Interview With DEWmocracy Event Participants

Event: Dec 13th - Dec 15th 2009

Mountain Dew payed for two Dew Labs members to fly out to New York for a special media event in NYC. Their account of the event has been going down, question and answer style, on the Dew Labs discussion boards. Some of their answers give interesting insight into the way Mountain Dew brand people and other marketers view the Dew Labs community, and vice-versa. I have quoted their responses exactly as they read on the site. The two members that made it to NYC were Dewmaster (John) and Kingofhitz0 (Ben). You can hear an audio recording of John explaining how his experience having a name he thought up winning the Twitter race and being called to go to NYC "was one of the greatest moments in [his] life" here on blog-talk radio.

Q: How long were you out there, and what type of hotel did they put you up in? Did any of the original 7 flavors stand out to you making you wish they got to this stage of Dewmocracy?

A (John):yea I had a nice hotel, i stayed 2 days, yea there are some of the original 7 i liked better then white out and distortion
A (Ben):yeah, like dewmaster said, we stayed two nights. we stayed in the w hotel* at union square... reallllll nice, modern, and contemporary hotel.
the dew brand team told us they went nuts with the creation of the seven flavors, adding in a little bit of everything to make the flavors... but none were more distinct to me than 509. they were DEFINITELY worthy of being in the final 3, but i think the have the best 3 already.

*The W at Union square is pretty nice, the cheapest rooms go for around $350

Q: What was it like? What type of people came? I assume you got all the Dew you could drink while you were there? How much Dew DID you drink?

A (John): It was very fun, there were people from the brand team there, and it was set up in 7 different stage, each stage representing the making of the new dews.

There were a bunch of people from the media there, I'm not sure who was all there but we did get interviewed.

We got all the dew we could drink, including the original 7 flavors.

It was fun, I had at least 10 cans of dew, most of it 509

A (Ben): it was incredible! there was a bunch of media there... everyone from twitter media with phone interviews, to television camera crews, to newspaper press.
and you know there was enough DEW to go around! personally, i drank 3 or 4 cans of typhoon haha, but i'm not sure how much dewmaster drank... i'll let him answer that one.

Q: Have your interview responses shown up anywhere yet? What type of questions did the media people ask? How were you treated... like a peer or like a specimen of marketing phenomenon?

I am just really curious about the relationship that we, as Dew Labs members, have with marketers. It really is a curious thing. The Mountain Dew brand people are really, genuinely, nice people... were the other marketers just as nice? I ask because to market to a certain population - like us - the marketing and brand people have to understand our habits and general personality features, and you would think that this understanding might make being social, even friendly with us easier. However, if you read marketing research publications that profile certain demographics, entire generations of people are abstracted so that they aren't really people anymore but a bag of characteristics to be exploited. So, on the other hand, I would think that this forced abstraction would make being social and relating to us all the more difficult... like we are just a sample or a statistic. See what I am saying? My question is: Did the marketing and brand people there (other then the Dew team of course) treat you like real people or a sample?

How much Dew did the others drink? I saw in the media hub pictures Brett sippin' back on a diet Dew. But I also saw a bunch of people drinking water.

A (John): They asked us about our experience throughout this entire promotion, what our role was, what we thought about, and our opinion about dew labs.

Everyone there was awesome, all the brand team and everyone there was really cool and treated us like normal people, sort of like friends, the event was very enjoyable, with this me/king would talk about our thought process through tasting the samples, coming up with the name/descriptor, what we like about dew labs, the twitter race strategies, and why we like dew and chose typhoon, so we came up with what we said on our own, there was nothing written for us to say, we came up with what we said for the interviews. So to sum up we pretty much said what we went through for both the presentations and the interview, we also talked about ourselves, i.e how much dew we drink a day, stuff like that.

There were a lot of people drinking dew there I was one of them(about 10 cans)

I haven't found any actual interviews, I did find one thing though where something I said was quoted, so if anyone finds any interviews, let me know.

A (Ben): i know interviews we gave are out there, but i don't have any leads as to where they are. the only place i would check for those are on dewmocracymediahub.com (which is a site set up specifically to cater to the media who attended the event). the questions i got asked were typically related to my role in the DEWlabs community, like personal achievements or contributions, as well as my history with drinking DEW.

considering our role was to explain how we were involved within the dewlabs community, we were treated more as peers than anything. i mean, after each run through of the event, the media understood that we were more than just some average DEW drinkers who had a small say in making the next DEW. they knew that we had a direct relationship with the DEW brand team, so in that sense, the questions were more "peer" related rather than just a marketing tool. And forgot to mention... yeah, lots of people were drinking DEW. when you've got access to a stash of it, can you really say no? i know i can't. haha

Q: So this sounds like an event where people come and see a demonstration or presentation of sorts, and you guys were part of that presentation. It sounds awesome. I won't lie, I am totally jealous. I also applied to be a council member; I would love to chill with the Dew team holding a cold WhiteOut in my hand.

