Digital CPG Blog

Have you tried consumer-generated media (CGM) or user-generated content (UGC)? Does it provide value?

Major consumer product brands think they do, and among them is Procter & Gamble who is putting so much stock in the word-of-mouth approach that it’s relying on it to promote a new mouth-themed campaign.

The “Life Opens Up” Project – and related “Life opens up when you do” tag line – launched in recent weeks with the objective of creating a correlation between maintaining a healthy mouth and “living life to the fullest.” Developed to promote P&G’s Crest and Oral-B brands, the campaign revolves around a contest that invites consumers to share their stories of how “a healthy mouth has played a role in opening up to life and the world.” To participate, consumers must submit a two-minute video of themselves describing their experience to LifeOpensUpProject.com. They can view and vote on the user submissions – including one made by spokesperson and host of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” Alison Sweeney – on the P&G campaign microsite, as well as on the Crest, Crest Whitestrips, and Oral-B Facebook pages.

A CGM contest and CGM marketing content are a natural fit, but more than that, P&G’s digital marketing strategy demonstrates an understanding of the web 2.0 media that’s so effectively connecting consumers with brands. With this campaign, the advertiser does a number of things right: it leverages authenticity while maintaining relevance, employs social media to promote the contest, and rewards consumers for their participation, and eschews traditional digital advertising for more personal messaging (while the Glam Media buy does include rich media ad units, it’s the personal stories from bloggers that represent the bulk of the campaign).

Twitter and Facebook may be hot now, but blogs were what started it all. So, are blogs still relevant for your brand? Or should you focus all your energy on social networks?

Spark Sheet looks at the pros and cons:

Blogs are a pain to maintain. Readership grows slowly and not always steadily. And it’s hard to communicate your company’s values without sounding like a worn-out press release.

But a survey of the blogosphere reveals a slightly more optimistic picture. In spite of the challenges, smart companies are maintaining successful blogs by telling relevant stories to well-defined and engaged communities.

Corporate blogging works well for brands that create a distinctive voice people trust. Many technology-related businesses find success by providing expert opinions about developments in their industry. Tech companies also benefit from a sophisticated understanding of the Web; they just ‘get it’ when it comes to capitalizing on a blog’s strengths, giving them an advantage over, say, a scuba gear company.

Once a company finds its voice and establishes the best way to engage customers, a corporate blog can focus on building communities around its brand.

In a sense, Lululemon can be credited for fostering an entire lifestyle community built around yoga.

So, what do you think? Does your brand focus on blogs? Is there an alternative? Are corporate blogs still relevant?

I love this – and it’s something fun as we near the end of the week. Sometimes it’s those small touches that really make you love a brand:

“Package design has become so artful, it has come to this: Even the barcode, the style runt of product labeling, is getting gussied up,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

You’ve heard of vanity URLs, but vanity barcodes? It’s all the rage.

“Consumer-goods companies hope these vanity barcodes will better connect with customers. The trend is popular with smaller companies, and even one of the world’s largest food companies, Nestle SA, is trying out vanity barcodes on its smaller brands,” continues WSJ.

Very cool, and that extra touch of delight is great for packaging.

Melissa Sowry, Content and Social Media Manager of Burt’s Bees has grown the brand’s Facebook fan base from 98,000 to more than 370,000 by creating compelling content that consumers want to interact with and discuss, reports eMarketer. That content, ranging from quizzes and video to sampling offers and behind-the-scenes access into the world of Burt’s Bees, is helping extend brand loyalty and generate powerful online viral engagement.

Here are some of her insights:

What drives word of mouth?

Beauty is a category where people take recommendations from their friends and talk about what’s new. They also look to experts for suggestions. For example, if we get a placement in Marie Claire or Lucky where they’re raving about the new tinted lip balm, we might share the link to the page.

We also find fans of the brand are recommending products to one another in this space. That’s the normal activity that takes place around beauty products. It’s mostly women talking to other women and finding out what works, but it’s taking place online in social media venues. For example, a mother might ask other moms about products that stop diaper rash: “What works for you?” These are important conversations and I think online social media is a place where people trust one another to get that information.

What’s your Facebook strategy?

Facebook is a channel for us to provide compelling content. When I came on board, we started doing simple things—posting content and behind-the-scenes images on a daily basis and discussing new products coming to market.

We use social media and Facebook in particular as relationship-building tools. We also create opportunities for consumer education around skin care, for example, and sampling offers. We ran successful sampling programs on Facebook for our relaunched body lotions and new tinted lip balm.

We talk about our products on Facebook but we also spend time talking about the culture at Burt’s Bees through our involvement with Habitat for Humanity, sustainability efforts, product ingredients and so forth.

How does your strategy stack up against Burt’s Bees?

Five big brand marketing campaigns are betting big on social gaming including Century 21, MasterCard, Psych, New York Public Library, and Expedia.

Big brands are “jumping into the game — so to speak — with branded virtual goods, integrated ads and offers as well as games that combine digital and real-world incentives. For example, marketers like Century 21 have started using branded virtual goods — inexpensive, non-tangible items people buy to use in digital games — in order to gain brand recognition and tap into the profitable social gaming trend.”

This is a huge opportunity for CPG brands as well, particularly national brands who want to build loyalty and show off their couponing offers. Notice it’s all about the branded goods and the cache associated with those. National brands could make a comeback with social gaming to combat private label.

Just remember: “Great social games begin with an obsessive understanding of how people are socializing. The marketers’ task is to translate everyday socializing behaviors into meaningful actions for their brands.”

