I’m off live-blogging a wine festival today (I know. Poor me.) Kevin Dugan, whom you may know from the Bad Pitch Blog or the Strategic Public Relations blog has offered to fill in for me. Kevin was lucky enough to attend the P&G digital summit earlier this week, and here is his synopsis of the event.
- Michelle
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The first moment of truth is “the time it takes shoppers to make up their mind about a product” according to The WSJ. It’s a tight window at three to seven seconds, so P&G considers it the most important marketing opportunity for a brand.
Earlier this week I joined Peter Kim, David Armano, Jason Falls and representatives from companies including MySpace, Hulu and Google to help shape the first moment of truth with social media for 100 P&G employees.
Loads of Hope
40 nerds teamed up with 100 P&G marketers to help raise funds for disaster relief through Tide’s Loads of Hope project. And we did just that…$20 at a time. $50,000 was raised in four hours employing everything from Digg, blogs and Twitter to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and a host of niche community sites. Tide matched the $50K for the $100K in all.
The teams that broke down into smaller groups, around specific strategies, were able to test more ideas more easily and quickly. They focused on the ones that did work and dropped the ones that did not gain traction. This is a great lesson that can be applied across marketing projects in my opinion.
The competitive, reality TV nature of the event was intense as the final minutes approached. The digital dashboards shown above were posted throughout P&G’s learning center and clearly added to the urgency of the experiment. In one view we tracked sales, site visits and conversion rate for each team while the Twitter Feed tracking the event scrolled at the bottom – all in real time.
It’ll All Come Out in the Wash
Post-event we have the predictable, armchair dissection of the event by pundits. But most critics miss the point of this exercise.
This was a starting point for P&G — a learning exercise designed to show the power of social media that organized itself transparently around a good cause.
In the process 3,000 people got a t-shirt and, most importantly, $100K was raised for a great cause. The P&G marketers that continue to participate in social media will come to understand its true value which includes better customer relationships and, done correctly, establishing a personal dimension to their brand.
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Kevin Dugan attended the P&G event and has been blogging at Strategic Public Relations since 2002. More recently he created The Bad Pitch Blog.