On August 27, 2009, Hilton Graham, Director of Digital Strategy with Hanes Brands, Inc, and Adam Keats, Senior Vice President at Weber Shandwick, discussed how Hanes is using social media to build better relationships with its customers.

What Is Social Media?

Social media is an umbrella term for the tools and technology people use to interact with content. It is the mechanism by which brand marketing has evolved from a monologue (one-to-one communication from advertiser to consumer) to a seriously super-charged dialogue in which many people can publish their message about a brand to many others.

Social media content is characterized as:

• Easy to interact with
• Easy to share
• Capable of generating realtime feedback
• Not being constrained by time and space

Social media has democratized brand messaging. Hanes was ready to join the conversation. Here is how they did it.

Hanes and Social Media: Tiptoeing into the Fray

Hanes’ overall strategy is to using social media tools to start a dialogue with their customers. They plan to accomplish this by:

• Developing a blogger network (the Hanes Comfort Crew)
• Tapping into their customers’ passion points (Passionately Pink for the Cure, Disney Celebrate in Comfort campaigns)
• Going where their customers are (Twitter, Facebook, real-world events such as the BlogHer conference)

I found it notable that several times during the presentation Graham described Hanes’ strategy as “tiptoeing.” To me this indicated a level of seriousness and humility that companies need if they are to survive and thrive in social spaces on the Web. Hanes is entering the social networking realm with a plan that prioritizes its customers’ needs and does not attempt to define or dominate the conversations that it starts with them.

The Hanes Comfort Crew

The Hanes Comfort Crew is a group of bloggers who broadly represent Hanes’ customer base: moms and dads, fashion and lifestyle mavens. These bloggers are not paid to write about Hanes. They were selected because they already had an affinity for the brand and had followings who were likely to share or be receptive to that affinity. Hanes gives these bloggers opportunities and ideas to talk about the Hanes brand in an authentic way. For instance, Hanes held its Comfort Crew kickoff by inviting the bloggers and their families to Disney World, where they discussed the products, tested out how the Hanes “wedgie-free panties” held up against a day of roller coaster rides, and created a lot of fun memories worth blogging home about.

Hanes also attended the BlogHer conference for women bloggers, where they built up even more buzz with their conversation-sparking T-shirt swag bags, footrubs at their Hanes Comfort Social, and expansion of the Comfort Crew (the original crew members each were invited to find 3–4 recruits from the conference attendees).

Hanes Got Crafty at the BlogHer Conference With These Cool T-shirt Totes

How Hanes Measures Success

Hanes takes a methodical approach to social media marketing, carefully crafting its message, setting goals, and measuring successes, just as it has always done with its traditional marketing tactics.

• They determined benchmarks for success in both traditional and social media.
• They looked at current brand conversations in both traditional and social media (e.g., number of blog posts about Hanes, number of tweets, print and TV ad circulation, etc.).
• They set goals to increase levels of conversation by 10% in both traditional and social media.
• They continued tracking and reporting monthly performance in each category.

2 Must-Do’s for Your Company

Graham and Keats left us with two cardinal rules for interacting with our customers in the social media realm:

1. When someone praises your brand, say Thank You.
2. If you make a mistake, apologize (quickly).

Other Takeaways

• Create real conversations by having interesting things to talk about and giving people things and experiences that they value. Hanes has a lot going on! They’re partnering with companies and celebrities we love to offer experiences worth talking about and participating in. I Googled Hanes and came up a T-shirt design competition to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, a Disney World vacation giveaway, a Michael Jordan celebrity invitational golf trip giveaway, an invitation to share your most embarrassing wedgie story (for a prize, of course!), dozens of news stories and videos, and reams of blog discussions.
• Don’t restrict your “social media marketing” to virtual venues. Go where your customers are in the real world, too.
• Create goals and success criteria for your social media marketing campaigns. Be methodical. Measure your results.
• Don’t say you’re great. Just be great. Social media gives people a way to spread their approval further and faster than ever before. Many thanks to Graham and Keats for showing how well Hanes has learned this lesson.

If you haven’t seen John Adams, seen, it’s an award-winning, 7-part mini series made by HBO Films on the life of the 2nd President of the United States.

This 2008 marketing campaign serves as a good example on how to create a successful multi-aspect campaign. When HBO started promoting this back in Feb. of 2008, they did several interesting things that made this truly an innovative stand out campaign:

“Stand out” Idea

HBO took the only written communication medium in 18th Century America - the letter - and linked it to a fairly obscure historical figure. In this “Power of the Letter” campaign, HBO focused on the letter (and strategically, the Postal Service), as being an extremely revolutionary tool of persuasion and power. Using this provocative idea, they invite us to learn more about the written word, and ultimately, John Adams.

Central Call to Action

HBO, along with their mail fulfillment partner, built the mini-site PowerOfTheLetter.com as the central call to action. The site enabled people to customize any of 6 different greeting cards with John Adams’ quotes and send them to friends and family for free. The greeting cards all had designs, quotes and even fonts from the early colonial period, but were modified using an online design tool. HBO picked up the cost of this viral marketing campaign (including postage)! The result was an online experience that enabled consumers to communicate with friends and family using the theme of John Adams as a context. For the direct order marketers out there, it is true that HBO paid for all this marketing under the flag of the show launch and brand building (as there were no immediate direct sales made), but the important aspect that could be extended to direct order models is that they focused on enabling a conversation amongst their audience. Once you enable people to talk in an arena that you facilitate, it adds to brand credibility and revenue down the line. Also, post-launch, I would imagine HBO would send a follow up to contest entrants & greeting card senders - as these types of offers are some of the few ways a television studio can use direct marketing with their audience.

Use all Marketing Vehicles Possible

Another aspect that is remarkable is the myriad ways they publicized this central call to action. Among them:

• Inserted John Adams quotes on USPS receipts (3.75 million daily)
• Window “standees” (6 foot tall cardboard cutouts) in 4,000 post offices nationwide
• Window “clings” in 12,000 locations
• Worked with the USPS to stamp cancellations on relevant letters in the USPS mail stream which included a John Adams quote and the mini-site URL
• Partnered with a high school educational org, to educate kids on John Adams
• Presence on main HBO site and web banners
• Agreement to temporarily re-brand the USPS’ own website (see image below) with the theme of John Adams

Rebranded US Postal Service Website

While a smaller company may not have the resources for such a partnership with the USPS, there are a myriad avenues to publicize your central call to action with a similar energy (email, blogs, social media, direct mail, flyers, etc.)

Keep the Conversation Going

What HBO did not do well was to use this incredible marketing effort to continue a community. When you visit the www.poweroftheletter.com website today, it goes nowhere. This is really astounding considering that the campaign began less than a year ago. If you really dig on the John Adams website, you find a place for an HBO Users Discussion Forum, but it’s rather lifeless compared to the other discussion forums out there (MySpace for the high school crowds, Facebook, etc.) A better execution would have been to transform that mini-site into a functioning interaction point for history buffs, possibly by offering the same “send a greeting card” functionality that the original site offered, but with more cost paid by the end user. If a quality experience (and community) was facilitated, such a site would take very little to keep it running and generate long term DVD sales & possibly syndication interest on other cable channels. In the long run, communities & relationships are what persist. Has anyone else seen post-campaign interactions and community facilitated well by a brand?

About Luis Paez

Luis Paez

Luis is a Market Intelligence Analyst at QuantumDigital, researching direct marketing trends and new market opportunities. Luis also blogs on marketing, technology and business at his personal website, Overlinked, and on direct marketing trends at The Direct Marketing Voice.