How long did the presentations last? Did both presentations and the practice turn out the same?

What did you guys do before and after the event? Was there time to just hang out in NYC, or were you pretty busy? Did you eat authentic NY style pizza? Who picked you up from the airport, Angie? What was Brett like... all business?

I know I ask a lot of questions, I just think it is pretty awesome that Mountain Dew is doing this. It is sort of soda history in the making, and I want to know how it is all going down.

A (John): Yes it was a lot of fun, I guess we are going to end up voting for the council members ^^, hope I make it.

Each presentation lasted about 20min I think, they were the same presentation each time, different media companies came at different times.

I hung out at the hotel, went to the seinfeld restaurant, walked around times square, went to the rangers game, got ny style pizza. I got picked up by a transportation company, I forget the name.

Brett was a really cool guy.

A (Ben): i completely agree chemantics, this is soda history in the making! dewmaster pretty much covered everything there, but i'll throw some of my views on it too.

20 minutes is about right, and there were three run-thrus of the event for different media personnel. we really didn't have a practice run-thru of the event, it was more of a briefing, because like we said somewhere on here already, DEW didn't tell us what to say, they let us run our own show. personally, i went up to times square, down to lower manhattan to see the statue of liberty and ellis island, then ran into wall street. i ate at espnzone and the carnegie deli, but didn't get around to some ny style pizza... unfortunately. brett was a cool guy. he definitely didn't come off as a strictly business kinda guy, he was more laid-back-and-have-fun-while-being-productive kinda guy.

Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right

Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right

Social media marketing campaigns are proving to be goldmines rich with customer engagement and insight that companies wouldn’t likely have otherwise. Companies like PepsiCo are going to extensive lengths to foster this type of collaboration with fans, and the payoff has been big.

The company’s Mountain Dew division is several stages into its DEWmocracy campaign — a plan to launch a new Mountain Dew flavor with the public’s involvement at all levels of the process, and PepsiCo also just launched the Pepsi Refresh Project on January 13th. Rather than spending money on Super Bowl television ads this year, the company is spending $20 million on a social media campaign.

Jay Baer, founder of the social media strategy company Convince & Convert, said brands are realizing they need to market for the long haul. “I do think it’s a good move for Pepsi. I don’t know if every brand can pull it off,” he said.

The Pepsi Refresh Project and the DEWmocracy campaigns are part of a crowdsourcing effort that’s part of the larger PepsiCo plan to more closely integrate consumers with the brand. “Driving consumer interest and engagement takes imagination and often a certain amount of reinvention, so it’s fair to say we’re rethinking everything we do from product development to marketing campaigns across our entire portfolio,” said Bart Casabona, a Mountain Dew spokesman.

A Closer Look at Mountain Dew’s Social Media Campaign


The first DEWmocracy campaign launched in 2007. This inaugural DEWmocracy effort let consumers choose Dew’s new flavor, color, name and graphics, and resulted in more than 470,000 people voting and an overall 1 million people taking part in some phase of the process, according to the company’s DEWmocracy media site. The winning new flavor, Voltage, hit store shelves in January 2009.

Brett O’Brien, Mountain Dew’s marketing director, said that for the first campaign a site was built for people to interact with, which made sense at that time.

Fast forward to July 2009, when the second DEWmocracy campaign launched. The multi-stage effort tasks die-hard Mountain Dew fans to narrow seven sodas down to one final new flavor that will become a permanent part of the Mountain Dew family, using social media platforms 12seconds.tv (12seconds.tv), Twitter (Twitter), Facebook (Facebook) and YouTube (YouTube) in the process.

O’Brien said that with the explosion of social networking, they felt it was best to interact with people where they are.

Flavor Nations Play a Large Role


The second iteration of the Mountain Dew campaign is fueled by the 4,000-strong DEW Labs crew, an online community of die-hard fans. The DEW Labs are divided up into three Flavor Nations for the three Mountain Dew soda finalists: Typhoon, WhiteOut and Distortion. Once the three flavors debut in April, the Flavor Nations must talk up their flavor and get people to vote for it to become the permanent new Mountain Dew soda. That one winning new permanent soda flavor will debut on Labor Day, according to the company’s DEWmocracy media site.

