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.