Pepsi is going to try. They just introduced  a “social” vending machine that lets users buy beverages for friends by delivering a code that can be redeemed at any such machine.

“Our vision is to use innovative technology to empower consumers and create new ways for them to engage with our brands, their social networks and each other at the point of purchase,” said Mikel Durham, chief innovation officer at PepsiCo Foodservice. “Social Vending extends our consumers’ social networks beyond the confines of their own devices and transforms a static, transaction-oriented experience into something fun and exciting they’ll want to return to, again and again.”

Hm… perhaps this would work well in schools, but if I were going to buy something for my friends, I don’t know that I would buy them a pop over offering to grab a coffee. Perhaps not every experience needs to be social?

What do you think – is this going too far or is it the next big thing?

Not everyone agrees that social commerce has taken off – or will. We talked recently about how Forrester said that commerce would not be driven by Facebook.

And while we disagreed, we also know that a Facebook like is not social commerce. Here’s another synopsis on why social commerce has not quite made it to the big leagues yet, and what you can do it about, from Ad Age’s Judy Shapiro:

Agree or not — no one can debate that social commerce has not really happened yet no matter how cool Mashable or TechCrunch describe a new marketing technology. Is it too much to ask for these technologies to be designed to sell something — anything? Or, how about, just for a change, we stop chasing the ever elusive “Producers” or “Influentials” or whatever we call them and we get down to the business of actually selling them stuff online? Why does it seem like “cool” marketing technology and “commerce” are mutually exclusive?

I can’t say for sure but here’s an observation — marketing technology is rarely built by marketers. Most often it is built by entrepreneurs who know how to make it cleverly cool, but who don’t get the commerce/ social link yet. This means we end up with technologies which marketers then must contort into measurable programs (a huge challenge right there) that they hope they might actually drive a sale (at some undefined and hard to measure future point in time).

That’s a real pity because, well applied, the real beneficiaries of commerce ready marketing technology are not just big companies, but lots and lots of smaller e-tailers (translate this to lots and lots of market potential).

Some of the cleverest tech companies are recognizing the huge market potential of merging local, mobile and social to drive commerce. Take these two examples. First is the recent deal between Addoway, the online trusted “social” marketplace and Reply/Buy, a mobile platform that lets users actually purchase product via phones. These companies have come together to curate a user experience that makes m-commerce almost frictionless (hooray). Or, take the example of a company called Big Door. This is a tech company that creates mini toolbars based on gaming theory so every action lets visitors earn points redeemable for products. It’s the first toolbar I have seen that drives commerce forward (double hooray since most mini toolbars just enhance the share function).

I agree with Shapiro that it will be the user experience that next defines the next era of the social web, not the utilization of Facebook.

Jimmy Dean wanted to solve those traditionally tough coupon problems of distribution and targeting and turned to a shareable coupon campaign. Here’s how it worked:

Basically the coupon campaign, which ran for a month, allowed online users to print off a coupon worth $1 off a 4-count pack of D-lights. However, if they chose to share the offer with three of their friends via email, Facebook Twitter or MySpace, they could score a coupon worth $2.50 off the same merchandise.

Sounds like the Huggies campaign right? So, did it work? Oh yes -

According to metrics provided by SocialTwist, in the 30 days the Jimmy Dean D-lights coupon campaign ran, more than 64% of users who came to the microsite opted to refer the coupon to their friends and get the higher rebate. Of those referrers, more than 70% of the sharing was done via email, while 27% of users shared over Facebook, and 1% each over Twitter and MySpace.

However, when it came to which channels produced the most clickthroughs from those referred friends, Facebook won out at almost 41% of shares, compared to only about 30% for email. And although it had fewer users, Twitter proved almost as effective as email in terms of driving traffic from referred friends: 29.35 of those who saw the referring tweet from someone they followed went on the click through to the microsite.

Word of mouth works best when it comes from those you know and allowing your customers to spread what’s valuable to them to each other is always important. This type of deal is still early enough that it can still be incredibly effective, so don’t wait to get on the bandwagon!

For some companies, an online coupon is social enough. Huggies recently took it one step further, however, with an innovative offer: “Instead of just the traditional online coupon to drive more diapers off the shelf, Huggies is offering parents a 2-for-1 choice.  More precisely – that is a choice between a $3.00 or $1.50 incentive.  The “catch” is simple and pleasant – just tell 3 friends about the Huggies deal.  They also offer customers the choice of how to spread the news to other fellow parents:  via social networking sites like Facebook, via instant messaging or via a good old-fashioned email,” reports Colloquy.

Their research shows that child care is the most important category for advice and referrals from friends and family, which makes the Huggies promotion all the more critical and smart.

The offer is clear, engaging and compelling – word of mouth at it’s best.

“As a marketing tool for online community and influence engagement, every brand and agency should be considering the use of Tumblr when developing long-term marketing programs; it’s going to become as commonly used as Twitter or Facebook.”

That quote via Jessica Now seems to predict what the next big thing just might be. While we’ve heard through the grapevine that Tumblr is focusing more exclusively on the fashion industry, it’s strength is it’s simplicity in uploading and sharing images, video and other media content – all of which are uber important to the CPG industry.

Could Tumblr prove to be just as important for CPG manus as Facebook has been? Or by the time the CPG industry catches up will Tumblr be old news?

Do you use Tumblr for your brand or personally? I’ve only used it for personal experiments, and have to say, I don’t exactly get all the hoopla…