Case Study

Finding opportunity in the midst of a crisis -

Guerilla PR uses SM2 to help Johnson Diversey

“do well by doing good”

Guerilla PR (“GPR”) is a 13 year old award-winning social impact consulting agency that builds product markets, cultural movements and social media departments for its clients. GPR specializes in B2B and B2C strategy, social commerce, increasing revenue, community management, building networks, and facilitating cross-sector partnership development. They provide best practices to businesses and organizations that enable them to build and control messaging, brand and reputation.

Michael Leifer, CEO of GPR, is a cultural anthropologist and social graphologist, who understands the value of social media data and the wealth of information it provides. An SM2 user for many projects, Michael dives deep into social media data to observe online ecosystems to solve business problems. When Johnson Diversey came to him for a project during the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, GPR turned to SM2 to help piece together an effective listening, monitoring and communications strategy.

The Challenge

With the outbreak of the H1N1 Virus (also known as the “Swine Flu”) across the United States in 2009, there was wide spread panic. Parents didn’t know how to keep their children safe and what the best preventative cleaning practices should be, nor did they know the right questions to ask. Schools and janitors were struggling to keep people calm and understand the best way to keep schools germ free and safe.

Johnson Diversey (“Diversey”), a leading brand of sustainable cleaning, sanitation and hygiene solutions, had a specific clean and non-toxic Accelerated Hydrogen Peroxide product and the knowledge of how to effectively prevent H1N1 using it. They knew that there was an opportunity to come to the public’s aid and

raise awareness of their product, but they did not know how to effectively reach and engage the right people to make this knowledge available.

“We researched, tried out and compared a lot of different Internet conversational listening and monitoring platforms before selecting SM2,” reflects Michael Leifer, CEO and cultural anthropologist, Guerilla PR. “Our decision was predicated upon three main factors. One, we needed a really robust engine that had a lot of power under the hood, meaning we needed a service that had their own datacenter with 7+ years worth of historical information. Two, we needed the platform to have flexible inputs to enable us to wire and blend data from a client’s other services like Google Analytics, bit.ly, Salesforce CRM, their Facebook social graph and widget sharing services like add this and share this, to a client’s affiliate engines and transactional info, to 3rd party opted-in public databases. Third, we needed the ability to create custom dashboards for our clients to easily digest, make sense of and pro-actively use the information based upon their specific role and responsibility that they had within their organization.”

SDL SOLUTIONS | COMPANY |SDL SM2 Guerilla PR

GPR chose to use SDL SM2 to complement their research, insight and strategy for the following reasons:

1. The SM2 datacenter provided the ability to track trends, conversations, channels and memes over time.

2. The SM2 control panel provided the ability to easily view, drill down and carve up different data streams into customizable sets and dashboards to make the information easily digestible.

3. The flexibility and interoperability of SDL SM2 allowed GPR to pull in data feeds from 3rd party platforms and run comparisons of that data against other information (e.g. Google Analytics) to triangulate results and bring multiple campaign elements and monitoring to life.

www.guerillapr.com Consulting, Public Relations & Marketing

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1. By listening to stakeholder concerns online and working together with key influencers, Diversey was able to create relevant and informative content to help render H1N1 non-pandemic and to educate key stakeholders in the best practices, processes and products from spreading further.

2. With SM2, GPR transformed key influencers into brand advocates of Diversey and the information they were trying to communicate to the public.

3. Sales of Accelerated Hydrogen Peroxide increased substantially as a result of the communications campaign crafted from the data that SM2 provided.

4. Diversey was able to create help a widespread crisis by responding quickly with the right information and spreading the word to the right people.

Solution

Guerilla PR first started by listening to what was happening in the marketplace. By becoming immersed in the online ecosystem with the appropriate search set up and meta-tags, the firm was able to identify key stakeholders or “grass tops” surrounding the buzz of the H1N1 outbreak. They found that not only were concerned parents talking online, but also concerned high school students, principals, school administrators, janitors and many others were also conversing about Swine Flu and looking for guidance in how to protect students. Using SM2, GPR was able to identify more targets in this market than originally planned.

With the information of who was talking and what they were most concerned about, Diversey and GPR were able to create a set of targeted N1H1 Informational Action Kits. One of these kits was a Parent Action Kit and resource, which provided relevant content on cleaning best practices including a set of videos, resource links, articles, info-graphics, photos, and most importantly a downloadable and sharable FAQ for parents to print out, bring to school N1H1 meetings, and ask or share with their faculty and administrators on best cleaning practices and processes. This FAQ file was directly taken and updated from N1H1 questions addressed in online conversations on 3rd party blogs, message boards, sites, social networks and in the news. With relevant and easily sharable content now available, the next step was to spread it to the stakeholders of the H1N1 crisis.

Subsequently, SM2 identified specific target key-influencers and what they were saying online. GPR was then able to craft a successful messaging strategy to directly and separately

confront these influencers (mothers, nonprofit groups, unions, bloggers, etc.) in their own language and environment. Working with them before publishing material, they were able to become a part of this process. As a result, these influencers became aware of the best chemical options provided by the EPA and were given access to CDC reports and resource sites, enabling them to advocate the Kits by spreading the word online and offline. Diversey’s Accelerated Hydrogen Peroxide (“AHP”) solution was never overtly pushed to the parents as that wasn’t the spirit of the campaign (only listed as an option to use for N1H1), which was to help.

The GPR / Diversey N1H1 Parent Kit morphed into the Outbreak Control website that is still an actively used and helpful resource located at:

http://outbreakcontrol.com/en/leftnav/types-of-infections/h1n1-details

As a result of GPR’s successful communications strategy and its use of SDL SM2, Diversey was able to respond quickly and effectively during a crisis, arming parents with the information needed to share and abate school-based pandemic fear and to help render N1H1 in 2010 as a post-pandemic concern according to the World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/en/). Another by-product of Diversey doing good for the world was that sales requests for Diversey’s AHP from their 3rd party distributors had a significant increase. GPR helped Diversey to do well by doing good.

Going Forward

As an innovator of the use of social media data, GPR plans to continue using SM2 to inform effective communications strategy for clients in business and nonprofit alike.

1. Results

Results

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