We now get to eat Giraffe Bread because someone in the Sainsbury’s customer services team wrote an open and uncontrived reply to Lily’s lovely suggestion. It happened because Lily’s Mum liked the honest and endearing letter, and shared it with others who recognised it’s natural good humour. Such genuine warmth is unexpected. We’re not used to hearing a human voice from the corporate machine.

Lily Robinson wrote to Sainsbury’s, in May of last year, asking “Why is tiger bread called tiger bread? It should be called giraffe bread. Love from Lily Robinson age 3 and 1/2″. And by good fortune her letter found it’s way to Chris King in the customer services team, who replied “I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea – it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it?” He also explained how it had got its name: “It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripey like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.” He included a £3 gift card, and signed the letter “Chris King (age 27 & 1/3)”.

Chris received hundreds of compliments for his thoughtful response and Sky Living reporter Victoria Joy has even ‘proposed’ after seeing his letter. Chris wasn’t looking for romance or even a promotion. (He’s now returned to university and is studying to become a primary school teacher). He wasn’t seeking to exploit social media as part of a clever campaign. And we love him all the more for that.

Back in 2000, a prophetic book called The Cluetrain Manefesto predicted just such social effects in marketing. It was written so early that it doesn’t even feature the word “bog”, yet it’s lauded as “the seminal work of the internet age”. The book sets out 95 predictions, or theses, on how the world of business and marketing will change as a result of the internet. The first three of the book’s theses are:
1. Markets are conversations
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice

It goes on to warn businesses that “In just a few more years, the current homogenized ‘voice’ of business – the sound of mission statements and brochures – will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th-century French court”

That tiger bread is now giraffe bread is testament to the power of a human voice in brand communications. And all credit goes to Sainsbury’s for recognising a good thing when they saw it.

Last week P&G launched the I Like = 1 Day charity Facebook campaign to promote their clean water programme in developing countries. If you give P&G a Facebook “like”, they will give one day of clean drinking water to someone in the third world. Am I alone in thinking this is in danger of looking crude and exploitative?

It seems a bit like blackmail. “Like us or else someone will go without water”. I have no particular feelings either way for P&G (far more likely is a connection with Ariel or Pampers), but if I give them a Facebook like, they’ll do something I care about. They’ve reduced an important campaign to a base transaction. I’m not connected and I’m not impressed. Maybe it’s the use of the “equals” sign. I can’t equate something as apparently banal as a Facebook “like” with something as essential as clean drinking water.

Successful campaigns offer more than trivial engagement. The Pepsi Refresh Project offered $20m to fund 1,000 “refreshing ideas” – philanthropic projects submitted to their site and voted for online. Over a million people have benefited from these projects, ten of thousands have volunteered, and hundreds of thousands have actively engaged with the brand by promoting their ideas and voting.

Great campaigns also work because they connect us with others, reminding us what we share, what we have in common – campaigns like the Let’s Colour Project from Dulux .  This award winning programme offers long term benefits for brand awareness too, because it’s so clearly anchored in what the brand is and the potential the brand has for transforming lives, whether it’s a community in India or my own living room.

Their most recent project was the rebrand of the Imperial War Museum with Hat-Trick. I think this is a great piece of work. Powerful, visually fresh and flexible. JWA developed the brand based on the idea of “the force of war”. The power and simplicity of the positioning is also reflected in the abbreviation to IWM and a naming structure that works across all five museums for the first time.

I had the pleasure of working with Imperial War Museum in 2008/9 on their very first social media campaign. They wanted to connect new audiences with a season of exhibitions on Britain in the 1940’s and to promote their retro ”Make do and mend” posters, books and archive materials. We created themed twitter characters and offered some of the IWM archive for free with creative commons licenses. This worked a treat, connecting with a young audience of vintage fashion freaks and retro aesthets.

The campaign team worked hard to understand this audience, the trends and emerging interests, the twitter feeds they followed and the blog sites they read. We started conversations, we tweeted and retweeted, we offered free stuff (creative commons), and we wrote about how IWM resources were being picked up and used by others. Success in social media often starts with two things. A genuine passion and a commitment to becoming a part of a community.

I’ve joined Jane Wentworth Associates as their digital brand specialist, working with clients on social media strategies, online brand experience, smartphone and tablet apps,  and the social workforce. I’ll be sharing examples of my work here over the comiong months.