Sharpie and Others Offer Lessons in Getting Customers Talking

For example, Walmart has launched its Elevenmoms blogger initiative, recruiting already-influential female bloggers (now more than 11, and with a few males thrown in too) to comment on Walmart products, services, policies and lifestyle in a magazine-format page on the company Web site at http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Community.aspx. The Walmart bloggers are unpaid and unsponsored, and are given free rein to write whatever they want about the retailer and its products, including critical remarks — as long as they're constructive.

Walmart has a mixed social-media history, having been caught “astro-turfing” a fake independent blog that they in fact sponsored, and currently running an under-subscribed corporate “Checkout Blog” at http://www.checkoutblog.com/. But the new approach is receiving view-positive reviews from both customers and marketing analysts for leveraging both the power of blogs and the credibility of uber-bloggers.

“Rather than Walmart trying to tell the story themselves … they've now figured out how to let their customers tell the story on their behalf — and that's the difference,” writes Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research senior analyst. “Given that corporate blogs aren't trusted — and people that you know are — this is the way to go for Walmart.”

Other brands, other social approaches. Canadian brewer Molson already knows people like its beers, partly because it's had a consumer-facing Web site since 1996. But a blog the brewer launched in January 2007 floundered initially because it seemed to have no central topic and no unifying voice.

“So we shuttered it,” says Adam Moffat, manager of brand and marketing PR for Molson. “We didn't want to have a blog just for the sake of one.” The blog re-launched in November 2007 with a new aim: to highlight the community projects pursued both by Molson corporate and its employees.

“We felt there was a need to publicize the human stories that the traditional press used to cover about the human side of our business, but which they now don't have the resources or mandate to cover,” Moffat says. “We've got 3,000 employees across Canada who are reaching in and helping their communities. Focusing the blog on that involvement is a showcase for our employees, invites visitors back to catch up regularly, and helps define an important part of our corporate brand.”

Sharpie's parent company, Newell Rubbermaid, blends the human and the how-to in the blogs it operates for its Rubbermaid container products and for its Graco line of baby strollers and infant products. And they have distinct aims: humanizing the brand in Graco's case, and highlighting the products in Rubbermaid's.

When Graco first began blogging in mid-2007, “people thought of us like any Fortune 500 brand,” says Bert Dumars, vice president of e-business and interactive marketing for Newell Rubbermaid. “We wanted to show that we are people and parents too, and would never put our kids in unsafe products.” As a result, the “Graco Heart to Heart” blog goes heavy on the personal baby stories and very light on marketing.

“If they want product information, they can click to the corporate Web site,” Dumars says.

On the other hand, the “Rubbermaid: Adventures in Organization” blog targets specific product awareness. “We found people knew the brand and knew we made trashcans,” Dumars says. “They didn't know we made organization systems for garages and closets or a complete food-storage line.”

So for the Rubbermaid blog, the company shows before and after projects, illustrating, for example, the real-life problems that its Fast-Track garage storage system can solve.

“My Rubbermaid Garage Makeover,” a five-part series posted last summer by one of the Rubbermaid bloggers, was a very popular feature — so popular that the blog has just chosen a reader to win her own Rubbermaid storage re-do, to be documented in the coming months.

Unlike Wassel's one-woman show for Sharpie, the Rubbermaid and Graco blogs tap into the expertise of multiple in-company bloggers — as many as a dozen bloggers in Graco's case, and professional organizers as guest bloggers for Rubbermaid.

As for Wassel, she may soon get some social relief. “We've just undergone an agency review, and social media is going to be much more highly integrated into our marketing aims going forward,” she says. “I'm looking forward to getting some additional support.”