Rubbermaid’s Talking Application – It actually talks

About six months ago Rubbermaid begin exploring the deep dark corners of social computing.  We had been listening for a while and knew conversations were taking place.  Now was the time to start participating ourselves.

Although the submission process asks to submit a single application (I’ll submit the core application) we utilize multiple tools to communicate with our customers.

The centerpiece of our talking strategy is blog.rubbermaid.com. We launched in February 2008 and by April we were going full force.  The core strategy to engage our target customers was to bring real-life experiences into our stories.  We wanted people to understand that Rubbermaid was made up of real people who share the same home organizational challenges as everyone else.

Some of our most successful postings have been when we’ve taken photos of our real garages, closets, desk drawers and more and showcased them to the world. Trust me, this was not easy. My wife was horrified I was going to show a photo of her very messy desk drawer.  The hope was that by showing people our challenges they could begin to realize we are real people too. Additionally, we asked for input on how they could help us solve our cluttered and disorganized issues.

The result, consumers and professional organizers have provided wonderful insight to us as well as everyone reading our blog.  The honesty and openness has helped engage our readers and allowed them to feel connected with us.

That’s success.

Now to take it a step further, we utilized Flickr to upload all the photos for our blog makeovers, posted video on YouTube for people to watch, share & comment, and most importantly opened a Twitter account and have had engaging tweets with numerous professional organizers.  We've even been able to facilitate connecting professional organizers around the country via Twitter.

Now, to answer the question about our application actually talking. Some of the relationships we’ve created via our blog and Twitter have turned into real-life conversations and will eventually lead to face to face meetings and summits.  Now that’s talking.

I hope you enjoy checking out our blog.  Plus, if you have any ideas for my linen closet, just let me know.  I'd appreciate it.