"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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Cover image for  article: "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, consumer-packaged-goods country, the hometown of P&G, not quite knowing why. I had been invited to participate in an interactive education event for the company's marketing leaders. But they didn't 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? P&G, or me?

The answer: Both.

I entered the main building and was immediately ushered to a table with a lot of Tide-branded T-shirts.

"Your color is red," I was told.

I slipped into the bathroom and put on my red vintage Tee. The Tide logo was on the front, and the words, "Loads of Hope" on the back.

OMG, it's digital media day camp. I wondered who else was going to bunk with me.

We were asked to gather -- P&G marketers and "Digerati," as an Ad Age article called us in a leaked story about the event - by color-tribe: red, green, blue, yellow. I was sitting next to leaders from social media networks, online publishers and digital agencies.

Lucas Watson of P&G issued the challenge, invoking P&G's culture of competitiveness and penchant for learning by doing. We were to raise money for the Tide brand's charity for victims of natural disasters, Loads of Hope, by utilizing our various social media platforms and selling the branded $20 T-shirts. We had until 9 pm--four hours--to make things happen.

We were led to a lab-like area of the company that was equipped with enough bandwidth to send small, live animals across the Web. "Who here represents creative?" 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 out.

"Who here can tap people?" 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 telethon.

I 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 didn't get immediate answers. Reason came to me, and I realized I wasn't following the advice I give companies like P&G about reaching out effectively. I pulled up my personal blog and wrote a post, "Blog for your life...and save disaster victims," 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 P&G event and might actually be interested in helping disaster victims.

P&G had some materials on-hand 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 attachment.

I selected some copy from the Word documents on the drive and sent it out to my co-founders, 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 blog-worthy message, something that will not only interest the blogger but that the blogger will think interests their readers. Which actually leads to Lesson #3: Don't endeavor to create a viral campaign; create something that deserves to go viral.

I started to obsess over what was most interesting: The charity angle? The T-shirts?

"Help me defend social media!" I wrote in an email. As if T-shirt sales would ultimately determine whether any of us would Tweet or blog again.

By 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 real-time sales and page view progress showed that the winning groups were not generating sales in dribs-and-drabs, but rather wholesale purchasing of dozens of T-shirts at a time from a single buyer. Team members were offering up free speaking and consulting in exchange for mass purchases.

I contemplated calling my mother, who years ago helped me game my Girl Scout troop's 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, what's the first way to get this done? Spamming people on Twitter? Running a site takeover on someone's 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 P&G's competitive experiment wrapped up.

"You know," said Chas Edwards of Federated Media, who had been sitting next to me, likely coming to the same conclusion I did, "Ego is the largest untapped market resource online." I finished the thought in my head, "But it sure ain't the most sustainable way to engage."

At this point several "top influencers" had done what I'd requested and started twittering and pointing their audiences to my team's sales site. I was grateful, but I realized they weren't engaged and virally spreading a message; they were doing me a favor. Lesson #4: Favors are nice, but they don't move the needle for large-scale campaigns.

I 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 P&G 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 people's 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 T-shirt sizes.

"Someone on the other team just put in a call into the Tonight Show!" I heard someone yell into our room. All I could do was shrug. So be it.

In 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 generated--not 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 Facebook).

Actually, this experiment validated much of the advice that we've been giving clients: Reach your customers where they are, when they're receptive to listening, with information that's relevant. For example, by running this experiment across the dinner hour in every U.S. time zone, we actually picked exactly the wrong time to reach a demographic that P&G probably cares most about: Whoever's making dinner for their family!

The fact that P&G was willing to experiment publicly (especially in the wake of recent backlashes, e.g. 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 network's branches, was the only thing to do.

As co-founder and President of Strategic Alliances for BlogHer, Jory Des Jardins is an innovator in online advertising, women's media and Internet entrepreneurship. Jory can be contacted at jory@blogher.com.
Read all Jory’s MediaBizBlogger commentaries at Jory Des Jardin - MediaBizBlogger.

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