Tag Archives: P&G

by Michelle Lentz

I love it when my city hits the national news for something other than race riots or boycotting Robert Mapplethorpe. In fact, I can proudly say we’ve come a long, long way since those days.

The latest national news out of Cincinnati is what’s being billed as The World’s Largest Tweet-Up. I’m not sure if that’s accurate on a number of levels, but it doesn’t matter. It’s good marketing for a good cause, and a great example of a non-profit using social media to raise awareness.

Last July, musician Katie Reider passed away at age 30 from a rare form of cancer that attacked the left side of her face. It left her blind in one eye and unable to do what she did best – sing. Katie was a local musician for us, but she’d been on the national scene as well, and was one of those artists spotlighted on WB shows like Dawson’s Creek.

500Kin365.org, was created in May of 2008 with the help of Katie Reider’s loyal fanbase to reconnect and introduce 500,000 people to Katie Reider, her music and her story over the next year, as she continued to undergo treatment. The site took off, and the goal is to introduce 500,000 people to her music. Two sets of Katie’s songs can be downloaded for only $1 each on the site and 100% of the proceeds to go help pay off the family’s exorbitant medical bills.

Now for the Tweet-up. About 500,000 people attend our annual Taste of Cincinnati event on Memorial Day weekend. Until last year, the Katie Reider Band had entertained at the food festival for almost 10 years. This year, Taste of Cincinnati will spotlight the Katie Reider Stage, presented by Avalon and Metromix.com Cincinnati at P&G Gardens, as the first stage in the history of Cincinnati named for a pioneer of gay and lesbian rights and as the first stage in the annals of Taste of Cincinnati named for a performer. I told you we’d come a long way.

The goal is for everyone to tweet awareness of the whole deal. 500,000 attendees might equal 500,000 downloads of Katie’s music. Called 3 Tweets 4 Katie, the campaign uses the shorthand Katie used in her everyday life.

Tens of thousands of tweets are expected to fill the Twitterverse over the Memorial Day weekend in honor Reider’s life and music. The Friends of Katie Reider encourage peeps around the world to adopt new Twitterminology and embrace a Reider family tradition: “3″ means “I love you” and “4″ means “I love you, too.” With tweets limited to 140 characters on Twitter, organizers believe the Reider family tradition of “3″ and “4″ may likely gain a global following as new Twitter shorthand.

Remember, you don’t have to be at Taste of Cincinnati to participate. You can tweet directly from the 3 Tweets 4 Katie site and show your love for the cause. Your tweet will help expose other people to Katie’s music and help achieve those 500,000 downloads. Or you can just spend $1 and download a set of her songs.

Here’s a a YouTube clip from Katie Reider’s last show:

__

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

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

_____________________

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.

__

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.

by Michelle Lentz

Every now and then, something exciting happens here in Cincinnati. This week, our local giant Procter & Gamble brought in the digerati so that P&G could learn more about social media. You may have seen folks hawking Tide t-shirts on Twitter? That was the P&G Digital Hack night.

We weren’t all lucky enough to attend that event, but a lot of folks came out for a happy hour the evening before, sponsored by Cincinnati’s rather wildly successful startup, ShareThis and organized by our Social Media Breakfast team of Daniel Lally, Dave Knox, and Kevin Dugan. The event took place at Bootsy’s, a rather hip restaurant co-produced by Bootsy Collins and local restaurateur Jeff Ruby.

I took photos, but I’m no Brian Solis.   Full event photos can be found on Flickr.

Ben Lerer (Thrillist), Dave Knox (P&G), Chad Sims (Hyde Park Blast), Adam Paulisick (Nielsen Online)

Chris George (MySpace), Tim Schigel (ShareThis)

Dave Tokheim (SixApart), Heidi Browning (MySpace), Emrah Kovacoglu (TotalBeauty.com)

Phil Wierbinski (MySpace), Chris George (MySpace)

Bobby Uhlenbrock (Ample), Kevin Dugan (PR Blog / FRCH), Josh Fendley (Ample)

__

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net