Converseon, Graco's marketing agency, was tasked with figuring out how to connect this 66-year-old maker of car seats, strollers and other products for babies and infants in a tightly regulated environment with this highly interconnected online community of "influentials" with a proven skepticism toward brands.

"The 34 million moms online in the U.S. are among the savviest consumers online," said Paull Young, a senior account executive and social media strategist at New York-based Converseon.

So, 18 months, ago, Converseon and Graco Baby first begin "listening" to the conversation--for several months before proactively doing anything--to develop a clear understanding of the landscape in the parenting category.

Based on the information they gathered, the agency and clients formed a strategy to make Graco an accepted and welcomed brand in the online parenting conversation. They also attempted to "humanize" the Graco brand, and to build lasting relationships with the community by demonstrating that behind the brand are concerned and engaged parents.

"We work closely with Graco's marketing team, their legal team, and even their product team to formulate the best strategy for the brand," Young said.

Additional "conversation mining" found a robust, active parenting group that was largely resistant to commercial efforts to engage them. A core thrust of Graco's strategy was, thus, not to force the brand into the conversations, but instead create and foster environments to facilitate relationships between influentials, and then get invited to the conversation.

The core components of that campaign included a series of Graco blogger "Get-Together" events across the country to lay the groundwork for the launch of a corporate Graco parenting blog authored by a team of Graco employees. The blog was designed to focus on "parent first" issues, stories, advice. The blogging effort was supported with the complementary use of other social media tools, including Flickr, YouTube and Twitter.

As a result of these efforts, online chatter about Graco nearly doubled and positive sentiment increased 15%--68% positive in 2007 to 83% positive this year. Also, the blog now regularly attracts thousands of unique visitors. The company plans to launch a Graco-branded Twitter profile to complement several existing Graco employees/bloggers who already use Twitter--as well as a new parenting and travel blog that launches in beta this week--at www.readyfortheroadahead.com, among other social media initiatives that employ a number of mediums.

"Converseon's end-to-end social media approach has been a game-changer for Graco," said Pancho Gutstein, Graco's director of brand marketing.

Whether Graco can retain its popularity among bloggers, and just how well it manages issues in the future, remain to be seen.

This week, when one searched for "Graco" and "children" on Google News, the first search result was a story by ABC News about new child safety standards becoming law--partly because of a Graco play yard killing a 13-month-old girl back in 2002.

Young, for his part, had no comment on this specific story, only saying that he planned to continue working closely with Graco's legal team to map out an online strategy. "Graco has made it very clear that they plan to invest significantly more in social media marketing in the future," Young said.