O’Brien said the several stages involved are really part of the normal product innovation process. He said if they were going to be totally transparent the whole time in launching a new Mountain Dew flavor, they needed their customers to be there the whole time.

Every part of the campaign involves the fans and the public — from picking flavor names, to voting on the best user-submitted ad campaign.

Collaboration With Consumers

“What we’re calling it [is] collective intelligence,” O’Brien said. “It’s less about crowdsourcing, but more about collaboration.” PepsiCo looks at DEWmocracy, which has literally been driven by word of mouth, as a way of doing business rather than an ad campaign, he said, and the most important thing to recognize is the passion consumers feel for Mountain Dew is like nothing that’s out there.

According to O’Brien, PepsiCo looks at social media as the best way to get direct dialog with their fans and for the company to hear from those fans without filters. “It’s been great for us to have this really unique dialogue that we normally wouldn’t have,” he said. “It really has opened our eyes up.”

Convince & Convert’s Baer said the DEWmocracy campaign fits with Mountain Dew’s brand and customer profile. He said giving customers ownership of the brand is a fantastic idea.

“What they’re trading off is reach for depth and they’re trading short-term impact for long-term impact,” he said. Baer sees this the process of brands asking customers to craft better products or services as a trend. He pointed out that companies aren’t just soliciting customer input, but they’re putting it into practice. And some business decisions are now based solely on customer feedback.

“To me, that’s tremendously exciting,” he said. “To me, that’s the social media story.”

Written by Leah Betancourt and originally published here on Mashable.com

The Fight For Typhoon

By Ben P., Dew Labs Member

So the Dew Labs is going into its final stretch before the general public get to ultimately decide. I have been part of this Dewmocracy II campaign every step of the way. As a winner of the Dew Labs Challenge, I was lucky to be one of fifty to receive 7 can of never released Dew, as well as a bunch of other awesome things. (including a one of a kind piece of art, and a Dew branded FlipMino) The directions that came with the kit were simple; get a bunch of your friends together and taste these flavors, record it, and tell the Dew team which flavors should ultimately go on to be the three competing sodas. The flavors ranged from sweet berry, to sour apple, and even a few strange ones (including a mango one.) None of them, in my opinion were “bad,” but there were a few that I sure wouldn’t buy religiously. My favorite, by far was flavor 231, and I was very happy to find out that this flavor has been chosen to be one of the three. Now, months later, a small box is delivered to my house. Inside are three potentially new flavors of Mountain Dew. I put the silver, unmarked except for the printed number on the side (eg 231,509, 493.) I tried these flavors, and so did my family, and to my amazement, 231 was no longer my favorite. I knew that next time I logged on to Dew Labs, I would have to choose my flavor nation, and when I did, I clicked 509 (now officially called Typhoon.) I’m not sure what was so appealing about Typhoon, but as soon as I got my first sip, I was amazed. The berry flavor (and do not assume because it is berry it is a copy of Voltage) was something like I never tasted before. It was sweet, but that is a characteristic of all Dews, but it was so flavorful and even the after-taste was enjoyable. That is where 231 lacked. It had this lingering sour after-taste, and 493 was too similar to regular Mountain Dew, in my opinion. So when spring rolls around, I know which flavor I will be campaigning for, and that flavor, is Mountain Dew Typhoon.

"Best in Class" Marketing Using Social Media

MediaTech Blog Post:

"Best in Class" Marketing Using Social Media
Originally Published HERE by Peter Yang

What do tampons, soft drinks, and the “best job in the world” have in common?

They’re all examples of marketing campaigns that effectively use social media to establish a direct dialogue with the consumer. With numerous media formats and multiple devices competing for the consumer’s attention, it’s more difficult than ever for today’s brand managers to connect with their target audience. But companies such as P&G, Tourism Queensland, and Pepsi have found success by using the power of social media to drive engagement, relevancy, and results.

P&G’s Beinggirl.com: The Last Thing that 12-14 Year Old Girls Want to Talk about is Tampons

Imagine for a moment that you’re the brand manager for P&G’s feminine care products. Your target audience is 12-14 year old girls. The last thing that they want to talk about is tampons.

Instead of using traditional TV advertising, P&G created Beinggirl.com. Beinggirl.com is not so much a community about tampons as it is a community about the problems of being a 12-14 year old girl. Girls can participate in discussion groups, read articles, enter contests, fill out polls, and ask a trained psychologist questions. Topics include relationship advice, diet tips, and stories about growing up. Ads for P&G’s Tampax and Always products are visible but do not dominate the site. They exist in the corner of Beinggirl.com’s home page, in a section labeled “free samples,” and below articles such as “Boys and Dating…Why Is It All So Complicated?”
P&G Beinggirl.com's home page


P&G Beinggirl.com's home page

The result? Beinggirl.com was 4x as effective as a similarly priced TV marketing campaign. The site generates over 2 million unique visitors per month and has been duplicated by P&G in 21 different countries.

