The Social Web and the Corporate Brand

Graco was one of the first brands within the Newell Rubbermaid companies to launch a corporate blog. It’s being closely watched by the corporate side and, if blog.gracobaby.com is a success, it someday could be surrounded by a family of sibling sites.

For some companies, especially those in the tech industry, blog sites are already an established part of the marketing curriculum. But it’s still an emerging area for a host of other brand-name companies, like Graco, that consumers deal with every day.

For these companies, it’s important to tread carefully when marrying emerging technology with public relations. The wrong step could alienate their audience rather than bring it closer. If you are going to invite your audience to interact with you, you have to be prepared to show them that you actually care about what they have to say.

And if you’re not authentic, prepare to be pilloried in the blogosphere, as Wal-Mart and GlaxoSmithKline have been in the past. (Wal-Mart a couple of years ago was reported to have had its PR folks writing blogs as if they were just everyday Joes traveling the U.S. and parking their RVs at Wal-Marts across the country, and later that year Glaxo took a hit for a blog for a weight-loss product that banned negative comments.)

The newness of social media networking as a forum for connecting with customers led Lindsay Lebresco, PR manager and lead blogger at Graco, to line up her ducks pretty carefully before stepping into the space. And she recommends that as other businesses take the plunge, they follow the same approach.

“We got into this very purposely, very slowly by design, to say, 'Are we able to make changes people are going to request, answer questions people ask, and set ourselves up for something we can complete?'" says Lebresco.

For Graco, that meant working on the project’s development and supporting the site’s evolution with Converseon, a social media services agency. Internal IT may someday have a bigger role to play on the corporate level if other brands follow Graco’s lead and roll out similar initiatives. But because this was a marketing initiative from day one, Graco needed consulting and strategic expertise that wasn’t available in its more tools-oriented IT department.