Week 1 Original

Clorox Creates a Community

Years ago when Facebook was primarily for personal use and few businesses were represented, it wasn't uncommon to see your friends liking groups about random quotes from movies, celebrities, or TV shows. For the most part, these fan pages and groups were created by other individual users who had no connection to the original source of the subject. They simply created a place for people with like-minded interests to go and talk about that specific topic. A usual notification on Facebook would read something like, "John Smith likes It is pointless to make your bed when your going to sleep in it again.," or "Jane Doe likes not spilling oil in the gulf of Mexico". Pages linked to other media types were also common such as, "Joanna Clark likes The Office" or "Mary Johnson likes Jay-Z". As Facebook became open to anyone with an email address (instead of strictly college students), businesses launched pages and groups of their own and soon new notifications began to show different trends of Facebook use.

I remember the first time I saw a post that said a friend of mine likes "Gatorade". I paused at the line. It looked so weird compared to the pages generated by users with long random titles. I thought, "Why would someone bother to like a product?" To me it seemed so random and unlike one of the pages above, it didn’t even give someone viewing your personal profile a sense of who you are or your personality. It seemed useless. However with more and more companies making pages it doesn't give me pause to see friends liking, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Skittles, or Verizon Wireless. That wasn’t until yesterday, when I saw that a friend of mine had liked, “Clorox”. This made me pause, and laugh. How Clorox got a 20 year old girl to like their page is kind of impressive in a way and it prompted me to click on the link. I looked through the posts they had recently generated and came across the website http://cloroxconnects.com/pages/home. I found that what Clorox has done is quite interesting.

For any company, it is a challenging prospect to create buzz using such a relatively new medium that at first may seem only most successful with younger generations. Being a company which sells mainly bleach and other cleaning products, the process of creating excitement through social media would appear very difficult. However, Clorox tapped into the basic principles of social media marketing and simply fueled the groundswell. By creating the Facebook page and then the corresponding website, the company immediately put power into the hands of their consumers and watched what happened. On the website, “CloroxConnects” users have the option to join the community as a Partner, Consumer, Inventor, or Employee. From there, opinions are shared about current products as well as possible ideas for new products. What really stands out for me is the fact that consumers can post ideas and suggestions for new products as well as ways to improve current products. Clorox has given every consumer the power to contribute to the future of the company in ways that most pertain to their needs. Social media marketing has provided the company with a direct line to consumers and in turn Clorox is learning more and more about what their customers want and need from the company. With that kind of information, Clorox will be able to improve and innovate in ways most relevant to the people.