Behind every amazing athlete is an even more amazing mom. This is the clear message that is, and will continue to be, presented by Procter & Gamble during the course of this year’s London 2012 Olympic Games.
The problem faced by the largest global marketers in the social space is how to effectively leverage their global footprint, consisting of tens or hundreds of millions of consumers across markets and platforms, to successfully roll out an impactful and measurable campaign at scale. Smart marketers are addressing this problem head on by blending three separate disciplines – Social Program Design, Social Story and UX Architecture, and Social Technology Delivery – into one unified approach, by working with only with best-of-breed partners that can deliver end-to-end solutions at scale.
To get into the spirit of this year’s program, take two minutes and watch this amazing video, which touches on Procter & Gamble’s theme of calling the world to take the simple action of saying “Thank you, Mom.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NScs_qX2Okk
For those of you who watched the video – take a few moments to dry your eyes. You need those Puff’s tissues because of this emotional connection that is innate in most of us based on the role parents, specifically mothers, play in the development of us as human beings. The spirit of this video is what is being translated into Procter & Gamble’s social initiatives; to let individuals be the ones creating their stories of thanks for their mothers, and for mothers as a whole around the world.
One of the solutions for this year’s “Thank you, Mom” initiative involved providing each Procter & Gamble local market around the world the opportunity to engage their consumers in a lightweight manner through social channels. The ask on the consumer is easy – simply open your heart, provide a message thanking your mother and share this message across your network. It’s these opportunities for lightweight interactions that will create countless conversations in social to get the big marketing message across for Procter & Gamble this year. The “big idea” is now deeply rooted in sustained, simple interactions around stories. To deliver optimal results, social programs and experiences can no longer be designed without marketers having an intricate understanding of how to leverage social technologies and the art & science of storytelling through the Open Graph. The social experiences that deliver business results are those that are framed so that the interactions that happen within the experience result in lightweight stories that propagate widely and deeply throughout the social graph. Never before was this possible at such a massive scale, but Facebook, through its brilliant marriage of owned, earned, and paid media, now enables us to deliver engagement at scale in a measurable manner.
Stuzo | Dachis Group was there from day one, working hand-in-hand with Proctor & Gamble, Facebook and a variety of leading agency partners to bring the program to life. A set of managed services from codified UX guidance, to Open Graph Object and Story architecture, to the development of a scale-advantaged technology solution, with real-time optimizations and ongoing measurement dashboard build and analysis were provided by our dedicated team to deliver optimal business outcomes. The result was an experience that lived on Facebook, with data integrated on a social microsite, and connected with various YouTube channels. The experience enabled consumers to engage with the program across social channels so that they could include their very own ‘thank you’ to the important mothers in their lives. Consumers can create their ‘thank you’ using text, photo, video, or their computer’s webcam, and then post it simultaneously to mom’s Timeline and into a public gallery to be shared with the world.
Organic “thank you” stories flowing throughout the social graph, resulting in earned media turning to paid media and vice-versa, generating outsized amplification and business results for Procter & Gamble. Localized versions of the Thank You, Mom experience were deployed to dozens of individual markets’ Facebook pages, from the US to the UK, from Russia to India, to Japan and Latin America , and virtually everywhere in between – delivering a heartwarming scale-advantaged, global social activation for the largest global marketer during the worlds biggest sporting event. This is Engagement @ Scale.
