What? Tampons in the Groundswell?

Chapters 9 and 10 of Groundswell focus on embracing the groundswell for innovation and how the groundswell can transform companies, respectively.

Both chapters reminded me of Kimberly-Clark's (makers of Kotex pads and tampons) most recent product line, advertising campaign, and interactive website - U by Kotex. Like Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, which was profiled in chapter 10, U by Kotex takes a risk by challenging traditional norms for feminine care advertising and releases some control over its brand by creating content for the groundswell to interact with. The campaign also fits within the topics of chapter 9, because it uses groundswell forces to solicit direct and indirect feedback about its products directly from its customers.

According to the New York Times article, "Rebelling Against the Commonly Evasive Feminine Care Ad," U by Kotex was introduced in March 2010 and comprises an entire line of feminine care products, including pads, tampons, and pantiliners. It is targeted to teenagers and young women between 14 and 21 years old - a prime demographic for groundswell engagement. The products are small, sleek and come in a black box, individually-wrapped in a variety of neon colors.

U by Kotex Products  - Try a Free Sample HERE

In addition to the line’s inventive packaging, the U by Kotex’s advertising campaign has caused a stir for its innovative, frank, and satirical nature. The U by Kotex campaign, which includes television, print, and digital advertisements, directly references and mocks previous Kotex advertising campaigns. Watch the campaign's most famous advertisement, "Reality Check," below.

Other advertisements in the series include a candid camera-style video of a woman trying to convince men to buy her tampons, a man administering a fake Rorschach test with every ink blot resembling a penis or vagina, and a print advertisement with large text that says, “I tied a tampon to my key ring to make sure my brother wouldn’t take my car. It worked.”

All the campaign's advertisements, as well as its other forms of rich media, can be found on the U by Kotex YouTube channel, which has 890 subscribers as of today.


Though the advertisements are humorous, the campaign focuses also on the serious aspects of education and awareness in relation to menstruation. The website has multiple interactive venues for girls and women to post their personal stories, read articles, view videos, take quizzes, and ask questions about menstrual health, and sign a declaration to “break the cycle."

Sounds a lot like Tampax's beinggirl.com, doesn't it?

In Mass Marketing Retailers' article, "Kimberly-Clark gives Kotex brand new slant," Andrew Meurer, the vice president of Kimberly-Clark's North American group brands was quoted saying, "For the past 50 years, advertisers – Kotex included – have been perpetuating a cultural stigma by emphasizing that the best menstrual period is one that is ignored...We are changing our brand equity to stand for truth, transparency and progressive vagina care," he says. "Moving forward, the tone of the Kotex brand's marketing will adhere to its new tagline--'Break the Cycle.'" The tagline, he explains, comes from a 2009 study of the same name, which showed that while 70% of girls and women ages 14 to 35 feel it is time for society to change how it talks about vaginal health, only 45% of them feel they have the power to make a difference.

The entire U by Kotex campaign is a perfect example of a company embracing the groundswell and using it to energize its brand. Notice how Meurer noted a focus on transparency? There may be an altruistic side to Kimberly-Clark's transparent approach to menstrual product marketing, but my guess is they've recognized that transparency is key to success in the groundswell.

The U by Kotex campaign begs its target market to give it feedback and engage with its products. The website immediately greets all visitors with a prompt for feedback, and throughout the site, there are countless additional opportunities to chime in about the products, the campaign, and the movement.

A Snapshot of a Forum about U by Kotex Tampons

U by Kotex Prompts the Groundswell for Feedback

In addition to its YouTube account, U by Kotex manages Facebook and Twitter accounts, and according to the running tally at the bottom of the U by Kotex website, the brand has engaged 2,333,827girls in its cause. 


Cause or no cause, all that engagement with the groundswell is sure to improve U by Kotex's brand presence and encourage innovation in its products and its market approach, don't you think?

Are We All Becoming Our Avatars?

What is the difference between your physical and digital self? 

This may seem like a silly question. Obviously, your physical self eats, breathes, sleeps, talks, and interacts with others. Your digital self - whether it is an avatar in a virtual community like Second Life, a profile on Facebook or Linked In, or just a username in a forum - is just a projection. But think about the amount of time you spend using or acting through that projection. If it is just a projection, why do you care about it so much?

Any user of social media, whether consciously or subconsciously, creates one or many calculated identities. These online identities – the motives for creating them and their existence in general– have important psychological and cultural significance.

Maybe Avatar was a hit because we could relate to it?

