THE GROUNDSWELL TRANSFORMS

PRESENTED BY:PRAVEEN MOHAN

STEPHANIE BAKERDIANA JOHNSON

Groundswell:Part Three

HOW CONNECTING WITH THE GROUNDSWELL TRANSFORMS YOUR

COMPANYCASE STUDIES – UNILEVER (DOVE) & DELL

Chapter 10

Groundswell – Transforms your company

Case 1 Unilever: Parent company of brands like Axe, Lipton,

Vaseline, Dove, etc.. Annually they spend over billion dollars in marketing

products. Rob Master and Babs Rangaiah helped Unilever to use

Internet as media to market their Dove Brand products.

Dove’s 75 second “Evolution” Video on YouTube was watched by over 5 million people in less than a year

Dove "Evolution" Video

Groundswell - Unilever

The “Evolution” video garnered the top advertising awards at Cannes advertising festival, and best of all it caused a surge of traffic to Dove’s Campaign for real beauty website- more than double what Dove’s 2006 super bowl ad drove.

Dove spent 2.5 million dollars to air this commercial during super bowl whereas literally nothing for You tube commercial.

The largest advertising spender embraced low-cost, low-control social technologies, but it did not happen overnight.

Groundswell - Transformation

The three essential elements to this transformation:Important to take step by step First, mental shift takes time and practice and

requires a repertoire of shared successes, building on these stepping stones is also essential to giving opportunity to adjust their concepts of how things should work.

Second, each of these stepping stones leads in a natural progression to the next step, you need a plan and vision to take your organization to the next level

Third, you have to have executive support. Realistically you need to start small and sell it to your upper management to embrace groundswell thinking

Groundswell - Unilever

For Dove’s campaign for real beauty in 2004, they took a big risk by featuring everyday average women instead of industry norm of using slender, young, perfect models. This radical idea was well researched and it worked well.

Dove tried to market their product using NBC reality television show “The Apprentice”, this paid well for them as well, as it generated increased number of hits to Dove.com transforming into higher sales.

The above experiences and several other led them to experiment with the Web using the Evolution video that became a huge success.

Groundswell - Unilever

Lessons learnt from Unilever: Take small steps that have big impact

Innovative campaign for real beauty Featuring in “The Apprentice” “Evolution” video

Have a vision and a plan Transformational thinking can be maddening slow, but

patience pays. Top executives at Unilever had a vision of Unilever’s

potential with groundswell thinking. Build leaders into the plan.

1. The top executives were relentless in embracing emerging media and give consumers the voice in the brand

Groundswell - Risks

Sometimes business books make it look easy by showing only success stories, companies sometimes fail to embrace groundswell.

An ‘X’ company spent 8 months in detailed planning in creating an executive blog, but the idea never took of since it was shot down by the executives, who feared loss of control over marketing message and prospect of getting negative comments from customers.

The executive team also did not have any idea about what groundswell was.

Groundswell - Dell

Dell is pretty advanced in using Groundswell to its advantage.

In fact, Dell’s entry into the groundswell began as real trial-by-fire crisis.

In 2001, the company started off shoring its customer support, and its customer satisfaction began to decline in 2005 according to a survey.

In 2005, Journalism professor and noted blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote in his blog about the abysmal customer service he was receiving from the company.

Groundswell - Dell

Dell lies, Dell sucks.. Dell Hell. These were some of the comments he posted in his blog.

Dell’s hell was not just a PR nightmare, starting Nov 2005, the company’s profits started dropping and was losing its investors confidence.

On June 21, 2006 a Dell notebook caught on fire at a conference in Osaka, Japan, http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1042700/dell-laptop-explodes-japanese-conference

Groundswell - Dell

Dell’s VP of corporate group communications, Bob Pearson and his team began tracking blog posts, but they didn’t have ties back to the customer service to act on complaints.

There was no one in the company whose job was to reach out actively to bloggers with problems.

Dell had over 3 million customer contacts per day.

Later , Dell setup digital media plan with a blog and assigned a product expert to manage it.

Groundswell - Dell

Dell started proactively responding to customer issues, they also issued an update on the flaming notebook at Japan.

The blog team had access to departmental managers within Dell so that they could respond proactively in the blog to the issues related to them

Taking up on the success of the blog, Dell later launched “Ideastorm”

Groundswell - Dell

Lessons learnt: It took a crisis or two to get Dell get started. Once

they were in, they really took it to the next level. Dell mastered one thing at a time, starting with

listening. Listening to blogs, to solving bloggers problems, to blogging themselves, to IdeaStorm, they pulled themselves up into the groundswell.

Executive push and cover made the difference: Michel Dell provided support from the top, giving Bob and Lionel the ability to breakdown departmental silos.

Authenticity was crucial: Dell couldn’t get anywhere in the groundswell until it honestly admitted its flaws.

Groundswell – Preparing transformation

Implementing Groundswell in an organization can be minefield with full of risks, but with proper planning you can succeed.

First, start small Second, educate your executives Third, get the right people to run your strategy Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in

sync. Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.

THE GROUNDSWELL INSIDE YOUR

COMPANY

Chapter 11

Employee Quote

I work retail. I inspire creativity and fun with my employees. I grand open stores, as many as possible, really. And I have never before

loved a job and a company the way I love this one.

