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Tom's of Maine on its Way to Going Viral

Tom's of Maine already has a very successful social media campaign. While it is successful in reaching out and talking with their customers, the communication is very sporadic and in order to increase their presence on the web and with their customers they need to work on having a steadier stream of communication.

Through Social Mention I tried to see their online presence on other social media platforms such as twitter, their blog, and other web networks. They provided four statistics: strength or the likelihood of being discussed in social media, sentiment which is the ratio of positive to negative mentions, passion which is the likelihood that those talking about Tom’s of Maine will do so again, and reach or the range of influence based on the number of different users discussing Tom’s of Maine. The different statistics that they provided varied greatly depending on which day you observed Tom’s of Maine. The following is from March 22, 2012:

The strength varied from 1% (on March 15, 2012) to 20% on March 22, 2012. The sentiment also varied from 2:1 on March 25, 2012 to 9:1 on March 22, 2012. I observed passion to be anywhere from 0% on the 22nd of March to 37% on the 29th of February. Finally reach was in a range of 14% to 28% between February 29 and March 25, 2012. Since these statistics had such a wide range of fluctuation I was not able to get a clear picture of how well Tom’s of Maine was succeeding with their social networking campaign. They did however provide top keywords for people looking at Tom’s of Maine. The top result was consistently “tom” which might be the cause of some of the drastic variations because not only is it a common name, it is also a popular shoe brand. The next few results however seemed to be more revealing as to the clientele discussing Tom’s of Maine on the Internet, which were “toothpaste” and “natural”.

Google also showed an interesting trend in the discussion of Tom’s of Maine. Since 2006 there has been a very slight yet declining in the number of people looking into Tom’s of Maine. There was a very defined peak in 2006 and more interest in the two years leading up to that peak, ever since the has not been the same interest.

This also shows that there is not a very steady rate of interest over a long period of time. The same is true over a smaller period.

Over the past year there have been a number of peaks and troughs as to when people search Tom’s of Maine on Google. These high and low points do not seem to coincide with much when looking at the specific efforts that Tom’s of Maine is employing for their social networking campaign. However, the search terms that are used are similar to what Social Mention provided with the top search by a lot was for “toms toothpaste” and “natural toothpaste” was the third most popular search term.

Icerocket showed similar trends as the Google insight did. Instead of only search engines it was searching across different social media sites as well and again there was  little consistency in the popularity of Tom’s of Maine.

Again here the peaks and troughs seemed difficult to predict or relate to anything going on within the organization. The number of post per day (10.88) is also indicative of the strong presence that Tom’s of Maine has on different social media sights. Looking at a smaller time frame the information seems to be even more random:

Even though the community discussing the company is sporadic, the post per day from the company itself stays very consistent over time. Because of how much these different statistics varied I found it a lot more useful to look at the Tom’s of Maine Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flicker sites.

The Tom’s of Maine Facebook page is one of their strongest platforms of social networking. They have consistently added about 200 “likes” per week between February 29 and March 27, 2012 and as of 6 PM on March 27, 2012 they had 283,242 “likes”. In addition to the people who “like” them on Facebook, there has been an average of 1,389 people “talking” about them on Facebook, over the same period of time.

There are a number of people posting on their wall as well and they generally comment back and continue a discussion with their customers. Their Facebook page highlights different offers and promotions that they are having and also offers a number of different ways to interact with the company. They are currently running a campaign that asks you to send in a “silly smile photo” and be in the running for the “smile of the week; they also are posting a “silly talk fact of the week”. This is all for their Silly Strawberry child’s toothpaste that they are promoting. Their Facebook page also has a story hour and live section where children’s books are read. 

The Twittter Page for Tom’s of Maine is loaded with responses to their customers concerns.

Whether it is answering a concern, directing their customers to a place on their website for answers to their question, or showing them where they can get a refund for their satisfaction guarantee, their Twitter page is very actively responding to their customers.

           

 There are a number of blogs that mention Tom’s of Maine. The majority of the blogs talking about Tom’s of Maine are for mothers. Some sites that posted about Tom’s of Maine include Mommy Hates Chemicals, Joyful Abode, The Denver Housewife, Momaroo, and A Helicopter Mom. Many of the article in these blogs about Tom's of Maine are sponsored by them and have a disclaimer at the beginning. Tom's is reaching out to its customers asking them to participate in the groundswell. Tom’s of Maine’s blog also addresses these people and clearly targets them as the audience they want to capture.

