Long story short:

1. P&G hosted an event called Digital Hack Night.
2. The event was designed to immerse, educate, and demonstrate the power of digital marketing to it’s marketing directors
3. The brought in sharp minds like David Armano, Peter Kim, Kelly Mooney and leaders form Google, MySpace, Facebook also attended. Note, Twitter did not attend.
4. The backbone to the event was a contest to raise money for charity by selling t-shirts. The combination of P&G Marketing Directors, famous peeps, and leaders were split into 4 teams. Each team competed to see who could rake in the most cash.

That’s all I’m going to cover about the event. Other people have given it better and more thorough coverage. You can read about it here, here, here, and here.

I’ve found most “leaders” to rarely establish a serious position, rock the boat, or be controversial.  Instead they focus on being “politically correct.”  By politically correct, I mean not choosing a side – instead opting to find pros and cons with both sides.  Since no one else will ask the difficult questions, I felt I should.  That’s my style.

What I want to focus on is this quote from Peter Kim

At the end of the evening, P&G’s CMO Marc Pritchard remarked that in the future, all employees should get involved in activating connections similar to what had just been witnessed.

I posted the following on Peter’s site:

Peter-
Nice recap. If the future is that all employees should be involved in activating their connections 3 things must happen:

1. Employees should be rewarded for the impact they make – this changes compensation structures
2. Personal brands must be embraced and supported; with rules needing relaxation so that employees aren’t be stifled – can a corporate company really embrace this?
3. Partners will need to be held accountable as well. – If employees are expected to do this, shouldn’t their agencies, packaging suppliers, etc.

At the and of the day the question I won’t to pose to the community (though few will actually answer) is at what point does this simply become just a very large pyramid scheme, that’s backed by one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world? Is this the future of marketing?

There’s been a lot of debate lately about personal brands. Specifically, the question has been raised about how important they are and if people should put their name (aka their brand) first or their companies. Make no mistake, the digital experts that were brought to Cincinnati for the event leveraged their personal brands big time.

P&G in effect is asking for people (albeit indirectly) to establish personal brands, grow the size of their virtual and real rolodexes, and leverage their personal brand in combination with their network size for the GREATER good of the company.

One part of me says, right on, EXACTLY. After all shouldn’t you support the company you work for? When I worked at ConAgra Foods, I traded Heinz Ketchup for Hunts and Nathan’s for Hebrew National. In general I embrace the brands I work on. I now work on Rite-Aid. You can be sure I’ll be getting my prescriptions there and not anyone else.

Here’s the million dollar question. Should employees, vendors, and partners be compensated for doing this or should it simply be part of the job?

Think about it. You are leveraging your personal network and brand for the greater good of your client and company. That’s not exactly in the job description It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it begs the question, no?

Let’s say I work for BMW and I convince 10 of my friends who were leaning towards Lexus to buy a BMW.  Let’s take a round number like $50,000 and call that the value of each car.  In effect, didn’t I generate $500,000 in sales for BMW?  Didn’t I do the job of the dealer, the ad agency, the TV spot, the web site, etc.?  Yet, in most cultures I’d never be compensated for extending myself.  What happens if person #2′s BMW has a boat load of problems.  It’s my reputation that gets sullied.  Remember, I convinced him to go BMW over Lexus.

This isn’t that far fetched.  Do you know how many people I got to switch to Peter Pan peanut-butter (subsequently people were pissed at me after Peter Pan announced it had salmonella) or choose Nikon over Canon when I worked on those brands?  100s if not 1000s.  If companies are going to want people to become brand advocates that establish brands, grow personal networks, and ultimately tap that network for the good of the company, there needs to be a change in how we compensate our employees.  At least that’s what I think.

Where do you stand?

Social media is supposed to be about providing value. Well, at least that’s what the experts like Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton, and the like will tell you. For the most part I think they’re right. If social media is an offshoot of marketing in general, then all marketing should be about providing value. Zeus Jones calls this “Marketing As a Service.” There’s probably no better example of this in action than Nike+. Nike+ is a product, a site, and most importantly a valuable service. There’s a reason why it’s done so well, and it isn’t the advertising.

Cool?

Ok, well if it’s all about providing value can someone please explain to me this decision by Skittles and their agency?

The twitter-verse was abuzz tonight, as you can see from this graphic, with Skittles. That’s odd, I thought; why would Skittles be such a popular topic.

Well it looks like the reason so many people are talking about it is that www.skittles.com was “redesigned” to simply pull the twitter search results for the keyword “skittles.”

First, let me say that I think what they’ve done is bold, beautiful, sexy, cool, fun, and ground-breaking, and frankly left me in awe. I wish I was a part of the project.

That said, I have to ask one basic question, “What value does this provide for the Skittles consumer?”

For starters, based on data from Quantcast Twitter.com and Skittles.com have completely different audiences. Twitter skews 18 – 49, with nearly 0 people in the sub-18 category. Contrast that to Skittles.com where the overwhelming majority of people visiting the site are 3 – 17. So, unless Skittles wanted to go after a different audience, which is possible, this decision made 0 sense.  That could be the case.  But, CPG companies rarely make this type of radical audience shift.

Yes, this approach will get people talking. But, I don’t want people talking; I want people buying. Getting people talking didn’t work for the Haggar dog poop ads or the Orville Deadenbacher creative. On the other hand, apparently it’s working for Microsoft. Maybe the investment into Jerry Seinfeld was worth it after all.

Take a look at what people were saying about the decision here. Some of my favorite tweets were:

Cluckee – @adamkmiec does it matter? they are doing it. that’s what matters.

GenaMazzeo – @adamkmiec what does the consumer get out of it? why go through a brand to get something i can already get? thinking its a bad pr stunt

Torchio – @adamkmiec exactly- the whole front page is filled with people talking about the skittles new web design and not about skittles!
Oliyoung – @WarWraith no, i think Mars have been pitched with buzzwords by an ad agency and jumped on board blindly, where’s the value? #skittles

Kerryboberry – skittles?

Time will tell if this was a great idea that catapults Skittles forward or if this was just another example of agency doing work for themselves and the advertising/marketing community.

What I do know is that if this bombs it will scare many brands and companies from investing in social media. That’s unfortunate for me, you, their customers, and those brands. Social media can be powerful and it can do wonders, but when you see things like this it makes you shake your head.