Avon's Mark Brand Uses Social Media to Promote Grass-Roots Sales

The Avon brand is the archetype of traditional grass-roots marketing. And according to a recent article in the New York Times, Avon has been expanding their grass-roots business model to the youth and young adult market with their brand Mark. 


Avon's attempt to reach the youth market focuses on three key components:

• A celebrity spokeswoman, Lauren Conrad, former star of MTV's reality show "The Hills"
• Mark Representatives, i.e. the younger version of Avon Ladies
• A "Social Beauty" campaign to strengthen the brand and promote representatives through Facebook, blogs, an iPhone application, and other social media tools

According to Annemarie Frank, director of digital media and strategic alliance of Mark at Avon, “Mark Girls can advertise their ability to sell products right on their Facebook profiles, and the widget functionality of Mark’s e-shop enables us to drop the shop into other places to give the brand a presence wherever people hang out online."

Individual representatives are encouraged to get creative with their individual campaigns. Last fall, Mark Rewards Program advertised a contest for all-expense-paid trips to the Sundance Film Festival for the two highest-selling Mark Girls. One representative, Hannah Parish, created a Facebook event, “Send Hannah to Sundance,” and invited 600 people in her network to join, as part of her strategy. She sold $6,000 worth of products and won the contest.

Mark's social media strategy works well because it is consistent with the company's overall strategy. Additionally, Mark does a great job of giving its representatives both tools and incentives, and then gets out of the way. It trusts that Mark Girls to promote the brand in an effective way that resonates with their local communities while also providing a larger framework and message. I think it is a great model that other large corporations, not only direct selling companies, could learn from.

Encouraging New Social Media Strategies

I read two interesting articles this week, one from Jason Falls' blog and the other from Harvard Business' Conversation Starter, both focusing on the need for more critical thinking and out of the box designing for social media strategies. Now that social media has moved out of the woodwork, companies (and marketers) are becoming increasingly more formulaic in the creation and implementation of social media campaigns. And although Facebook, Twitter, and blogs should be part of any good social media, they shouldn't be the whole strategy.

As David Armano points out in Conversation Starter: "The current state of "social media" for many businesses looks more like an episode of MacGyver than Apple's design process. Duct tape and bubble gum hold together fragile tactics such as Twitter accounts run by the summer college intern (nothing against college interns) or agency-generated Facebook fan pages that have few actual fans. This is not how any design process begins. It's not a purposeful or intentional act of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component. It's a reactive fragmented approach that may achieve short-term results for marketing but usually ends up living in isolation (a social media department)."

Jason Falls created a list of suggestions to round out a social media campaign. The highlights, paraphrased, are:

* Make a point of developing ideas that don't involve Facebook, Twitter or blogs.
* Devleop five tactics to reach consumers on forums and message boards.
*Take 10 pictures (without captions) that visualize what you’re trying to communicate, and upload them to Flickr. Look at them every day.
* Write a news report about the success of your campaign, starting with the headline that you achieved your goal and write the success story in reverse chronological order, imagining the blueprint for your success.
*Ask yourself, “What would make the boring, old clerk at the corner store tell me about this?” Find a way to weave that in to your strategy.

These suggestions apply to any type of social media campaign, but they are particular useful when creating campaigns targeting women. Women are indundated with unoriginal, formulaic, and disingenuous social media tactics from marketers and advertisers. If we are to reach women through social media, we must think outside the box to create clever campaigns that both appeal to them and engage them. If not, we run the risk of being just another advertiser pushing a product to deaf ears.

Bravo Creates Social Media Success with Virtual Viewing Party

Bravo hosted the "Ultimate Virtual Viewing Party" last week for the season finale of the Real Housewives of New York. The "party" was in essence a social media blitz combining Twitter, Facebook, and mobile chat. Social media blog Mashable posted the results yesterday, confirming Bravo's efforts were a success.

Some of the highlights:

1. 2,089 total tweets mentioning “bravotv” on May 5th, and 2,906 total tweets from the 4th - 6th

2. BravoTV increased their follower count 121.18% (from 3,111 to 6,641) during the course of the campaign

3. The percentage of news stories mentioning “bravotv” jumped 15% during the period, with coverage now up 55%

4. BravoTV.com page views for the finale exceeded 1 million and were 159% higher than normal, with 47% more video streams than the previous episode

5. The Real Housewives of New York site accounted for 66% of all BravoTV.com traffic on finale day

6. 40% of viewers participated via Sign in with Twitter

The statistics reveal, how, if done correctly, a social media campaign can not only generate buzz on sites like Twitter, but also bring the traffic back full circle to the content provider's website. I look forward to seeing what Bravo will do next.