            While Tom’s of Maine already has an extensive social media campaign it is always possible to do more. When they discussed the take-over by Colgate-Palmolive on their website they talk about listening, learning, and responding to their customers. This is very similar language to Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. They say that you need to listen, talk, and then energize your customers and the groundswell. It seems that Tom’s of Maine now needs to energize the groundswell. They have effectively listened at talked to consumers as is evident by all the various activity yet the activity is still limited. Although they do have an online store on which one can buy their products, it is not possible to add a review. Allowing customers to communicate to one another in this way could help them to energize their customers to talk in other mediums and spread their product through word of mouth.

            Another suggestion for their social media campaign is to branch out to more consumers. They currently are doing a very good job at reaching the mothers and environmentalist that they are targeting. There are a number of other customers who might also be activists and identify with the organizational values of Tom’s of Maine that the company does not market themselves to. Tom’s of Maine could try to create an online community for activists that might agree with their organizational values. While their blog touches on these topics, providing a form for people to communicate on would help to energize their customers.

            A final way that Tom’s of Maine could energize its customer base and help their social media campaign is to allow reviews for their products in the store section. While the store is not very active many comments on their other social media platforms are reviews of their products. Consolidating the review information to their online store would help customers to express their feelings for products as well as help the organization listen to what the customers want and more appropriately respond to them.

Mgmt 101

Now that my time in college is coming to an end I am beginning to look back on all the different directions that my education has taken over the last five years. After the chaos of choosing a school and not having a direction in mind as to what my major would be I think I have told my friends that I was majoring in every department at one point or another. For some time during my sophomore year I thought I was going to be a management student and took a number of classes in that department. Now after finishing Groundswell by Chalene Li and Josh Bernoff I don't know if management 101 will be as beneficial and timeless in the information it provided as i thought it would be.

In the final few chapters of Groundswell they discuss more of the company specifics and the future of groundswell; one theme that jumped out to me and seemed very significant was the change in management style that social technologies require. The book outlines six dimensions to see how an organization is changing due to the obstacles that they face and one of those is culture. Li and Bernoff say, "How much progress has the organization made on the cultural changes - from top-down to bottom-up - that social applications require" (257). Change in organizational structure is crucial for social media tools to effectively take hold in an organization.

Li and Bernoff give examples of how companies such as Best Buy, Razorfish, Bell Canada, and Home Depot (as a few) effectively implemented some sort of social media within their organization. They outline the crucial role that the top executives played in the creation and acceptance of the social media. While these organizations created their internal social media effectively "highly conservative top-down cultures and heavily regulated industries that fear moving forward" are much quieter in the realm of social media (260).

While my management 101 class seems to be out of date as organizations are forced to be flat and transparent and that is no longer as much of a decision for management, I am now curious how this will continue because of some of my classes that I have taken in the past year. Having taken a number of courses on intercultural dimensions and how different cultures relate to one another, I have learned that power dynamics are very important. Geert Hofsted developed six dimensions to define a culture, one of which was power distance. He defined that as the extent to which a culture accepts or rejects power and a hierarchical system. I am curios as to how the groundswell will change cultures in which strong leadership and authority is expected and accepted. All this brings me back to what Li and Bernoff showed at the beginning of the book:

We will see how these different countries with different participation accept the change in leadership that comes with social media and how they shape it to fit their culture.

Tom's of Maine

Tom’s of Maine is a company that produces personal care products but does so in a very positive way. They focus not only on quality products but also making sure that they are produced in a way not harmful to the environment, aren’t harmful to the consumer, and that their employees are also taken care of, over all they ensure that they are doing good.

Their website also focuses on their corporate responsibility as well as individuals responsibility. There you can find a lot of information about their company values, products, and organizations that they work with. They even have tips for furthering your environmental sensitivity along with other information on them in their blog.

Beyond their website they provide links to their flicker account as well as their Twitter, Facebook page, and youtube channel. On their youtube channel (or the video tab on their website) you can find a number of videos that emphasize their philosophy as well as show the pleasant atmosphere that the organization fosters.

Overall they are being talked about and are trying to show themselves through social media. Socialmention has the following statistics for Tom’s of Maine today:

4% Strength (likelihood of being discussed in social media), 6:1 Sentiment (ratio of positive to negative mentions), 37% passion (likelihood that those talking about Tom’s will do so again), 28% reach (range of influence based on the number of different users discussing Tom’s)

The strength here is not very high and the reach is just over a quarter; however there is a strongly positive sentiment as well as high passion. When you compare Tom’s to Crest on social mention we wee that they have very similar statistics:

9% Strength, 6:1 Sentiment, 29% Passion, 33% reach.

This shows that Tom’s is on par with other similar product organizations. Because of their strong website and involvement with social media outlets of all kinds they are reaching out to their consumers and so far the response has been positive.

