all the buzz that the activity generatednot much of it by the imposed deadline but by the next morning 163 women engaged their communities with 113 blog posts 91 Tweets and 48 mentions on social networking tools mostly FacebookActually this experiment validated much of the advice that we39ve been giving clients Reach your customers where they are when they39re receptive to listening with information that39s relevant For example by running this experiment across the dinner hour in every US time zone we actually picked exactly the wrong time to reach a demographic that PampampG probably cares most about Whoever39s making dinner for their familyThe fact that PampampG was willing to experiment publicly especially in the wake of recent backlashes eg Motrin is courageous They took us all right out there on the limb with them but for some of us climbing back down before we broke any of our personal network39s branches was the only thing to doAs cofounder and President of Strategic Alliances for BlogHer Jory Des Jardins is an innovator in online advertising women39s media and Internet entrepreneurship Jory can be contacted at jorybloghercomRead all Joryamp8217s MediaBizBlogger commentaries at Jory Des Jardin MediaBizBlogger

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"Hey Buddy, Wanna Buy a T-shirt?": Notes from Inside P&G's Digital Marketing Hack-a-thon - Jory Des Jardins - MediaBizBlogger

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"Hey Buddy, Wanna Buy a T-shirt?": Notes from Inside P&G's Digital Marketing Hack-a-thon - Jory Des Jardins - MediaBizBlogger

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