Social Media Case Study on GoGirl

I went to my first Social Media Breakfast last week. The presentation by Risdall Online Marketing Group was impressive. So impressive I took 2 1/2 pages of notes.

They had one tough assignment. Selling what, for want of a better term, is a feminine urinary device. The device was created by FemMed, Inc., so that women with medical issues such as hip replacement surgery or in an otherwise difficult or inconvenient situation could pee standing up.

Here’s what Risdall Group’s team decided:

Their goals were to:

1. Rebrand the product (to go beyond merely marketing it to hospitals and doctor’s offices)(They renamed it GoGirl)
2. Build brand awareness
3. Drive website traffic
4. Sell product

Their hurdles:

1. Seasoned competitors
2. Low category awareness (no one knew such thing existed)
3. Taboo subject
4. Start up with low marketing budget
5. And “Are you serious” reactions to the product

Coming up with a strategy must have been difficult. However, knowing the issues they had to deal with, they knew the only solution was to rise above the discomfort level and confront the issues head-on.

Their strategy involved making an old idea fresh by targeting lifestyles, having fun with the brand (what else can you do with a device for women to pee standing up) and try to normalize the conept. That last idea shouldn’t sound too strange in a day and age with TV commercials about “erectile disfunction” and “male enhancement.”

Their next strategy method involved building buzz online. The third strategy was trying to humanize the brand through social media, customer reviews and testimonials. Lastly, they talked about Integration. As far as social media, they were specifically utilizing Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the website.

Personally, I think they were breaking things down a bit too much. I think they really only had two strategies. Making an old idea fresh and building buzz online. Everything else was just the tactics to get there. It pretty much breaks down to what are you going to do off-line and what are you going to do online. But that’s just my take on things.

First, they went looking for content sources. Obviously, you can’t build an online campaign without content. They started out with sponsorships (and I think they made brilliant choices) of Breast Cancer Awareness and the Saint Paul Saints among others. However, these two stuck in my mind the most.

The partnership with Breast Cancer Awareness is obvious. Working with the Saint Paul Saints baseball team may not be. However, anyone who’s been to a Saints game knows their marketing team really pulls out the stops to have fun. If you want to humanize a brand and make it fun, I can’t imagine a better group to work with than the Saints.

They also put together the GoGirl Tour. A group of young women traveling Minnesota and across the country to events and giving away T-shirts and GoGirl’s product and trying to create fun and excitement around the product. They were also trying to remove the “stigma” around the issue and bring it out in the open.

During these events and tours, they took tons of photos and video to create visual content for the website, press releases, YouTube, Facebook and other online venues. Always in the hopes that something would go viral.

Another avenue they took advantage of was Search Marketing although they didn’t go into any specifics about that (not surprising since most of us in the search marketing business are pretty secretive about what we do.)

They also mentioned using HARO. (Help A Reporter Out) This is a pretty effective tool and I’ve been using it recently myself. HARO is an email that comes out three times a day to subscribers. Writers, reporters and others can make requests for resources concerning various subjects looking for stories, experts or whatever other resource they need. I’ve also seen requests for bloggers. They got someone to blog about the product and got a 3% traffic boost out of it.

While that may not sound like much, Search Engine Marketing isn’t necessarily about hitting home runs. It’s about consistently getting little hits that accumulate into an eventual flood. (But, of course, we are always looking for that one hit that goes viral and turns into a flood all by itself.)

One of the most effective social media “tricks” they used to gain content was to let bloggers offer to give away two of the product. You had to comment to win. One blogger got 680 comments. Now that’s effective use of social media!

Here was how they described their use of specific social media platforms:

Twitter

• Own the conversation
• Introduce consumers to the brand
• Using Twitter as an extension of customer service
• Connecting with customers
• Promote events (if you want to read about another great use of Twitter for promotion by Kogi Korean BBQ, read my post on Social Media Marketing Requires a Purpose and a Plan.

Facebook

• Gain valuable customer insight (essentially looking for quality events suggested by visitors and fans where they could promote the product. They initially used a consultant for this and found better results asking their fans)
• Bypass traditional media barriers (they asked their Facebook fans where they should promote the product and then asked for the fans help in arranging the promotions and events. Brilliant use of “product evangelists.”)
• Promote the tour (“we’ll be here next. Look at all the fun we have. You should be there too!”)
• Provide a sense of community
• News & updates

Analytics – they used website and social media platform analytics to determine the top 10 sources of traffic to the site and the social media sites so they could make more effective decisions on targeting their best sources of traffic and eliminate campaigns that weren’t working. if people ask you about Return On Investment (ROI) from social media, this is how you determine it and show concrete results to clients.

Flickr

Repurpose photos – fan photos – product photos

You Tube

Currently, there are 12 videos on YouTube and only one of those was posted by GoGirl. The other 11 are media coverage videos. So far, they’ve enjoyed 130,000 views. Pretty impressive.

GoGirl blog

One of my biggest difficulties with clients is that they don’t have time to blog and have no idea what to write even if they did. The GoGirl crew found a solution. “Submit Your GoGirl Story.”

If they use your story on the blog, you get a free GoGirl t-shirt and one GoGirl product. They post one story per week and they already have a stack of stories to choose from.

Monitoring

They monitor blog posts and comments on the Internet. A great way to do this (it’s what I do) is to set up Google Alerts for your product name and primary search terms. Google will send you Alerts to the email of your choice as often as you like to let you know where your product name or search terms have popped up on the Internet.

Letting Go Of Brand

This is very difficult for most businesses. Marketers have been telling them for years to “control the brand” and now we’re telling them to “let go of the brand.” I can’t say I blame them. I also can’t say that I agree for every product or service.

In this case, a blog called Overcompensating parodied the product. The GoGirl team’s first inclination was to ask them to take it down. Instead, they simply commented on the blog thanking them for finding humor in the product and having fun with it. The blog post now accounts for a huge amount of traffic. Still, it’s great to look back and see that it was the right choice. But it was a gamble that, in this case, paid off.

Return On Investment

This, as always in marketing, is the toughest thing to measure. Here’s how they’ve chosen to consider ROI.

By monitoring the Internet, they found a blog post by a reporter with WCCO TV who had found out about the product at a morning meeting. She was questioning whether there really was a need for such a product. The women on the GoGirl team commented on the blog post that “if she couldn’t think of a time when she could have used a GoGirl, she was one very lucky lady.”

The reporter responded that after consideration, she did see a use for the product and would like to do a show about it. That show (combined with some judicious PR work by the Risdall team) led to an explosion of media attention for the product.

That’s how they are gauging ROI from social media. On results.

Learning

Here’s what they learned from the project:

• Remember the big picture – Use PR, social media and Search Engine Optimization together and integrate them as tactics in the major overall strategy.
• Pay attention to the “little guy.” – This is about spreading the news through “word of mouth” not just through big media outlets.
• Leverage what you’ve got – Take photos and videos every chance you get. Let people, customers, users and fans contribute content and repurpose content every chance you get.
• Utilize the discussion – Good & Bad – Always respond positively (remember TruckNutz) and say thank you.
• Have fun and be flexible – Evolve, adapt and go with the flow.

Also, always be responsive to people who contact you through various social media. It’s a great opportunity to avoid unpleasant surprises. If they say something negative about your product, you must respond. First, you have to figure out if they’re being mean or have a legitimate complaint. Either way, if you don’t respond, you’re just asking for the bad news to spread across the Internet like a flame.

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