For society to adjust to social networking and digital technologies, users have adopted new definitions of interpersonal communication and interaction. We have created new languages and interpretive codes oriented around the encoding and decoding of digitally transmitted messages, and we have grown to accept digital projections as replacements for physical reality. Cyberspace has become a valid site for human interaction – on par with coffee shops, classrooms, work offices, and any other form of face-to-face interaction.

Could it be?

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message." His ideas followed that the media and technologies a society uses, not the content the mediums carry, have societal significance. Though different mediums engage users in different ways, each serves as an extension of the body. The technologies people use, and thus extend themselves with, provide insight into the psychological underpinnings of the society they belong to.

Social media technologies have allowed users to extend their bodies into virtual communities. The increased use of digital communication technologies and social media simultaneously encourages hyperconnectedness and discourages face-to-face interaction. By transferring emphasis from material existence to the digital sphere, social media users have more power to strategically calculate their virtual selves and the ways they present those bodily projections to others. These digital projections affect the creator's perception of self, of others, and the ways others perceive the creator’s physical person. Over time, these altered perceptions cause changes in societal norms and expectations.

Cartoon by Hugh Mcleod

Social networking users have no control over the ways others will interpret their constructed identities once they are created. Users can adjust aspects of their profiles, but when they sign off, their virtual selves remain in cyberspace for other users to interact with and judge. Misuse and misinterpretation of personal information can be uncomfortable and sometimes harmful to the profile creator. Why, then, would social media users take such a risk?

One reason is community. Social networking profiles are a bridge to a cyber-community with its own set of behavioral norms and expectations for self-presentation. Users may be aware of the vulnerability, superficiality, and calculated nature of the profile, but to opt out of social media is to opt out of an entire social realm that gains more and more cultural clout every day. By opting in, users submit to the social networking communities' expectations and written and unwritten codes of conduct.

A "map" of online communities based on actual online traffic from bandwidthblog.com

Every social media user consciously chose to use social networking as their medium for self-preservation and social connectedness. If the medium is the message, the individual profiles are only a product of a larger cultural phenomenon. Social media has changed society’s definitions of a social community. Social media users consciously and actively participate in changing their perception of themselves, of others, and of society in general – within the social media community and outside of it as well. The more social media users participate, the more they give life to the medium, until the need to differentiate between users’ corporeal selves and their digital representations becomes obsolete.

From a marketing standpoint, the blurred line between the physical and digital worlds is significant. If online identities and virtual communities are becoming more and more legitimate, a brand's presence in social media puts it on par with other profiles, and subsequently, other people. As Groundswell suggests, people trust other people more than they trust companies. If a brand exists on the same plane as a person, it is easier to relate to and carries more influence.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964): Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: Mentor

In Honor of the (Impending) Holiday

Courtesy of Lab 42  - Originally created for Mashable.com

Groundswell Doesn't Come from the Ground

After reading the first half of Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, I have not been able to get the social media movement - or the "groundswell" - out of my mind. While I have been aware of social media since I first made a MySpace in 2003, I am now more attuned to its powerful influence on society and marketing strategy.

Before reading Groundswell and taking the time to really contemplate social media marketing, when I thought "social media marketing," I thought, "That's right, old people, you'd better make a Facebook and Twitter in order to catch up with what us young'uns are up to." I would explain to my dad how to "friend" someone on Facebook or post on a "wall," and I would feel like an expert. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in case you were wondering,  I was not an expert.

Now I realize that, unfortunately for us young'uns, social media marketing is much more strategic than just knowing how to use basic functions on Facebook and Twitter. It is complex, risky, technical, largely unpredictable, and requires an innovative mind. At least it's not boring.

Some of the main concepts reiterated in the first six chapters of Groundswell were that social media is interconnected, that the content and brands projected into social media technologies belong to the network users and not their creators, and that there is no single social media networking strategy that works for every situation.

Take, for example, the infographic I found on Digital Buzz Blog. A user creates content and, if it's good enough, it tailspins into a maze of non-linear social media connections until, maybe, it develops enough buzz to appear on a reputable news site.



Whether or not content follows a trajectory similar to that shown in the above graphic depends on the creator - the marketer.


Groundswell has taught me thus far that success in social media marketing is about positioning. Marketers need to understand what social media technologies (if any) their target market uses and in what ways. They have to listen to the areas of the groundswell they hope to influence, and eventually, they have to strategically engage with them. The form of engagement marketers should choose is relative to their target market, the technology, and the marketer's creative ability. Knowing the important elements of a marketing strategy - the who, what, where, when, and why - then allows marketers to innovate. If they're lucky, they'll create an entirely new way of engaging with the groundswell.