P&G found success by building a social community to establish a direct dialogue with its consumers. In 2000, Beinggirl.com was filled with dry educational material about puberty. Although puberty is something that teenage girls think about, the site initially didn’t generate much traffic. Perplexed, P&G polled the site’s users to list the types of content that they desired and found that teenage girls were – not surprisingly – also very interested in music.

In response, P&G partnered with Sony BMG to feature recording artists on Beinggirl.com. In addition to being educational, the site had also become fun. In the words of David Knox, a brand manager for P&G’s teenage beauty division: “Teens wear their brands as a badge, you can’t sell them lipstick because it’s long lasting or deodorant because it keeps them dry. But if they associate the brand with the first time they saw Teddy Geiger’s eyes — well, you can’t buy that kind of thing!”

A visit to Beinggirl.com today reveals two important facts. First, P&G has learned from the site’s users – links to download free songs from popular artists are featured directly on Beinggirl.com’s home page. Second, P&G is still learning from the site’s users – the same home page also features a four part consumer poll about pantiliners.

Tourism Queensland’s IslandReefJob.com: “The Best Job in the World” Gets International Attention

Imagine that you’re the brand manager for the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef – hundreds of islands in Australia with pristine beaches, coral reefs, and an abundance of wildlife. Your target audience is tourists from eight key international markets. The problem? When tourists think about an island vacation, they think about Hawaii, the Maldives and the Caribbeans – not Australia. Oh, and you only have a budget of $1.2M.

Tourism Queensland’s hired ad agency MS&L to launch its campaign, which focused on islandreefjob.com. Islandreefjob.com was a branded site that advertised “The Best Job in the World,” a year’s stay at the Great Barrier Reef for free. With a tiny budget, MS&L used traditional newspaper classified ads and online job listings launch the campaign in key markets. Here’s one such ad:
Best Job in the World newspaper ad


Best Job in the World newspaper ad

These ads brought consumers to the core website, where they were treated to stunning imagery from the Great Barrier Reef. The website also encouraged consumers to submit videos to apply for the position. To build an online community, submitted videos could be easily shared on popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The best videos found thousands of fans on YouTube:



Word of mouth spread, attracting the attention of major news outlets. Everyone from CNN to BBC to Time magazine began talking about “The Best Job in the World.”

The results were phenomenal. With a budget of only $1.2M, “The Best Job in the World” campaign generated over $300M in free media coverage from major news outlets. 34,684 video job applications were submitted from 197 countries to Islandreefjob.com, which had 6.8M monthly unique visitors at its height. In total, Tourism Queensland estimates that over 3 billion people worldwide were touched by the campaign.

Pepsi’s Dewmocracy 2.0: The First Soft Drink Created Entirely By Its Fans

Imagine that you’re the brand manager in charge of introducing a new flavor of Mountain Dew. Your responsibilities include choosing the next Dew’s flavor, color, name, and graphics. You’re given seven flavors to choose from.

Dewmocracy 2.0 is a campaign that begins and ends with the consumer. Every aspect of the new flavor’s product development will be decided by Mountain Dew’s most passionate fans. To achieve this goal, Dewmocracy 2.0 takes full advantage of social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, 12seconds.tv, and YouTube. The campaign is being rolled out in 7 stages.
Dewmocracy 2.0 home page


Dewmocracy 2.0 home page
Stage 1: From Seven Flavors to Three

Dewmocracy 2.0 kicked off in July 2009 with a traditional road tour – a team of trucks that traveled across 12 states giving consumers the chance to sample seven new Mountain Dew flavors. Visitors were encouraged to describe the flavors that they liked or disliked in video booths at each truck stop. These videos were uploaded directly to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. A total of 1.5M people attended the road tours, and three flavors were chosen based on their votes.
Stage 2: Online Community Creation

Stage 2 kicked off with the creation of DEW Labs, an exclusive online social community for Mountain Dew fans. Consumers were invited to DEW Labs only if they picked Mountain Dew as their top beverage of choice and drank it several times a day. DEW Labs members received samples for each of the three flavors and joined a Flavor Nation, a mini community dedicated to championing the flavor that they enjoyed the most.
Stage 3 and 4: Choosing a Color and Name

