BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Procter & Gamble Co. loves Facebook after all, and besides encouraging brands to develop a presence there, the world’s biggest marketer has opened an office in Silicon Valley to help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities with the website.

Those messages came in a meeting last week between P&G executives and venture capitalists, recounted by David Hornik on VentureBlog in a post that quickly picked up currency over the weekend on, of all places, Twitter.

“P&G’s explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that,” Mr. Hornik wrote. “And while P&G’s thought leaders expressed some skepticism about the efficacy of Facebook’s ‘engagement ads,’ they certainly view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building. They didn’t quantify what they are paying for that exposure, but it is quite clear that the numbers are very big.”

Mr. Hornik contrasted the enthusiastic outlook on Facebook to a less-enthusiastic one by P&G executives toward Twitter. “They described Twitter as ‘much more like television than one might think.’ To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one-to-many communications that are short bursts of timely information,” he wrote. “P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand-building and advertising side. … They do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook.”

Mr. Hornik, after being contacted by P&G over the weekend, did backtrack on one big number — a projection he had attributed to P&G that Facebook would reach 5 billion members globally. That 5 billion is actually the number of consumers P&G hopes to reach globally, up from the current 4 billion.

By whatever count, however, P&G’s outlook on Facebook and social media as marketing tools appears rosier than Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation, portrayed in a talk to a digital-marketing forum in Cincinnati in late 2008.

“What in heaven’s name,” he asked, “made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

“Who said this is media?” he said. “Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

He went on to say, noting it was personal preference rather than company policy, “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”

He also expressed discomfort about the level of personalized targeting available through Facebook, though he said that Facebook applications are potentially valuable vehicles for advertisers.

In an e-mail, a P&G spokeswoman wrote that Mr. McConnell was speaking for himself, not the company, at the time. “P&G sees the value of digital and social media in consumers’ lives and we want to connect with consumers in the environments where they are spending their time,” she said. “For example, Facebook fan pages for brands [are] an easy way to engage with consumers in a forum where they’ve chosen to engage with us. (i.e. Pringles’ fan page has over 2.8 million global fans). We don’t have social media figured out, but we are encouraging our brands to include digital and social media into their holistic brand-building strategies.”

She said the intended perspective on Twitter is that it’s “a communication platform that is good for ‘one-to-many’ communication, similar to TV. Additionally, some of our brands are using Twitter to engage with consumers one-on-one when they have questions. We also view Twitter as a valuable listening tool.”

She also clarified that what was referred to as an Innovation Center on VentureBlog is a “Connect & Develop” office near Palo Alto “to increase our presence in innovation hotspots,” but is not the size of the sprawling complexes that P&G typically terms “innovation centers.” Connect & Develop is a longstanding P&G program which seeks to solicit innovation from outside companies and consumers while also licensing its own technology to outside companies.

[via Advertising Age]

LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

You can listen to your customers in two ways. Directly and indirectly. Do both and gain not only  valuable insight from what your customers share with you but also be seen as a brand that truly values the opinion of your customers.

Direct Listening: Listen, Engage, Impress Your Customer

Enable your customers to give you ideas, feedback and suggestions about your products, services and operations. VOCANIC can help you empower and impress your customers with your brand’s own customised Direct Listening platform. You gain value insights from the information and your customer see you as a brand that cares to invest time and energy in listening to him.

VOCANIC’s own VOC (Voice of Customer) Listening Tool and our IdeasXchange solution are proven platforms that many brands have used to listen to their customers, directly and indirectly.

InDirect Listening: Hear What Your Customers Say To Each Other

Monitor the conversation that your customers have having about your brand in Social Media. VOCANIC can help you evaluate, select and run the right Social Media monitoring tool for you,  to scan and aggregate your customer conversations so they can be analysed and translated into deep insight and good action plans.

WORD OF MOUTH

Word Of Mouth marketing is a key component of successful campaigns. VOCANIC gets that. In fact, research shows that a face-to-face recommendation is more effective in changing a person’s perception of a brand and in driving the action of trial or even brand switching, than an online recommendation.

Our proprietary Groundswell™ method and technology can help you identify your brand’s powerful advocates. We can also help you plan and roll out a calendar of activations to engage these Influencers and Opinion Leaders of your brand, giving them stories to share and topics to talk about with their wide social network, face-to-face as well as online in the Social Media.

BRAND ADVOCACY MEASUREMENT

Every positive recommendation helps you win new customers at lower cost. Every negative recommendation makes it harder and more costly for you to acquire new customers.

NET PROMOTER SCORE

VOCANIC can help measure the strength of your customer loyalty in the marketplace using the NPS® metric. This essential tool will help you to correlate the measure of your brand advocacy to the financial performance of your business.

VOC LISTENING TOOL

More insightful that conventional surveys, VOCANIC’s own VOC (Voice of the Customer) Listening Tool can you harness valuable insights from the most powerful person IN your company – your customer. We can help you to design and build a programme to track your NPS and give you the diagnostic insight needed to improve it.

Social media took a wild ride in 2009. The mainstream press fell in love with Twitter, Facebook grew aggressively and a new wave of companies starting taking social media seriously as a business tool. Below are 5 secrets to staying on top of it all in 2010

1. Pay Attention to the Metrics
You can't manage what you can't measure. Chief Marketing Officers are going to pay more attention to metrics and tie in social media more directly to overall business goals, not just web-related goals. When starting up new project agree on what the metrics should be and what goals are appropriate.

2. Scale Good Habits
As you grow, make sure you match your structure, policy and guidelines to your organization size. What works with 2 people won't work with 20 people. All in all your structure should encourage good habits. Your entire team should be motivated to respond quickly, post consistently and talk like a human. Speaking of policies and rules…

3. Have Rules, But Trust People
As your social media strategy matures, you'll add in more rules and guidelines. However, you can't have a rule for every situation. You need to trust your team. Lead by example, don't manage with rulebook.

4. Creativity & Personality Trump Big Budget
Social media is definitely one of those areas in life where more money doesn't always win. Two of the most powerful ingredients in social media are creativity and personality. They are the key to having a viral message and to being a trusted resource. They are also essential to discovering useful strategies and tactics. You can't be afraid to try something new or go against the grain.

5. Listen Listen Listen
Don't focus so much on you and your message. Put that farther down on your To Do List. Focus first on your customers. Hear what they are saying, see what they're up to. Once you've been able to connect, and figure them out, then see how you can help.

Hat Tip to the SlideShare Team