Creating Community from the Can

In this inuagural post, I take on what it really means to make something out of nothing...

Creating community--it is the essence of PR and MarComm. Priority #1 for companies is to create a common bond between people that turns one consumer or supporter into thousands. Harley Davidson's Harley Owner's Group (HOG) is an excellent example. Buying a Harley Motorcycle is your ticket into a culture built around black leather, boots, and Posse Rides (where owners from across the country get together, share their experiences, and ride on...together).

For companies like Harley Davidson, creating a community is simple: build an image for your brand based on your customer's interests and *let it ride*, but replicating their efforts is another issue. It's a point of interest that even Academia has taken on. Jim Grunig, John Ledingham, and Stephen Bruning, among many others, have posited theories to better understand the phenomenon of groups of people forming relationships with a company's brand, including the level of involvement people have with the company, and people's trust, commitment, level of control in decision-making, and their overall satisfaction.

But here's an example that defies the deeper insights of these gurus...

In an attempt to drum up publicity for the efficacy of its toilet paper, SCOTT Tissue created a campaign around the Halftime Flush for Super Bowl XLI this past January. Citing that 90 million tiolets will be flushed during halftime of the Super Bowl, they claimed that Scott's toilet paper disolved 4 times faster and prevented unsightly and emotionally draining clogs, and even enlisted Mike Ditka to get the message across. The focus of the campaign: A Share Your Cloggiest Moment Contest with a $25,000 reward for the person with a story of the most inopportune moment for a toilet clog.

Even if their claim that everyone flushing the toilet at Half Time would cause sewage problems wasn't true, their campaign was successful, and the eventual winner was a guy from Pennsylvania who rushed to the rescue of a clog with a ski pole (There were others that were funnier...).

What SCOTT probably didn't expect was the community it created among people, particularly bloggers. With a chance to capitalize on people's "dirty little (toilet) secrets," bloggers didn't hesitate to feature SCOTT's promotion on their blogs and talk about their own stories, even if it was tongue-in-cheek.

The genius of SCOTT's promotion was that it got publicity AND community for the price of one. For a brief moment, SCOTT successfully got people to talk about their most embarrassing toilet experiences AND they effectively linked their own product to the emotional release from people "coming out of the bathroom" about their own experiences (and not to mention, they linked their product to preventing further embarassments).

Here are a few examples:

• In a random post on a blog entitled Fresh Preserves, the blogger added that she considered entering the contest, and then bore her most embarassing toilet experience.
• On Adfreak.com, Blogger David Kiefaber posted his own embarassing moment in the water closet.
• On family blog FamilyOf9.blogspot.com, the father of nine expounded his on kids' toilet mishap that he had actually submitted to Scott, featuring a practical joke that went awry.

The point is, creating community is about getting people to relate, and getting people to relate, is about getting people to talk. Or as Scott Clog Clinic rep Mwanza Lumumba put it, "Everyone has experienced a toilet clog at one time or another, and whether the stories are embarrassing, unfortunate or downright gross, they always describe a situation people can relate to."

In cases like this, creating community and branding go hand in hand--branding at the core is about getting people to relate to and talk about your product. The example of SCOTT's campaign shows that if you can find something intriguing for people to talk about, and get them to link it to your brand, you can create a community of people who associate your brand with something your competitors don't. And creating community is as much about creating differentiation as anything else.