Hello World

While in Mississippi leading a youth group on a service trip two weeks ago I paused at one point to think about the consequences of taking a week off of school and work. Mainly I decided (as I had before the trip) that my COPACE professors are so amazing (they might be reading this so I need to suck up) and my bosses had enough people to distribute the work amongst that there would be no major consequence. The main issue I have faced is getting all the work that I missed done, especially when there is the Internet that is so perfect for procrastination.

So of course I tried to do my work and was consumed with an urge to do everything but my homework, but I always feel better when I procrastinate in a slightly productive manor so I started looking at how different organizations that I am involved in are represented in social media which was almost like doing a social media monitoring assignment I have. Looking at how the group I went to Mississippi with had viral videos and how my internship had a large presence on Facebook made me think, how does this change how we perceive things?

Social media is now so pervasive in our daily lives we don’t step back and think about it any more. We accept the continuous updates and people snap and upload pictures all around us without blinking an eye.

But what if we didn’t immediately know about Whitney Houston’s death or that what you just saw on the Academy Awards was a wardrobe malfunction. In Mississippi parents had an idea of what was going on through the videos and didn’t need to wait a week until their children came home. Also in Mississippi the kids I was with did not have their cell phones and had a hard time not being able to quickly look up an answer to whatever questions arose.

While it may be nice to get the updates that we do it can also cause some harm. I know when I went on trips like the one to Mississippi I loved telling my parents about it, and I could in great detail because they had no idea what I had just experienced. They could never have said that they knew about my work site and had seen it in a video. It all just leaves me wondering if we are loosing interpersonal connections through all the social media. While the tweeting and the posting wont stop, we can remember to ask the people around us what is going on rather than just read about it on their Facebook page

Word of Mouth

In order to stay up to date with the groundswell you need to continue to monitor social media as it evolves. Following the groundswell begins with listening and as the excitement increases it moves to talking and then to energizing. These categories for following the groundswell also are similar to how people interact personally. The “social techonolographics profile” describes users as in-actives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, or creators. They are each representative of “a group of consumers more involved in the groundswell than the previous” and you progress from one to the next as you become more involved (43).

As organizations move towards energizing their consumers in social media rather than listening or talking to them, the power to reach more customers increases drastically. Word of mouth has always been an important tool for marketing and now with the help of social media every individual can talk to a lot more people than they used to. Because with social media everyone can be a publisher and everyone can get their opinions out into the open, opinions are much further reaching; credibility is also more difficult to gage when looking at a website rather than having a personal interaction with someone. Even though word of mouth can be increased with the Internet and social media, the process itself remains believable, self-reinforcing, and self-spreading. As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write in Groundswell, “Individually, no consumer can achieve the reach of mass media. But word of mouth is a powerful amplifier of brand marketing, achieving results no media campaign can achieve” (130).

Like always in the groundswell it is important to know what people are saying before getting into it. While it may seem great to energize your customers it needs to be positive energy and positive buzz going on about your company. Positive endorsement is free trusted advertising while going viral in a negative way can set you back because of those reasons.

Stay With Us

In class as each student defined the strip of paper they were given the class irrupted with discussion on a few topics. So many students wanted to chime in on the favorite VoIP service. Students chimed in after a definition of Skype to tell the class about the different advantages of the services that they used like Viber or Google Voice. While a number of other topics cause the class to irrupt in discussion I was interested in the different podcasts that were mentioned. I have been subscribed to the podcast of This American Life from NPR and Public Radio International for almost three years now. In the podcaste, as Ira Glass tells you at the beginning of each episode, that they will choose a theme and present to you a number of stories on that time. 
A few weeks ago there was a story based on the factory's in China where they produce Apple products. In the story they looked into the "Foxconn Village" that is sprawling out around the factors, the living quarters that the employees are placed in as well as the conditions they face at work.The story went into detail exposing a lot of details about the factory that were truly horrifying.

There have been a number of news stories about the apple factories and the conditions they face at work including the staggering suicide rate of the companies employees (there are even nets outside the building to catch people from jumping) but nothing had painted such a clear picture of what the situation is like than this podcast.

Podcasts can be about anything from music to news stories or university lectures. People can subscribe to whatever theme of a podcast they are interested in. Because the technology is becoming so widely available almost anyone can make a podcast. They are increasing the information flow as well as changing who holds the power to distribute information. The issue that podcasts now face is the same that nearly all social media is facing: finding people who will subscribe and continue to listen to their stories. For this blog, as Ira Glass says at the end of each podcast "back next week with more stories of this American life".