My name is Ashley Hemsath, and I am Best Buy.

Tapping the Groundswell inside your company

The bigger a company is, the more of a problem internal communication becomes.

Information tends to flow down the ladder, but rarely does it go back up.

Around the world, employees are connecting on internal social networks, collaborating on wikis, and contributing to idea exchanges

Case Study:Best Buy: Connecting Far-Flung Sales Associates

Blue Shirt Nation was started by two corporate marketing guys, Steve Bendt & Gary Koelling, who wanted to gather customer insight on what kinds of advertising worked.

“We had a lot of posts that said it sucked”It turned out, money wasn’t what was needed

to make Blue Shirt Nation a success, participation was

The Impact of the Blue Shirt Nation

Best Buy didn’t anticipate that Blue Shirt Nation would not only educate management, but enable employees to help each other.

Some managers worry that connecting employees will create a revolt, and sometimes it does.

The Blue Shirt Nation (video)

Internal Groundswell Benefits

ListeningTalkingEnergizingSupportingEmbracing

Case Study:Avenue A/Razorfish: Collaborating on a

Wiki

Collaborating on a Wiki(Video)

Wikis are spreading through the corporate world

Intel-IntelpediaOrganic-Organism

Case Study:Bell Canada: Driving Cultural Change from the Bottom Up

The Director of Collaboration services was trying to find a better way of dealing with ideas in the company.

Created ID-ah!, which allows anyone in the company to submit an idea and then have the employees vote on it.

Within a year and a half, more than a 1,000 ideas and 3,000 comments had been submitted.

Companies should deploy social technologies internally only when organized change is both desirable and possible.

Strategies for nurturing the internal Groundswell

The internal Groundswell is all about creating new ways for people to connect and work together. It’s about relationships, not technology.

Internal Groundswells work only when management is listening

Plan to ramp up in stages and ease people’s participation

Find and encourage rebelsCulture and relationships trump technologies

THE FUTURE OF THE GROUNDSWELL

Chapter 12

Jason Korman

Makes wineIt’s a terrible

businessDistribution is

challengingAwareness from

magazinesKnew he needed a

different approach

Jason’s Different Approach

Concentrated on the experiences wine is a part of and not the wine in the bottle

Groundswell thinking To encourage people having a good time with his wine to

talk about itJune 2005

Sent wine to 185 bloggers in the United Kingdom and Ireland

Also sent a little booklet suggesting that they write about it if they liked it, or even if they didn’t

By the end of 2005 305 blog posts mentioning the wine

Results

Partnered with Hugh McLeod Brought his international following, catchy graphics,

and intuitive feel for what works in groundswell Pamphlet gave credibility and authenticity

Two years later a $10 million businessJason has continued to build success with a

Facebook group, YouTube videos, and Flickr photos CNN, Advertising Age, and Microsoft http://www.stormhoek.com/blog/ http://gapingvoid.com/2007/02/23/stormhoeks-jason-k

orman-interviewed-on-winecast/

Stormhoek

It lives in the groundswell

The internet is its marketing department

Created a company in multiple countries

They live in the groundswell and know they will grow as it grows

http://www.youtube.com/StormhoekWines#p/f/30/ODvfb37nR_4

The Ubiquitous Groundswell

Technologies are explodingThey are cheap and easy to create and

improveTap into the Internet advertising economyResult

Groundswell is about to be embedded within every activity

Social networks will connect people with the groups they care about

Transactions will be constantly rated and reviewed Tags will reorganize the way we find things Feeds will alert any changes in content

Let’s spend a day in that future.

A day in the life of the ubiquitous groundswell

You’re in marketing at a shoe companyYou wake up on December 1, 2012Your phone

You’ve set it to bring you information from the Wall Street Journal, Footwear News, and Women’s Wear Daily

The feeds are smart Comment from your phone Receive alert that interstate is backed up

At the Office

Check your monitoring dashboard – is it mauve or canary yellow

On your blog you make a trial balloonSearch ShoeTube to find source of the buzz

Put a link in your blog and a link to your post on Super Shoe

Update internal wiki so manufacturing and retail relations know what you’re up to

Time for lunch and turn your phone on private

Afternoon

Of the 191 comments on your blog – 75% are positive Competitors can see this You have an edge

You place an order that goes straight to your boss and operations – no need to contact them

You will post the news on your blog in a week or two It will be too late for competitors to catch up

Shoe ambassadorsLook and see that daughter and friends are

talking about algebra on FaceSpace.soc

Groundswell Changing Companies

Mobile Internet, feeds, communities, blogs, and wiki Already working right now Participation is missing – but rapidly on its way

unhealthy focus on the short term –instead creation of effective long-term strategies

Will make incremental moves with feedbackWill have a secure relationship with

customers

Groundswell Changing Companies

Companies will need to make the groundswell a resource

Product cycles will speed upConstant feedbackStrategies based on deception will be doomed

Attaining Groundswell Thinking

Advice on not what to do, but how to be!Developing the right attitude

Never forget it is about person-to-person activity Be a good listener Be patient Be opportunistic Be flexible Be collaborative Be humble

Questions?