At Pepsi Innovation Day

by Howard Greenstein

I’m at Pepsi‘s innovation day – thanks to my friend Stephanie Agresta and Bonin Bough of Pepsi. This is their opportunity to host a bunch of bloggers and journalists, and show what they’re doing that’s new. This is an open kimono day – except for in R&D labs we can take pictures, video and blog everything.
Learning about their company now -at their flavor lab in Valhalla, NY.

Food facts so far – they’re working to ELEVATE the Core – Lays – remove transfats (2002) lower sat fats, lower sodium, simple
ingredients. Baked, different oils, reduce sodium – different flavors arond the world.
This piece is going to be snippets and thoughts, updated all day.
UPDATE
-Just got done with the R&D lab – lots of fun making my own soda, learning about flavors, and getting an overview. My soda was Lemonade, Raspberry and Passion Fruit – very good flavor but I over-sugared it.

Lunch: Lots of ocmments on Twitter, also:

Carbon footprint labeling in the UK – Walkers

Performance With Purpose

looking for positive momentum – they feel they’re on a roll because they
are part of the conversation.
Interesting

College Humor – made new Pepsi Retro commercials for pepsi throwback
UPDATE 330pm

Panel now with John Andrews (formerly of Walmart 11 Moms program), Christine CEA (Unilever head of PR) and Adam Cristinsen from IBM.

Discussion of Earned and Paid media.

How is social media changing that?

ADAM: Former PR person – you used to decide message, control, decide who presents it. Now there’s an opportunity to connect with corporate culture – and

Christine: Cultural shift – the tipping point in consumer-generated evolution. They let go of brand control – in 1st season of apprentice – let contestants create a Dove commercial – generated more interest than some of the ones they had done. Now letting consumers create content, or MTV etc. Part of a conversation – letting consumers interact with the brand.

There are challenges – you have the legal folks watching and interacting – how do you create guidelines to allow connection (twitter) and still handle law.

Q: How do you work with Paid media group
Christine: they don’t have a Bonin to oversee Social media. Therefore it’s been a collaborative effort – by necessity. Lots of different needs in Social Media – many related to marketers thinking they ‘need’ a campaign but not 100% sure why or objectives.

They make them sit with media and PR and help figure out goals, and decide who should be the lead (PR or Media) so they can leverage to existing efforts, and also avoid ‘mess’ and/or ‘mess ups’ and know whats going on if things go awry. How you’re judged in your response is important.

John: Paid and Earned working together – Beyond paid and earned – participation media. As they created longer term relationship with 11 moms, they learned they could include them in that planning process as well. They did a program with “Twilight” and used the 11 mom group as a sounding board.They were part of process, had ownership of process, and helped it be most successful pre-sale DVD launch.

The social sphere isn’t always interested in talking about what you’re interested in. When they tried to engage and it was just another media tactic.

Large scale social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, how have those platforms worked for you?

Adam: Agnostic about where employees communicate – there are 275K IBMers on LinkedIn. We want to let employees engage everywhere. From a tactics standpoint- alumni network is also valuable.

Twitter – wonderful ad-hoc communication network. Even corporate news travels faster on that kind of a network.

UDPATE 340pm

Christine: Great tools for listening. Also suggest they work directly with Facebook. Casestudy – one activity to reach MySpace consumer, one to reach FB, true to the brand (for a different beverage).

John: At Walmart – not about the tech – about the relationships. Eventually FB won’t be cool but it is about creating relationships. Example: Blog Her network – become an integrator in her network – youre createing relationships with those people in her network. It is much more meaningful that you have the relationship with the core influencers.

Q: (missed it)

Adam: Social Media – don’t overplay – it is just the way things are done now – so the model isn’t to have a social media person – it is to integrate it into the marketing team.

Christine: Social Media handle is a shorthand – but a greater area of WOMMA – 80% is offline – the handle has yet to be created for the ‘conversation space’ – social media, soc net, word of mouth – Soc Media is reudced to something – but as a Marketer you need to think beyond it.

From PR perspective – the measurement challenge – if we could capture the value of PR fully we’d be millionares for the way to do so. Now we are trying to measure value of conversation, net promoter score, – those used to more standard measurements – there aren’t as many standard ones now. THere may not be “a model or ‘the’ model.” there may be an engagement model, brand equity, pure sales, and it is harder to compare entities.

Adam: The think that kicked off Social Media – massive employee brainstorm – this was a ‘crowd sourcing exercise’ – helped create current corporate strategy. This isn’t a standard effort that would be measured in a standard way.

John: Every metric under the sun shows up. As he left – standard is being worked on – He saw a great presentation from Tyson – taken a nielsen overlay with specific retailer’s shopper area from Spectra – layered on Sales- what’s result of year long twittering? It was quite compelling.

Q: Integration of Paid and Earned to accomplish goals – what does and doesn’t work from process standpoint to see how they can work together?

Adam: Paid, traidiontal have been 2 sides of house – Communications and marketing just merged last year at IBM. There were always tensions. Communications have now taken over marketing – now thinking about how to do things differently – combination to come up with things that work differently. He gets budget from things that used to be advertising. Culture has been melded.

John: several groups coming into process- esp. customer service group as well as tech folks- and set up as an internal agency to be a consulting group inside the agency.

Christine: Lots of experiements (missed some of this).

At Pepsi Innovation Day

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