Dr. Laundry’s Blog: A Stain on Corporate Social Media

I love it when big, rich, sophisticated companies stumble like blindfolded spendthrift drunks into the world of social media.

I refer to Clorox’s Dr. Laundry. The good doctor provides an object lesson of how to misuse social media.

It’s a blog designed to serve people who battle laundry problems. The good doctor, a 30-year veteran of laundry product development, answers questions.

How does Dr. Laundry’s blog fail the competent-use-of-social-media test?

1. Nearly every entry promotes one or more Clorox products. Violation: People don’t trust self-interested advice–they want information that will help them, regardless of which products are involved. They reject overt sales pitches on the web.

2. The questions appear to be made up. They are not signed by real people, yet they are labeled “Your Questions.” Violation: Lack of transparency; trying to create the impression of interaction where there is none.

3. It makes no attempt to solicit, or respond to, other ideas from people. It has attracted very few comments–nine comments between July 31 and September 4. The Doc does not appear to have responded to any of them. Violations: Muzzling the “wisdom of the crowds.” Failure to engage the audience you’re trying to attract; failure to leverage user input.

4. It pre-moderates comments. If you use a dirty-word and robot-spam filter, why keep comments off the blog? Add the names of competitors to the filter, if you’re feeling prudish. But pre-moderation depresses user interaction. I left a comment at 7 a.m. on Dec. 2. We’ll see when it’s posted–and if it’s responded to. Violations: Depresses user participation due to fear; ignores it due to indolence.

5. It does not link to outside content. Ah, the “walled garden” approach, which most others abandoned in 2003! A blog’s value is enhanced by links to outside content. Fear of “sending customers away” is how a retailer thinks, not a contemporary communicator who understands web user behavior and values. Violation: Sacrificing user value to shallow self-interest.

I’m sure there are ways to argue Dr. Laundry has been a success for Clorox. But the metrics don’t look good to me.

Its Technorati authority is 30, its ranking 209,329. Nearly all 50 of its inlinks are from blogs that are about corporate social media [many of them complimentary. Go figure].

Quarkbase suggests each user views 1.2 pages [page view count is not available].

The blog ranks 1,874,459 on Alexa, with its rank trending downward.

Eight items have been bookmarked on del.icio.us.

It has 27 coding errors that fall short of W3C standards.

I can’t tell which fancy social media consultant delivered this campaign for Clorox, but there is a “multimedia release” for which Ketchum PR is responsible, and the domain is registered to Ketchum. But it’s not clear whether that firm is responsible for creation of the site and its strategy.

I don’t care what Clorox does with its marketing budget. But for those of us who are self-interested consultants/providers/analysts in the social media space, badly done stuff like Dr. Laundry is harmful. Dr. Laundry becomes a lesson, to Clorox and its competitors, that “social media doesn’t work.”

The fact is, social media “works”–sometimes. It depends on what it’s intended to accomplish and whether it’s done creatively and intelligently. But it’s an immature form of communication, and even the best practitioners are learning as they go.

But social media has to be given a fair shot. Which requires following at least some basic best practices. And avoiding unsightly stains on the medium.