Sharpie and Others Offer Lessons in Getting Customers Talking

Almost the instant the news broke on “60 Minutes,” someone had sent a report and a screen shot to @sharpiesusan via Twitter.

Chris Martin, lead singer of the Grammy-winning band Coldplay, was using a green Sharpie marker to doodle possible lyrics and song titles on a white grand piano in his studio, and the news show aired a two-second beauty shot of the product during the 12-minute segment.

“Sharpie shows up in the most amazing places, but I have to say the alignment of Coldplay and ‘60 Minutes’ on one day was just amazing,” says Susan Wassel, social-media manager for Sharpie and currently the one-woman force behind its many social-media initiatives. “Coldplay was up for all those Grammys, and on this top-rated show — and there we were, a part of it. A small part, but a part of it,” she says.

Celebrity catches like that are part of Wassel's job as Sharpie's social-media evangelist, charged with spreading the word about Sharpie markers and what their most passionate and creative fans are doing with them. This fits with the brand's slogan, “Write Out Loud!” It also involves Wassel in almost every social-media channel imaginable, from a blog (http://blog.sharpie.com/) and a Twitter account to a Facebook page and a Flickr site where creatives can post the evidence of their “Sharpie Love” (http://www.flickr.com/groups/sharpielove/).

That Sharpie love is what led Wassel in late 2008 to urge her company to get involved in social media.

“We knew there were a lot of fans already out there,” she says. “We did some very cursory internal research, just going out and counting up Sharpie-dedicated Facebook pages, Sharpie-related blogs and Sharpie YouTube posts. We came up with a nice number of people who were already talking about us.”

So in addition to her promotional jobs — sponsoring gallery shows of Sharpie art, handing out Sharpies at the Academy Awards, etc. — Wassel took on the task of enriching that customer/fan conversation.

“Our intent was not to interrupt the conversation but to complement it and add to it where that made sense,” she says. “We've been welcomed by that existing Sharpie community, which is actually thrilled to hear from us. We're sharing all sorts of good resources, and they love us for it.”

Those resources include a T-shirt designer who customizes designs with a Sharpie, an artist who draws on gourds to create Sharpie snakes, and instructions on how to dye a wig using Sharpie ink.

The Sharpie blog site gets about 10,000 unique monthly visitors, and at press time Wassel is closing in on 1,000 followers on Twitter. Neither of those would be standout stats for a big-budget corporate Web effort. But given that Sharpie's social-media campaigns have so far involved about $2,000 in start-up costs (“mostly for the blog header, and we probably overpaid,” Wassel says), the returns are strong in terms of brand attachment from Sharpie's fan base.

“Everybody owns a black Sharpie,” she says. “We want to give them a reason to own the rest of the colors.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

These are tough times for marketing and promo tactics that can be labeled “experimental.” Efforts to reach customers through all channels are being held up to a return-on-investment yardstick, and many that can't demonstrate an immediate bottom-line impact are being dialed back, at least during the downturn.

But brands like Sharpie, Home Depot, Walmart, Molson and the CPG properties of Procter & Gamble are going ahead with social-media campaigns in spite of the economy. In fact, difficult times might in themselves provide a rationale for opening up the lines of communication with a brand's consumer advocates.

Nick Ayres, interactive marketing manager for Home Depot, told a corporate blogging conference last month that his company got involved in social media with the strategic aim of differentiating itself from its home-remodeling retailer competitors.

“We got to a point where our brand was not as differentiated as it used to be,” Ayres told the Chicago BlogWell meeting. “We built our brand 30 years ago on world-class customer service and home-improvement know-how. We employed ex-plumbers and ex-electricians in the aisles who could tell you not only how to use the products, but everything you'd need to complete a project.”

But workforce realities eroded that expert contingent among Home Depot's floor staff, with negative results. In March 2007, a blogger on MSN Money posted about a bad experience and lamented the chain's decline in expert service. That post got 7,000 equally negative comments in two weeks and elicited an apology from the Home Depot CEO.

“This really showed our executive team not only the power that social media has, but the energy that surrounds our brand,” Ayres said. Customers weren't neutral on the brand: They either loved Home Depot or hated it.

So about a year and a half ago, the chain began strategizing its “Digital Orange Apron” social-media effort, with three aims in mind: recapturing those customers who might have been turned off, connecting with new homeowners who might not yet have any established loyalty, and engaging staffers, particularly those in-house experts in Home Depot's 2,000 stores who serve as keepers of the do-it-yourself tribal knowledge.

Last year, Home Depot decided it could use social media to provide real value to customers by publicizing its natural-disaster prep-and-recovery abilities via a Twitter page. The company had already built these capacities into its logistics after 1992's Hurricane Andrew, and was typically the last retailer out and first back in when disasters struck. The company even maintains a hurricane command center at its Atlanta headquarters to plan response.

“There was a huge opportunity for us to take that internal knowledge and use tools like Twitter to spread that knowledge more effectively,” Ayres said. For example, his Internet team was able to tweet the decision to keep 20 area stores open around the clock for the two days before Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast in late August last year, getting the word out to Twitter followers faster than any other medium could.

Home Depot used Twitter to spread pre-disaster prep tips from its corporate guides. After Gustav and then Hurricane Ike, the chain also used Twitter to advise customers on stores that were temporarily out of the most needed supplies, such as bottled water and plywood, saving those customers a useless and probably dangerous store trip.

The company was also rigorous about keeping marketing messages out of the Twitter channel at these times of distress, even arguably relevant ones.

“We weren't using Twitter to sell products,” Ayres said. “No tweets about how the Home Depot at Sixth and Jones has four power generators and you can get them for $29.99. We were not at all pushing a hard sales message.”

In terms of possible results, while Home Depot's Twitter campaign may have produced some incremental sales, that was not the primary aim, Ayres told the blogger group.

“We wanted to give a face to the brand. Second, we wanted to lay down a building block for long-term preference and create a differentiator for us,” Ayres said.

He pointed to Twitter posts that suggested the beginnings of that brand loyalty, including one that read, “I can't believe Home Depot is on Twitter for their stores in affected areas. I've forsaken Lowe's for you entirely.”

DIFFERENT WAYS TO TALK

Sharpie's social media highlights creativity and fun; Home Depot focuses on service. But the aims and tactics for which social media are deployed, from corporate blogs and Twitter to online video and community comment, can vary widely according to what fits the brand.