Each Flavor Nation was then asked to choose a color for their favorite flavor via Mountain Dew’s Facebook fan page. They were also encouraged to submit product names, which were then reviewed by Mountain Dew’s marketing team. The most popular names were given their own Twitter pages. Dew fans were encouraged to become followers of these pages if they liked the names. White Out, Distortion, and Typhoon were the ultimate names selected.
Stage 5 and 6: Designing a Label and TV Campaign

The next task was to design a label for each drink. A challenge was sent out to designers across the country and hundreds of submissions were received. Voters on Facebook narrowed down these submissions to three designers. Each designer then worked with Dew Labs members over conference calls and live chats to come up with a design unique to each flavor.
A similar process was used to determine the ad agencies that would work on a TV campaign for the new flavors.
Stage 7: Product Launch

This year, Mountain Dew will use both social networking and traditional media to conduct a two-tiered product rollout. Once the three flavors hit store shelves in April, fans could rally friends, family and the rest of the country to vote for their favorite flavor online. The flavor with the most votes will join the permanent Dew family on Labor Day.

Conclusion

By giving consumers almost complete control over the development of a new soft drink, Dewmocracy 2.0 is perhaps the most extreme example of leveraging social media to establish a direct dialogue with consumers. Beinggirl.com and “The Best Job in the World” have already demonstrated the impact that such campaigns can have. Although it’s more difficult than ever to reach today’s consumer, social media provides an opportunity for brand managers to communicate directly with their audience in previously unimaginable ways.

Keep Your Crowd Motivated: Promote From Within

What happens when you need your crowd to not only brainstorm ideas and give feedback, but actually put in some real effort promoting your product? You are not paying them, but you need them to work for you above and beyond idly checking your consumer panel and fan pages. How do you make them care?

Mountain Dew has been faced with exactly this problem, and looks like they have figured member motivation out. They have created a hierarchy of fan control and leadership, using a little friendly competition, with outstanding members settling to the top with more responsibility (and fringe benefits). Let me explain the way this has worked.

1. Mountain Dew has this large online fan base (their Facebook page has over 600,000 fans) this is the base of the DEWmocracy pyramid.
2. They get 4,000 of their most active members to join Dew Labs which comes with the additional responsibility of commenting on discussion boards and providing feedback, BUT Dew Labs members get to taste the new flavors first, see the new designs before anyone else does, and have a greater say in the soda development decisions. Plus, there is the faint hope that free Mountain Dew gear will come from participation, so far the general Dew Labs population has only really been promised Livestrong-style bracelets (which we haven't seen) and "more opportunities to get gear in the future." That's okay, for me it isn't about the Dew gear, it's about the experience. So why select just 4,000 of your fans (of which ~500 are active) to make decisions instead of 'em all? I think it is because the vocal Dew Labs members rile up the larger fan base making them wish they participated in Mountain Dew related events more... Dew Labs helps activate the rest of the fans.
3. Out of all the Dew Labs members, 9 were chosen to take a leadership role in one of their online events - the Twitter name race. These 9 leaders were given the opportunity for increased participation in the outcome of the DEWmocracy campaign by running the Twitter name race (where the outcome was directly related to how hard the leader worked), they were included in a conference call with the winners of the can design challenge (the designers that actually designed the new flavor's packaging), and in a live online chat. The 9 "lead" Dew Labs members help activate the larger Dew Labs base.
4. Finally, there is activity going on now to select 3 "council members," one to represent each flavor nation. The perks with this job seem pretty nice. Moderators said "... comes with HUGE benefits ... council member must be able to travel to NYC." Already, 3 Dew Labs members were invited to travel (all expense paid) to NYC for a media event. Only two of the three were able to make it. The report from the two that did go to NYC for the DEWmocracy day is now up on Dew Labs. Just like each other step in the hierarchy, these two sort of rile everybody else up... even the most active members, to make them a little jealous and see the possible benefits of participating even more in the Mountain Dew online community.

I think that all this organization is a way for the brand team to maximize bang for their buck. They pull out all the stops for a couple of members (after all, a free trip to NYC for two nights isn't cheap), and there is a trickle down effect of activity to the larger populations of fans.

**The Dew Labs members who went to NYC are telling their story on the private site. Expect an account of their adventures (in their own words) in the near future. I think what they have to say is an insightful look into Marketer/Consumer relationship. Also, the bacon loving @DHatfield has agreed to write an article, so look forward to that.**

Einstein Supports Time Travel and Mountain Dew Throwback

Courtesy of Dew Labs member Chemantics.