Showing CPGs How to Socialize.

Advertising spending figures present at best a grainy picture of social media marketing activities. Many brands consider social media interactions to be “earned” media—gained through promotional efforts rather than paid advertising. CPG firms in particular have seen success through other forms of outreach.

CPGs can use social media to humanize their brand and create loyalty simply by being available when consumers have a problem, question or compliment. Among all forms of social media, social networks draw the most attention from CPG marketers. That is due, in part, to their sizable user base. CPG companies are mass marketers, even as they use social media to reach individual consumers. Branded fan pages are a common first step.

While some Facebook fan pages for CPG products are hugely popular, it can be hard for, say, everyday cleaning products to garner as much brand loyalist love as is shown by the millions of Coca-Cola drinkers who broadcast their fandom on the social network. The key is to connect with consumers in an authentic way that makes sense based on the brand values they’ve been familiar with for years.

Dawn’s “Everyday Wildlife Champions”

A longtime supporter of charities that work to clean wildlife caught in oil spills and other natural disasters, the Dawn brand in summer 2009 took its first big step into social media with a Facebook fan page and a sponsored Facebook application tied to its wildlife conservation efforts.

The “Everyday Wildlife Champions” page had garnered 15,000 fans as of late October 2009. The page is part of a larger cause marketing effort in which Dawn pledged to donate $1 to two wildlife charities for every bottle of detergent purchased, up to $500,000. The campaign also included a TV commercial and companion Website, www.dawnsaveswildlife.com, where consumers could register a code on their bottle to activate a donation.

“How do you elevate a brand linked to a chore and make it something people want to engage with? The cause has allowed us to do that in a credible and emotionally engaging way.”

— Susan Baba, external relations manager for dish care, Procter & Gamble, in an interview with eMarketer

A sponsorship of RockYou’s Pieces of Flair Facebook application helped drive people to the page. Users could share Dawn-branded Flair buttons on their Facebook page and send them to their Facebook friends. Within three weeks after the sponsorship launched in July 2009, more than 1.7 million Dawn-branded buttons were shared. The key demographic group for the application is females ages 18 to 49, squarely in Dawn’s target audience.

Like other CPG companies, P&G is wrestling with how to adapt its traditional marketing practices to social media. One of the biggest challenges is letting consumers take the lead. Measurement is another challenge. Dawn is using what Ms. Baba called “more rudimentary measures of success,” such as keeping track of how many people are engaging with wall posts, how many “likes” a comment gets and what consumers are saying about the brand.

“Social media is a way for us to have a voice other than ‘Hey, I’m your dish liquid.’”

Another issue P&G is grappling with: how to maintain fans’ interest after the marketing campaign is done. P&G had planned to stop actively seeding the Facebook page at the end of September, when the campaign was slated to conclude. But because it has not reached its $500,000 goal (total donations as of late October 2009 were $135,000), Dawn will continue to accept donations online and support the Facebook page.

“We’ve made people care about a product they didn’t think a whole lot about before, and care about a cause,” Ms. Baba said. “Now we have this group of consumers that’s chosen to actively engage. You can’t stop that momentum. Social media is a relationship, and like any relationship you have to invest in that.”

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