Behind the Orange Apron – Presentation Coverage from BlogWell

The following is part of a series covering the BlogWell conference which took place at Chicago’s Gleacher Center on Thursday, January 22.

Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal, stated in his introduction to the over 230 attendees at the BlogWell, “Starting a blog at a 5,000+ person company is like fighting a war on two fronts. At the same time we’re fighting against resistance inside the company, we’re being disparaged and fought against by independent bloggers who criticize corporate blogging in general.”

But, Serovitz said, “it’s worth it because the openness and transparency/honesty that doing blogging correctly brings will bring change important enough to fight for.”

Nick Ayres’, Interactive Marketing Manger for Home Depot, presentation, titled “The Digital Orange Apron”, explained the objectives and accomplishments of their social media efforts. As background, he explained that market share in their space is about half Home Depot, half Lowes, Menards and Ace combined. Consumers used to express a strong preference for Home Depot because of the great assistance and advice provided by their store staff (“orange aprons”). But there were many signs they were losing that reputation and the preference/loyalty they had as a result.

This loss of preference was publicly made painfully clear for Home Depot in the Scott Burns MSN article of March 7, 2007. Within two weeks that article had received over 2,000 comments from people agreeing that service had plummeted. Home Depot’s CEO responded online and all Home Depot employees had a vivid example of both the passion surrounding the brand and the incredible communicative power of social media.

The mission of “The Digital Orange Apron” is to use social media to recapture customer attention and preference, to connect with a new customer set, and to engage store associates (employees) in new ways. They intend to reach those goals by doing online what the best associates do in the stores, more efficiently, broadly, and consistently.

The Home Depot’s foray on Twitter has gone through an extensive evolution. Initially it was a move to block poachers and make sure they reserved the name in case the service became popular.  Later they realized that they could use the timeliness of Twitter in conjunction with their unique strength (particularly in the South) as a critical provider during hurricane season. They got a seat literally inside the Hurricane Command Center during the onset of Hurricane Gustav, learned exactly which stores were going to be open and, thanks to Twitter, were able to spread the word immediately.

They also spread information from their pre-existing hurricane preparedness guide and communicated which stores were out of which items during the Gustav experience to save customers unnecessary aggravation.

Two critical elements discovered during the experience included:

1. Do not use Twitter to try to sell products, but only to provide information people might need or want.
2. Set one person to be the face and voice of Home Depot on Twitter.

Since its inception, they’ve received multiple comments on Twitter about new and/or renewed brand preference, showing that they are achieving their goal. Still, they are not pushing that they are on Twitter at all via ads or PR, and they are intentionally not measuring its success by short-term sales increases.

In addition to Twitter, they have also experimented with online video, Facebook and other social media efforts. The major lessons The Home Depot has learned from those are:

1. Start at the beginning as often as possible. Talk to your customers. Figure out what they want/expect.
2. Find others at the company who are passionate about the brand and the space and make them the evangelists.
3. Scratch and claw for small wins, then use them to capture the imagination of an executive champion.
4. Don’t let it turn into a “campaign”. This is a conversation, not a one-off. Make sure you have or can get buy-in for the long-term commitment needed.

Learning those lessons is, in part, why Home Depot’s Nick Ayres encouraged the BlogWell audience to persevere; fighting the war on two fronts that is creating and managing social media initiatives in a large corporation.

Guest blogger James R. Dickey is Executive Director of Marketing for Unitrin Specialty. His personal web site is at jamesrdickey.com. Watch for more of his coverage of BlogWell coming soon.