Walkers: Using social media in new product development

Dan Calladine

Research from comScore recently revealed that 75% (211m) of adult internet users in Europe visited social networks in December 2008. Bearing in mind that three years ago social networks were almost unheard of in Europe, this is an amazing statistic.
Generally speaking, each market has its favourite local network (for example: Hyves in Netherlands; Studivz in Germany: Tuenti in Spain), but Facebook has started to make real inroads into markets outside the UK, particularly in Italy.
An Italian colleague recently explained to me that if you joined an Italian network you could just connect to other Italians. Facebook had far more long-term potential, because it is so international.
The scale of social networks has increased marketers' desire to find ways of using them to actively connect with their audiences. The audience is there - so the potential to harness this power must also be there.
A good recent example from the UK is the 'Do us a Flavour' campaign by Walkers crisps, part of PepsiCo. Walkers is the most popular brand of crisps in the UK, and last year embarked on a mission to develop a new flavour through "crowdsourcing". Wired magazine defines the term as "the act of taking a job performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call".
In this case, Walkers asked consumers to suggest new flavours, via its website, together with a description and a picture to represent the flavour.
Reportedly one million flavours were submitted, from which six flavours were chosen to go into production. All six will be on sale in the UK until early May 2009, when a winner will be chosen from public votes. As soon as the six flavours were chosen, the campaign moved to Facebook to add a social element.
A Facebook page was created for the overall campaign, where has 8000 'fans' have made nearly 500 wallposts. In addition, there are individual pages for each of the flavours, so that people can become fans of specific variants, such as Chilli & Chocolate and Builders Breakfast. Here, they can discuss their merits and cast a vote to decide the ultimate winner. (Incidentally, the smart money is on Builders Breakfast, which has far more fans than any of the others).
The Walkers' story well illustrates a recent quote from the American social media guru, Clay Shirky, who recently wrote: "More interesting than thinking about what's possible in 10 years is thinking what's possible now but that no one has built".
The work that Walkers is doing has been technically possible for some time, but it is only the increased popularity of social networks, like Facebook, that has provided the mass audience to make it worthwhile. With social media, we are now more limited by imagination than by technology.
Twitter is fast becoming the "new Facebook", in terms of the press coverage that it achieves. The buzz about the site in the media is very high at the moment, and has been climbing since late 2008, partly because of the use of the site by the then US Presidential candidate, Barack Obama.
Another reason for this surge of popularity is that, since Twitter does not sell advertising, many other sites do not see it as a competitor, and are happy to promote it and use it to connect with their audience.
For example, Google has now started "tweeting" officially, as has YouTube and MSN which, in the UK, has over 30 different accounts.
All of this serves to increase the popularity of Twitter, and seems to guarantee that it will keep growing in at least the short and medium term. The story for Twitter, and what it will add to social media, is only just beginning.
We are very, very unlikely to get 75% of internet users joining Twitter, but it is likely that things using elements of Twitter will soon start to make a real difference to people's lives.