3 Ways P&G Drives Traditional Marketers to Social

I had thechance to speak with Lucas Watson from P&G last week. He spearheads digital innovation on the marcom side and leads a small team of digital and social experts who work across the brands (Global Team Leader for Digital Business Strategy). Clearly P&G has an earnest commitment to applying social media and other digital marketing innovations to their way of marketing. I have been reading Design of Business from Roger Martin and believe their efforts in terms of applying 'design thinking' to their business has created a culture that makes social easier to embrace.

3 Ways to Get to the Hard Cases

I asked Lucas how he has seen the most entrenched traditional marketers become more "willing" to use social. What does he do to help them? He gave me the following three things;

1. Get them out of the office. Take them somewhere provocative like to a startup's office or to the Googleplex or somewhere where they can feel and see the excitement of doing things differently. Don't try and convince them in a conference room at P&G behind a Powerpoint slide

2. Get a digital champion on the brand. Every team needs an enthusiast who will push and keep challenging the usual way. We constantly shift between making digital everyone's job and embedding it via true experts. Truth is both are necessary and the balance will change over time as more people make digital a part fo their jobs.

3. Show them the ROI to inform marketing modeling. P&G is know for their marketing modeling. This simply confirms what each of us not inside the company would guess and that is that you have to have a 'pretty good' story of both the performance and ROI to convince hard core marketers like those at an FMCG (fast moving consumer goods).

Many brands and many, many social media consultants underestimate the power fo this last point. No doubt that ROI is far harder than performance measurement (knowing if a social strategy is working better this time around). And the full benefits of a social media-based marketing approach has positive impact beyond the short term sales impact. Still it can be done and and it is one of the key ways to get break down barriers to adopting social media-based word of mouth programs. Check out WOMMA's Measurement and Metrics Guidebook for more.

Comments

[Andrew Foote]

Great insights. The 'champion' and ROI approaches are tried-and-true. Love the point about taking marketers out of their environs...not your typical answer on selling social but something I see being very effective.

[Tim Holmes]

yes , one has to move out of traditional methods! affiliate marketing is one such thing. read it here http://www.aceaffiliates.com/affiliate-education/how-to-find-valid-affiliate-programs.html

[Amy Jackson]

Hi John - Glad to see you underscoring the importance of social media initiatives/ROI within traditional marketing departments. That's why my client StrongMail is introducing a new product suite that marketers can use to engage with their brand influencers in social channels and get detailed ROI and analytics.

I would love your opinion on this approach. You can see live examples of campaigns that are going on right now…

http://mozy.com/share

http://store.theflip.com/en-us/designs/upload.aspx?cid=m2

To complete the suite, a campaign management application will soon launch in private beta, to help marketers engage their fans and followers on Twitter and Facebook, with detailed analytics on campaign performance.

Sound interesting?