In an industry that changes constantly and rapidly, "new" is a necessity.

The Path from Social -> Personal -> Emotional

The start-up sector of the social media industry is the most telling of social media's future directions. One recent innovation in social media that is telling a lot is Path - an app launched in November, 2010 for smart phones (specifically for the iPhone) that calls itself "the personal network."

The Path app allows users to share photos and 10-second video clips with up to 50 friends. For each post, the user can write only three contextual tags: person, place, and thing - nothing else. If friends wish to respond, they can do so with one of five emoticons. 

Path - Nervous at Home from Path on Vimeo.

The friend maximum is a response to Dunbar's Number, which is a theory that human beings cannot support more than 150 personal relationships at a time. By allowing only 50 friends to access posts, Path hopes to create an intimate network where users can share personal moments with people they actually know and care about. Additionally, according to Wired, Path's emphasis on sharing intimate photo and video memories was inspired by a recent Ted Talk by Daniel Kahneman about the connection between memories and happiness.

In addition to its social research background, according to Mashable, Path has a star-studded founding team, which includes former Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin, Macster co-creator Dustin Mierau, and Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning. It also has a solid backing by angel investors - proving its clout in the social media sphere.

So why is Path so telling of social media's future?

Path responds to several emerging trends and issues in social media by creating a new way of sharing, gathering, and processing information. 

Too Many Photos!

Networks like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube allow users to share a (practically) unlimited number of photos and videos with others. While tags and captions help viewers sift through them, we are still inundated by photos and videos we either don't care about or want to care about but can't because they are surrounded by so many others we don't care about (Phew). Path stops that by saying, "Here are photos and videos you will want to see because they come from people you actually know."

Network Overload & Privacy Concerns

The larger networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin grow, the more impersonal they become. Also, the more friends, followers, or connections one has, the greater the chance his or her personal information could be compromised or exposed to unwanted viewers. With too many superficial online "friends" and too little control over what those people see, many social network users have cut down on what they share. How, then, can social media be social when users hold back from each other and heavily monitor their content? 

Path, with its limited close-friend network, is a refuge for the disillusioned social network users who seek safer, more genuine relationships online. 

Postmodern Individualism

More than other social networks, which expand and often overextend relationships, Path attempts to strengthen the relationships one already has using the technology people are already accustomed to. Path is only for smart phones. Each individual posts individual photos with individualized tags to other individuals on their smart phones. It's the closest thing to socializing without talking and without actually interacting with anyone else. And that's perfect for those of us who are so wrapped up in busy schedules that intimate social interaction is hard to come by. 

Don't have one of these phones? Can't sign up for Path.

Collective Memory Loss

The modern young generation has a deteriorating need to remember anything. Information is at our fingertips, so why remember it? Lack of memory can be inconvenient, however, when reflecting on our own lives.

Photographing and/or recording important or interesting moments allows Path users to essentially bookmark their lives for instant recall. Not only for others, but for themselves. 

We are Social and Emotional Creatures!

Humans are fundamentally social and emotional, and Path makes sure to satisfy those impulses. The app displays who views a post and allows other users to react using one of five emoticons – happy, sad, mischievous/wink, shocked/surprised, or love. 

A photo post on Path with all the possible emoticon response options

In this way, Path separates itself yet again from traditional social networks without entirely rejecting users’ expectations. Though users still cannot comment on photos, emoticons serve as a compromise. Because users can react with a range of emoticons, user responses to posted media are more complex than Facebook’s “like” feature for photos and posts. Also, the emoticons fit nicely with Path’s visual aesthetic. Additionally, unlike open-ended comments or “likes”, emoticons allow for a simple measurement of users’ emotions in response to photos and video. If Path gains enough popularity, the app could track its users emotional responses - a potentially valuable insight in the world of social media marketing!

The idea of displaying and/or measuring emotion – an essential part of human interaction – in a social network is new and catching on. Just yesterday, Mashable posted an article on Affectiva, a new commercial technology for monitoring viewers’ emotional responses to video. 

Click here to have your face monitored by Affectiva!

Path may seem simple, but its insight into the human social condition and the trajectory of modern technology is highly sophisticated. Before long, we may actually stop measuring our social network's value by size and instead by the personal connection we have to it. Could Path be the app we need for social network reformation?