• by Karl Greenberg , October 4, 2011

The title of the Advertising Week panel "Winning the Marketing War" was a contradiction. The panel was less about how to be a martial marketer than it was about how marketers at company's like GE, FedEx and CVS Caremark are social.

General Electric, for one, is using social media to collaborate for the common good on problems like power and cancer treatment, per Beth Comstock, the company's SVP and CMO. She pointed out that GE makes social media a channel for innovation. "Through our Ecomagination program we challenged the world's entrepreneurs on ways of empowering the smart grid," she said at the event at the Times Center in New York. "We got something like 5,000 business plans, not all of them good, and an array of technology ideas from around the world. That led to investment, but it is nothing we could have created on our own."

Comstock said the company will use that "power of community" much more. "You will see more of that from us." The company is, for example, looking to entrepreneurs to develop a new means of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. "We are using [social media] as an accelerator for invention."

Rob Price, SVP marketing and advertising at CVS Caremark, said the company is using social to extend relationships with the 68 million or so households it has in its ExtraCare loyalty program. "We are bringing it to life in the social media space," he said, adding that social efforts focus on savings personalization and beauty.

But it has also changed the destination for marketers' targeting play books, per Comstock, who said social media has created something that hadn't been possible before: micro relevancy as a kind of shorthand for the kind of narrow reach that hyper-targeted media buys achieve.

"I grew up in mass media, and now with social media and targeted technology, it's about getting to the right people, the right target. Maybe it's 40 radiologists we need to speak to. It's reinventing how you describe success. You still need the 'mass,' but social lets us be much more surgical. So the idea of micro relevancy has been somewhat liberating. It's a bit harder; you have to work more, but the technology we have now means we have the tools to do that."

For CVS Caremark, some of the biggest changes have been around creating a net big enough to gather the right data and the right teams to sift through it all. "We have had to reconfigure how insights are gathered, to determine the degree to which paid owned and earned media are being maximized," said Price. "We have been consolidating sources of insights and looking at them all the same time."

Price said CVS does more deep ethnography and recently opening an internal research center with a mock CVS store with focus groups and eye-tracking. "When we are struggling with wrenching decisions, it's yielding those different areas of study."

He said the CVS/Pharmacy chain is using social media to promote programs like its 600 in-store MinuteClinic medical facilities, and promotions that had hitherto been relegated to print circulars. "Weekly circulars are becoming an anachronism."

Raj Subramaniam, SVP of global marketing and customer experience at FedEx, said the company uses social networks both for consumer facing and internal efforts worldwide. He said the company's blog response unit allows it respond with more expedience to events like the launch of the iPhone 4 last year, for which FedEx handled shipping worldwide. There were some interesting tracking snafu's involving early-shipment notices that predated that iPhone's global launch date. Subramaniam said FedEx was able to use social media networks to deal with tracking hot spots. "We were able to use social media to deal with those issues."

"You think of FedEx as a business to business brand, but now the consumer, who is the final recipient of that iPhone has got a voice and can influence opinion about your company. You have to think about thought leaders in any marketplace and how your actions are influencing that market," he said.