L’Oreal; Celebrates 100th anniversary on China social media.

June 3rd, 2009 was L’oreal’s 100th anniversary. To celebrate this special occasion, and take advantage of it to market itself, L’oreal launched a social media campaign throughout different China SNS sites.

This campaign’s portal website is L’oreal100.com.cn – a website L’oreal created especially for this 100th anniversary; and the overall theme of this campaign is “caring”. On L’oreal100 site, it launched 3 different events – gather hearts for L’oreal love heart tree, join L’oreal blogger group and L’oreal public welfare project; then use them to interact with audience through different SNS channels.

Let’s take a close look at each event.

Gather loving heart for L’oreal loving heart tree

To me, this is the main and most influential event in this campaign. I will show you “why” by hard data later, but before that, I want to give you an general idea of it.

The loving heart gathering event was from June 5th to July 5th. During this one month period of time, L’oreal encouraged netizens to send out “hearts” which indicated different caring movements to their friends on 4 SNS sites – Xiaonei.com, hi.baidu.com, Yoka.com (a fashion website), Sina.com. All the hearts being sent out would be gathered on a loving heart tree “planted” on L’oreal100 site. Those who sent out the most loving hearts, or sent out hearts at special lucky numbers (e.g. the person sent out the 18,000th heart, and the one sent out the 88,000th heart, etc) would win prizes from L’oreal worth hundreds, or thousands of RMB.

Ok, how impressive is the result? So far, the number of hearts gathered is 1.3 million! If we add the receiver number, which is also 1.3 million, and take into account that some people would send/receive more than 1 hearts, my estimation is there are around 2 million netizens engaged in this event. Now let’s compare this number to total Chinese netizen number of 298 million, which means there were 6 netizens out of every 1000 have engaged in this event.

Below are results from those 4 SNS sites -

1. hi.baidu.com

L’oreal created a heart sending page on hi.baidu.com; besides let Baidu users send out loving hearts on this page, L’oreal also encouraged user to adopt a special application to their hi.baidu space (similar to myspace) so they can send directly from there. A very smart way to take advantage of those users’ traffic to get more people engaged, isn’t it? From Baidu’s prize announcement page, Baidu users total sent out over 1.08 million loving hearts; and over 100,000 hi.baidu users adopted the special application.

2. Yoka.com

Yoka.com is a fashion website targets to fashion and trendy Chinese young people. L’oreal’s event was held on Yoka’s SNS section – space.yoka.com. From Yoka’s event prize announcement page, the total number of hearts sent out was 1.1 million.

3. Sina.com

As you can see, the event page on Sina is pretty much the same as Yoka. From Sina’s event prize announcement page, the total number of hearts sent out is 200,000.

4. Xiaonei.com

The event on Xiaonei is much different from the other 3 websites.

The Xiaonei link on L’oreal100 site goes to L’oreal’s Xiaonei group which was founded last October. There is only one banner ads on the top announcing the 100th anniversary and related events, but L’oreal didn’t let Xiaonei user send out hearts to each other here.

However, as a brand sponsored SNS group, L’oreal’s Xiaonei group is developed pretty well. So far, it has 1938 members, 3 pages of discussion, 80 topics; content are mainly Loreal’s product news, product Q&A, campus PR events such as tryout, etc. There are 5 admins (either L’oreal’s staff or students hired by L’oreal) who are maintaining this group and starting the conversations. From this, my impression the Xiaonei group is L’oreal’s long-term campaign, rather than the other 3 websites, which are one-off events. But, I still wonder why L’oreal didn’t let Xiaonei users send out hearts to each other, from Foundertech’s Xiaonei campaign, it seems this is a good place to get people engaged in such an interactive event.

[NOTE]
You may have noticed, when add up all 3 SNS sites stats (since Xiaonei doesn’t have heart sending function), the total is far more than 1.3million. My guess is L’oreal100 site only counted till July 5th which is event end day, and people are still sending out hearts after that.

Join L’oreal blog group

The “Join blog group” section on L’oreal100 site listed 7 feature bloggers’ blogs; also encourage other bloggers to join the group so as to attend future L’oreal events. But L’oreal seems to forget to attach links to those 7 blogs, to find them, you will need to use blogger names and pictures to discover yourselves…

However, by searching for them, we did discovered a blogging campaign ran by L’oreal.

L’oreal’s “brand ambassador” on blogging – Lan Zhenzhen (vice-president of L’oreal China)

The 1st feature blogger on L’oreal1oo site is Lan Zhenzhen, vice president of L’oreal China. Lan created a blog on Sina.com, and writes mostly L’oreal’s events and news, but in a very personal way which connect with readers. This is proven by her blog’s stats – Lan’s blog has 726,746 visits from July 2006.

Besides this blog, Lan also founded a L’oreal blog group in 2007, which aggregates other fashion/beauty Sina blog. So far, this group has 1405 members and 415,863 visits.

L’oreal blogging campaign for 100th anniversary

It seems L’oreal not just simply collect blogger’s information on L’oreal100 sites, it also made a good use of them. There are over 10 bloggers across different SNS sites wrote about their experience being invited by L’oreal to attend their 100th anniversary celebration; and all the content is focus on L’oreal’s caring and loving brand image. Most of these posts have been viewed hundreds of times, exceptionally one blog on QQ.com has been viewed 784,115 times. This is the content strategy I talked about before – people like to see personal experience/opinions they can connect with; by doing so, L’oreal’s blogging campaign got a good exposure to its audience.

Public Welfare Project

This is a part of L’oreal’s global campaign – to do 100 public welfare projects globally to celebrate 100th anniversary. In China, it created a “graduates employment and venture capital fund” to help graduates find jobs or start their own businesses. Graduates who submitted the best venture plans will get 50,000 to 150,000 RMB from L’oreal. As a part of this campaign, this event didn’t get too much exposure as the other two. Although the introduction is included in all the 100th anniversary announcement, it seems L’oreal only execute it through college channels. However, it did help L’oreal established a “caring” brand image among college students.

Thoughts:

L’oreal created an interactive online event, then used popular social media channels to get people engaged; established appealing content, then got opinion leaders to spread the word. Overall, L’oreal created a very successful campaign on its 100th anniversary. Beyond this, L’oreal is also building a strong social media foundation: Xiaonei group, Sina group, Lan’s blog and all the other opinion leader bloggers; all those will be very valuable resources for future campaigns.

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