FIR Interview: Walgreens Social Media Director Adam Kmiec

Posted on January 22, 2012 at 9:07 am UK

FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz interview Adam Kmiec, director of social media for Walgreens, the largest drug store chain in the US and a Fortune 50 company.

Walgreens has engaged in the last 10 days or so in a social media-focused effort to build awareness among customers of alternatives to Express Scripts, the prescription benefit manager through which hundreds of thousands of people in the US pay for their prescription medications. Unable to reach an agreement to renew their contract, Walgreens no longer accepts Express Scripts but using mechanisms like Prescription Savings Club membership to retain customers.

The campaign to build awareness and retain customer loyalty has been largely focused on social media, including paid tactics like promoted Twitter trends and sponsored blog posts. In this wide-ranging interview, Kmiec outlines the challenges of the campaign, discusses the importance of statistical insights to drive decision-making, and the use of paid social media, as well as outcomes of the effort to date.

(The Walgreens campaign was covered by Advertising Age and was the subject of a story covered on FIR #634 on January 16. That FIR report was covered by the Best O Pop blog.)

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About our Conversation Partner

For more than 14 years, Walgreens Social Media Director Adam Kmiec has worked for some of the most forward thinking organizations in the world, while helping some of the most dynamic brands find success in the interactive and social space. His career spans both the client and agency sides of the marketing and advertising industry, covering stops at renowned organizations that include Fallon, Leo Burnett, and ConAgra Foods. His focus has always been on solving business problems by leveraging consumer driven insights to fuel creative ideation.

He is a frequent speaker and news contributor. He is currently working on a book titled Yes, It’s Hypocritical due for completion next summer.

Connect with Adam on Twitter @adamkmiec or via other social networks.

Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 3239 9082 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music – On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)

Social Business – a history defined

Posted on January 20, 2012 at 10:23 am UK

It seems that everyone is talking about social business. Whether it’s IBM launching its SmartCloud for social business, or marketers developing their social business strategies for 2012, the term ‘social business’ means different things to different people. So what does social business actually mean? Guest author Andy Hewitt of Global Dawn offers some perspectives.

We define social business as the creation of shared value for everybody in a business value chain, including the customer and the communities they live in, online or offline. For someone in technology, social business may mean free software, platform businesses or games. For a marketer, it could mean loyalty programmes or social network marketplaces. There is also a CSR angle – social business might apply to an ethical, value-driven business.

Social business isn’t new – it has in fact been around for the past thirty years and continues to evolve. Social business has evolved from multiple sources and is taking business in a new direction.

My company Global Dawn has produced an explanatory infographic to niftily sum up social business over the past three decades, showing all the routes that business has travelled to become more social. More than just being about social media, it’s also about values, customers, collaboration, involvement and engagement.

From the development of micro-finance to crowdsourcing to today’s customer ecosystems, shared value and social business is all about empowering people and creating a more collaborative human-centred business environment.

The Technology Stream

A strong tradition running through social business and dating back to the free software movement and then open source is the idea of contribution, specifically making a contribution to the ecosystem you work within. This tradition has helped build the web as we know it today into a giant, free collaborative resource.

The Marketing Stream

Another strong tradition begins with multi-level marketing and loyalty programs. The web has enhanced the capacity of smart firms to build loyalty by engaging more deeply with customers and by interacting in more equal terms, creating a two-way conversation between marketers and customers.

The Social Stream

Finally, there is the tradition of social itself, beginning with the micro-finance initiatives that were designed to replace development aid in what used to be called the third world. That tradition has informed open innovation, the large mobile ecosystems that flourished first in Kenya, and then crowdsourcing.

As we can see, social business is no buzzword but rather a long tradition that has evolved through the decades. However, we can expect to see many more organisations coming forward, claiming to be social business over the coming 12 months.

Social business is about more than just engagement across social channels such as Twitter and Facebook. A true social business will create shared value for everyone, empowering the people it reaches in a valuable way.

Andy Hewitt is Global Dawn’s Director of Customer Propositions. Global Dawn works with brands to offer bespoke software-as-a-service (SaaS) social business platform packages which enable brands to optimise customer marketing engagement. Andy is responsible for defining the Global Dawn proposition for customers as well as the functionality of its Social Business Engine. Contact: andrew.hewitt@globaldawn.co.

Hollywood had Chris Dodd and a press release, Silicon Valley had Facebook

Posted on January 19, 2012 at 6:44 am UK

A nice sound bite in a frothy report by US entertainment industry columnist and blogger +Sharon Waxman about yesterday’s online protests against SOPA and PIPA.

If you remember the core of this issue, it’s seen by many as Hollywood and vested interests versus the rest of us. Sort of the 1% against the 99%.

I’m not sure I’d liken it to a war zone – emotional rhetoric isn’t really helpful – yet this assessment looking at the PR aspects isn’t bad at all.

The bottom line:

It seems that Hollywood still does not realize that it is in the information age. Knowledge moves in real time, and events move accordingly. The medium is the message in a fight like this.

Embedded Link

Sunk! How Hollywood Lost the PR Battle Over SOPA | The Wrap Media
Hollywood had Chris Dodd and a press release. Silicon Valley had Facebook

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Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

To extend Waxman ‘s analogy a little further, battle may be won yesterday but a war still wages.

On the matter of the MPAA press release, I like Ike Pigott’s suggested edits that would make the message a little more authentic.

Related post:

The SOPA blackout

The SOPA blackout

Posted on January 18, 2012 at 7:02 am UK

From 5am GMT today, January 18, one of the top-ten most visited websites on the internet is unavailable for 24 hours – if you visit English-language Wikipedia, you’ll just get a page with a text concisely explaining why you can’t get the content you came for.

In a press release on January 16, the Wikimedia Foundation – owner of Wikipedia – said:

[...] the Wikipedia community has chosen to blackout the English version of Wikipedia for 24 hours, in protest against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PROTECTIP (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States.

(For more about SOPA and PIPA, Google has some easy-to-understand information focused on the US; the BBC looks at SOPA and PIPA from the broader international perspective.) [Later: BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones adds a depth assessment of SOPA and PIPA in his report Wikipedia - what can it tell us about Sopa?]

Wikipedia isn’t the only web resource to go offline today – other high-profile sites include Boing Boing and Reddit (the latter only for 12 hours). It’s notable that the heavyweights on the social web are conspicuous by their absence of action like today’s. So you’ll find business as usual at places like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

As a way to raise awareness of the twin legislative approaches being addressed by US elected representatives, it will undoubtedly have a big impact, particularly in the US. I wonder, though, what Wikipedia’s (and the others’) measurable goal is. Or is it sufficient to simply get awareness raised around the world and over time we might see some kind of result? After all, SOPA itself is off the legislative agenda for now.

Plenty of opinion on that.

In the meantime, what will you do if you can’t get Wikipedia content today? You could try others from a dozen alternative resources Mashable suggests. If you speak other languages and if you’re looking for explanations of things rather than simply linking to them, try the other language versions of Wikipedia – they’re all up.

Or simply postpone your “what, why, how and where” searching just for a day. It’ll all be there again tomorrow.

[Update 1100 GMT] I discovered that I can access much of Wikiepdia on the mobile website. So far, every page I’ve gone to on my mobile device has shown up.

Actually, the mobile website works on a desktop computer too. Try it for yourself. Not everything will show up – some links redirect to the main website and you’ll get the blackout overlay page. Best bet: use the mobile site on your mobile device if you can’t do without English Wikipedia for a day.

It’s not much of a blackout from what I can see.