inside Gatorade social media war room "Mission Control", Episode 2

Yesterday Adage posted this interesting interview with Carla Hassan, senior director-consumer engagement at Gatorade and apparently head of the G Mission Control.

The popular sport drink decided to launch the Gatorade Mission Control in April 2010 along with the roll-out of G-Series in order to be pro-active on the field of online conversations and to engage with customers.

Partnering with Radian6 and a couple of agencies such as Fleishman-Hillard and VML, the G Mission Control was able to increase substantially the amount of brand fans joining the Facebook page over the past months and reached 1,200,000 in 2010 (+ 500,000 against only +200,000 in 2009 ). From a tactical perspective, they also helped adjust communication tools on G-Series. For example, the social media analysts on-board received lots of negative feedback from people having difficulties finding the product in store. Based on these comments, the brand created a store locator on the corporate website.

The internal team is composed of four full-time community managers using Radian6 to monitor conversations about the brand, competitors and sports enthusiasts communities. They are surrounded by flat-screen TVs to watch live events and interact with fans. Their reporting is done on a weekly, bi-weekly and monthly basis.

To my knowledge, Gatorade is the first brand to incorporate and communicate about its social media management in such transparent way. It will be interesting to observe what impact the G Mission Control will have on the company's sales, product innovation and reputation overtime.

Do you have other examples in mind of similar social media management structures?


Original article from Adage, "A sneak peek inside G Mission control": http://adage.com/article?article_id=146149