Pleo

A two-part study of how some online brands are using social media to build customer loyalty finds that friendship can involve a lot of work—and some companies just aren’t putting in the time.

Online marketing agency OneUpWeb started before the Christmas shopping season by singling out a dozen brands that seemed either to have social communities in place around their products or appeared to be poised to build them in time for the holidays. The study analyzed the potential each brand could maximize by using social media of various kinds, from social networks and virtual reality to blogs, podcasts, consumer reviews, user-generated video and interactive tours.

All these features are “tools and platforms people use to publish, converse and share content online,” the first report said last fall. They also serve to cement brands’ relationships with consumers and keep them coming back to the Web sites and staying longer than average when they get there. Many of these social media features also offer the chance to get indexed more often by Google and other search engines. Since Google now regularly includes blogs and video content in its Universal Search, brands that commit to pouring new content into these social channels can find that they own more of the real estate on those results pages–and that competitors get correspondingly less space for their own listings.

But in its follow-up study released earlier this month, OneUpWeb found that those same 12 brands that seemed social leaders turned in a very inconsistent record when it came to realizing that pre-holiday promise.

The agency found that five of the marketers it singled out in fall 2007 for their social efforts online either sustained or even expanded those initiatives during the holiday shopping period and were rewarded with year-over-year traffic boosts to their Web sites (and presumably increases in their online sales, although it’s still too early to confirm those quarterly results.) The Web sites for the Nintendo Wii game system, Coach leather goods, the Pronto comparison shopping site, beauty and cosmetics merchant Sephora and Pleo, a robotic dinosaur that “learns”, all won plaudits for keeping up the good social work through the holidays.

But the seven other brands highlighted in the first report chose to switch their social media tactics—in some cases altering them, in others basically abandoning the initiatives. Starbucks, Target, and the sites for the iPod Touch music player, the Casio Exilim and the Webkinz plush toy line all changed their social media strategies, for better or worse, according to OneUpWeb.

And two sites—for luxury shoe designer Taryn Rose, a division of Nike’s Cole Haan, and another for the book release A Thousand Splendid Suns by the author of The Kite Runner—essentially squandered the good capital they had invested in social media.

In Taryn Rose’s case, says OneUpWeb chief researcher Amy Booth, the brand’s good efforts in September (a corporate MySpace page, a personal blog by founder Rose with a “Tal to Taryn” e-mail link, and video footage of Rose and her products on various media outlets) simply went unmanaged and fell into disuse. The blog degenerated into a “flog” or fake blog, with few entries, undated posts and no reader comments; and the Taryn Rose MySpace actually lost one of the four “friends” it had in the earlier study.

“With Taryn Rose, there was a very promising amount of social media that had been incorporated and done well, but then it was just abandoned,” Booth says. “I think the lesson there is that starting a social media effort but then not spending the time it requires to maintain and manage is probably worse than never doing it at all. You run a risk of alienating customers by seeming to invite them to come back to your social site, but not giving them anything new when they do.”

Retailer Target was forced to change its social strategy soon after the first OneUpWeb report. In October the company groomed a pack of carefully chosen college-age influentials into a group it called Target Rounders and offered them discounts and free merchandise to market Target products to their peers and funnel feedback to the company. Target also set up a Facebook page and requested that its Rounders post to that page, talking up the company and its products.

Unfortunately, the Rounders were also instructed not to disclose their Target connections to fellow Facebookers. And unfortunately but (let’s face it) inevitably, one of those Rounders grew uncomfortable and went public, setting off a blitz of negative publicity that undercut Target’s social efforts through the holidays.

“If using social media is a process of communication, people want it to be an honest one, and they’re very sensitive to being deceived,” Booth says. She points out that Target also integrated shopper-friendly tools into its Web pages, including a “sticky note” feature in its online toy catalog that let users post a note to themselves on a page and rediscover it when they returned to that page later.

But by Christmas both of Target’s big-box competitors had also incorporated social media into their campaigns, with Wal-Mart launching its Check Out company blog and Kmart amassing its own cadre of brand evangelists with My SHC Community (for Sears Holding Company, Kmart’s parent).

Nintendo also made big changes in its community-building initiatives, but Booth says they seem to represent a strengthened bond with Wii owners. Basically, the company has taken its social media off the Nintendo Website and moved that content onto the Internet-enabled Wii console, letting users communicate with the brand and with each other in the same location where they play their games.

The available channels offer news, weather and shopping but also social functions like photo-sharing and message boards. A new “Mii channel” lets users design cartoon avatars for use in game play, and a “Check Mii Out” channel lets them examine, rate and trade other users’ Miis. Another channel called “Everybody Votes” polls users on general questions others in the community have sent in.

“The Wii system is an investment product, and Nintendo was well served by shifting their social efforts from first-time online sales on the Web to long-term customers via the game console,” Booth says. “By doing so, they’re building brand loyalty with their current community. It will be interesting to look back in six months and see if Nintendo has also cut themselves off from some shoppers or first-time buyers by moving this social network off the Web.”

The move also meant that Wii competitor Sony Playstation won the holiday Web site traffic derby handily, since all its social content (blogs, discussion forums and videos) reside on-site. But since Wii far outpaced PS3 in sales this Christmas—at the height selling at a rate of 17 per second on Amazon.com– Nintendo probably deserves credit for a successful social selling season, Booth says.

Pleo

Another marketer making hay from the social scene last Christmas was Ugobe, makers of Pleo, a robotic dinosaur programmed to learn behavior and respond to sensory cues from its owner. The manufacturer created intentional buzz around December’s product launch by getting early versions onto some morning news shows and releasing videos of Pleo in action to the tech-y portions of the blogosphere. (Additional buzz came as Ugobe pushed back the general launch date from September to mid-December, even as Amazon was taking pre-orders for the product.)

But the real social driver around Pleo the dino is that the product comes with its own online community, PleoWorld, where owners can post and share profiles of their robot pets and download occasional software upgrades from Ugobe that enable those pets to perform more actions. As with Webkinz and some other online groups, PleoWorld is accessible with a code that owners get at purchase.

According to the manufacturer, some 6,000 owners had registered at PleoWorld by the first of this year, many of them after the gift-giving was done. “Owners wanted to share their experiences with their new ‘pet’,” Booth writes in this month’s report. “It’s a perfect example of the potential of social media to let consumers sell your product for you.”

Marketers can look at the brand stories in the OneUpWeb study and glean some specific ideas for social-media tactics, of course. But Booth says one big-picture lesson for her from this before-and-after comparison was the importance of investing enough resources in any social program.

“Like any other kind of marketing, using social media requires a lot of planning and time spent,” she says. “That lesson applied to all twelve of the brands we studied across the board. They all started out with social strategies of various kinds, as we showed in our September report. Some of them spent that time and made that commitment of man-hours, while others didn’t, and that made a difference in holiday traffic.”