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.

Tropicana’s Orange State Twitter Strategy

What an incredible. . .thing New Media Strategies, a Washington, D.C. digital marketing firm, has created for Tropicana, the orange juice brand.

It’s called An Orange America.

The. . .thing displays an aggregation of Twitter updates about either John McCain or Barack Obama, visually indicating in blue or red which terms are linked more frequently to each candidate. Click on the words across the bottom, and arcs illustrate how each term is connected to others.

It’s hypnotic, in that high-nerd kind of way.

Two observations:

1. It’s an aggressively unexpected branding venture for an orange juice company. It’s all a stretch: the “We’re not red, we’re not blue, we’re 100 percent orange” slogan. . . the “squeezing” of “fresh” Tweets. . .the idea that the conceptual connections so vividly illustrated are meaningful. [What, for instance, does it mean that there is such frequent use in Obama-centric Tweets of the words "Biden" and "Pray"?]

You can just imagine the suits at PepsiCo who haven’t been in on the fun seeing this and going “WTF?????? How does this help us move more units of Low-Pulp in Q4? Minute-Maid is killing us with those in-store promotions!”

2. And yet: Viewed holistically, An Orange America conveys the impression that Tropicana is alert, progressive and in touch with emerging cultural forces–a significant shift from what you’d normally think about a mass marketer of juice products or its PepsiCo corporate overlords.

I think it’s great to see companies doing odd and wonderful things with social media.

The use of this stuff by big companies is still immature (by which I mean in early development, not juvenile. Although it’s sometimes that too).

It’s inspiring to see the sort of creative mojo behind this thing coming from a marketing agency.

I’m guessing An Orange America didn’t cost much to develop–a fast, inspired job flipped against the wall to see if it sticks. A wing, a prayer and a fast sign-off.

How any of this relates to the core mission of moving the aforementioned units of Low-Pulp OJ is a question I leave to others.

How to Kill a Social Media Campaign

David Armano, author of the Logic+Emotion marketing blog and VP for experience design at Critical Mass, presents this image of the life-and-death cycle of a social media campaign:

The first things we do, is kill all the social media campaigns….