This has me in stitches every time I watch it. You really know you have made a killer campaign when Sesame Street viral it! I was very proud of P&G and what they did with the Old Spice campaign – you can see the results here. I can imagine the meeting that this was presented by W&K and it must have felt like a very brave decision to go for it from P&G but it paid off – and hopefully sets the tone for the future!

So yes, I work at Procter & Gamble… a company that should be at the forefront of digital marketing given its brands, size, money and amazing staff… but its not…no big secret for anyone inside or outside the company… but we are getting there!

But today my company put a massive Web 2.0 smile on my face that I’d thought I’d share to give an insider example of how social media is being used within a company to learn more about the consumer & interact more with him/her and each other at a level never before possible.

So today, P&G Marketing internally launched an upgrade of its internal marketing site…and in one fail swoop installed all the web 2.0 social media tools that I could ever want to connect better with the consumer, and also with my own P&G colleagues (all 180,000 around the world) – some of which are marketing geniuses.

I was given the option to choose 12 boxes to go on my homepage and was able to select items such as a Twitter feed of my brand (Max Factor) , a You Tube feed of my category (Cosmetics) and links to what I can only describe as internal twitter-ish profiles and groups (similar to Brazen Careerist) which populated in seconds with members joining from all over the world to start discussing marketing trends, brand news and share and reapply items through the forums and streams. Also, we all have our own blogs to post what we want to share with the P&G community.

I find this so exciting because I know that within P&G I am with very good company in terms of expertise in marketing and brand building and therefore can’t wait to read what all the employees are posting and talking about etc…. It is also so exciting to have a twitter/you tube feed constantly of my consumer… although I already had this myself, I think it is awesome that now Gen X + will have this streaming to their screens every day.

Anyway, I love it and all I can hope is that it gives me not only inspiration in my daily work but also for my blogging too…. so Thank You to my 170 year old company for thinking of Gen Y and absorbing social media.

How many tribes are you a member of?

I am currently reading Seth Godin’s book on Tribes and its got me thinking.

I have joined many tribes without knowing and some tribes with knowing. I am a member of….the apple tribe, the gen Y tribe, the Geneva ex-pat tribe, the 2 many DJs band tribe & the thesis tribe….to name but a few.

Seth describes the difference between a crowd and a tribe as the ability to communicate up, down, with each other and with the outside. Social Media makes it easier for us all to be tribe leaders and some people like Penelope Trunk, Jamie Varon & Matt Chevy have done it very well.

But what makes a tribe last? If you asked Seth he would probably say – the leader and the dialogue – which links to the point that Kevin Roberts made on the role of social media in building lovemarks.One of the best examples of such a tribe is Apple- where the Leader, Jobs, communicated directly with the tribe to announce new products – result – record sales and lovemark status.

To build the tribe and the lovemark, the leader needs to maintain the dialogue – in the social media world, through blogging, tweeting, commenting and encouraging comments on their blogs -  and I am interested to see where some of these social media tribal leaders go, will the tribes grow or move to the next leader? Jamie Varon has tweeted about losing her blog motivation (0.2 posts a day) and twitter followers…is this a sign that she is losing her tribe? Carlos Miceli and the CookieMonster on the other hand are posting once a day and racking up tweets and comments by the hour….how will their tribes grow and grow?

Which tribes are you are member of? Do you lead a tribe? Did you know you did? Do you want to?

Kevin Roberts – CEO Saatchi & Saatchi and Mr. Lovemark. As an ex-P&G employee he often comes to speak to us at events and I always find his presentations insightful and eye opening. The last one I saw he was locked in a cage talking about cause marketing and advertising.

Here is a 4 min video (you have to go to the actual post on my site) that he posted on Friday on his of the moment thoughts on Winning Ugly, Lovemarks, Social Media, Retail and Sustainability.

Most interesting point for me is the re-enforcement of the strength of social media in building lovemarks in a recession.

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Love when politics and social media come together.

After being inspired by the power of Twitter, Aron Nil thought of ways twitter could help the people of Israel. What he came up with was @TheKotel where fellow Jews tweet a prayer which Nil then prints off and takes to the Western Wall where it is believed God picks up the message quicker….but the question is… does @God tweet back?