Stephanie Fierman - Marketing Observations Grown Daily

Stephanie Fierman On Reverse-Engineering A Social Network

Thursday October 23rd 2008, 9:46 am
Filed under: ad agency,advertising,branding,facebook,Internet,loyalty marketing,stephanie fierman,word of mouth

Everyone knows that social networking is today’s IT girl of marketing. Most people aren’t exactly sure why, but there you are. What’s given me a chuckle are networks tossed together on a very loose definition of “shared” interests. Facebook, ironically, may the best example of them all. While it’s the media darling, to be sure, and has a kagillion members (including yours truly), most of whom have little in common. So its cosmic customer growth has been great for news outlets, but not so wonderful for marketers who quickly discover the limitations of Facebook applications and the difficulty of uncovering and aggregating “like” people.

Enter Unilever and their ad agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty who chose Kodiak, Alaska for its harsh physical conditions and promptly set up a storefront where they began giving away free bottles of a new Vaseline lotion, Clinical Therapy. From there, Vaseline representatives began asking visitors to pass the word and subsequent visitors had to name the townsperson who had referred them. In other words, they went hunting for a key influencer: a “tipping point person” whose advice people heeded and who could influence others to try a new product.

This is the way they found Petal Ruch, who tried the lotion when she read that the company was giving away samples.

Once she did, the company claims that she passed the product along to 1,000 town residents in only two weeks. The company set up a special website, www.prescribethenation.com, where visitors could see individuals who have tried the lotion and how many people they passed it on to. Unilever also spent several days filming documentary-like footage for the ad campaign, and site visitors can watch videos of each person talking about why they like the product.

This is an outstanding word-of-mouth effort that I hope wins some awards. The effort itself could not have been that expensive (no doubt the filming was the most costly element, not the consumer/storefront piece) and, most importantly, Unilever built a “social network” from the inside out: by finding a passionate advocate first, rather than building the network and hoping someone will pop out of it.

Unilever Bartle Bogle Hegarty Vaseline Clinical Therapy Kodiak