P&G Social Media Lab

Procter & Gamble’s Social Media Lab

P&G was one of the top 10 brands that our members wanted to talk to. So, we felt pretty lucky to be asked to participate in the P&G Social Media Lab.

P&G marketing has historically been known to try to impact consumers directly. When they can’t find solutions to help them reach the right people, they’ll pioneer their own, like Tremor, and Vocalpoint. Direct ownership of these initiatives by the brands gets into its own thorny issues about influencing consumers, and disclosure.

The P&G Social Media Lab, I believe, helps broaden P&G’s perspective on how to harness the power of passionate consumers — beyond the simple, direct control of them. By exposing their brand managers to a broad range of robust community sites in a learning environment, their marketers are afforded the proper structure to evaluate and understand the strengths of this delicate, but powerful new source of consumer connectivity. The Lab helps facilitate the conversation between partner and marketer by instilling an even playing field for learning, and, more importantly, a structure to define success. The lab’s focus helps the conversation not slide into the predictable marketing mode of “what’s the CPM and how many eyeballs can I get”. I find that trodden line can singlehandedly stunt the emergence of new models and lead to unnatural, force-fit projects best suited for old media. Instead, our partnership discussions have been directed to define how engagement, influence, and dialogue can be measured (and priced) to ensure that the right consumers — the interested consumers — are reached. Our projects are focused on impacting the buying process, and on developing metrics which measure our members’ purchasing influence. By being invited to help craft the right success metrics, social networks involved in the Lab are empowered to make sure that their ‘consumer conversation’ projects don’t go as astray as they have when demographic reach and frequency became the end goal.

We talked a lot internally about how the P&G Social Media Lab helped ‘even the playing field’ for us so that we could influence how P&G brands should define success with our community. Because we are hyper-focused on our members’ expectations and needs, we think we can easily create something that will leave our community and P&G better off than when we started. Can’t say that for most of the eyeball deals I’ve done.

For the more official story on the social media lab…see Deb Schultz’s blog.