#H2HChat Consumer Engagement at the Kellogg Company with Rick Wion

Hey, everybody, how are you doing? This is Bryan Kramer. Really excited to be back for another H2H Chat. I am really excited about today's guest. Rick Wyan is here with me. Rick is actually calling in from Chicago and very excited. We ended up meeting up at a dinner, I believe, at— let's see, it was Content Marketing World. And that was a lot of fun. And then the next night we ended up having drinks together. So here we are having, having an HDA Chat around something that is so, so exciting to just sit and listen to Rick and everything that he has to talk about and the things that he's done. We're going to open that up and open it up eventually to some questions, but we're going to be really focused today on, on the topic, which is digital and social media. for Kellogg's, as well as some of the things that he's done in his past. So just to give you a little bit of a sense as to who Rick is, if you're not aware, Rick leads the transparency storytelling— leads transparency storytelling through digital and social media for Kellogg's. So he actually started this really cool site. I was taking a look at it before called openforbreakfast.com. I had had breakfast and it made me hungrier. So be aware that you may get hungry by looking at the site. It's a platform that engages with customers around nutrition, sustainability, and philanthropy and has all kinds of fun stuff to click on that eventually get you, like I said, pretty darn hungry. So previously, Rick was the first ever director of social media at McDonald's, where he built the social function from the ground up. Transforming the brand from a digital laggard to the most talked about non-technology company. Rick was also— he also worked as vice president of digital and social media for Gauland Harris in Chicago, where he implemented digital communications like for all kinds of Fortune 500 companies like General Mills and Johnson& Johnson, Dow Chemical, really small companies. He doesn't like to work with large companies, unfortunately. So kidding there. He's a frequent speaker. Obviously, he was speaking at the event we're both at, Content Marketing World. Rick has appeared at South by Southwest, BlogWorld, iStrategy, all over the place. And he was named to Adweek 50, not something that is easily listed on. So congratulations, Rick. Welcome to the show and thank you so much for being here.

Great. Thanks for having me here.

You got it. You got it. So let's get this kicked off. First things first. What, what got you started? How did you get started in the land of marketing? Was it something you studied?

No, I actually studied journalism in school. I went to the University of Illinois and I got a journalism degree because I was very passionate about writing. And I was a reporter for the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago and then for the Chicago Tribune for a while. This was in the late '90s era. And at the same time, this is— that's when the commercial side of the internet started happening. And like a lot of journalists, you work a lot of long hours and you produce great stuff, but you don't get paid that much. So I was always doing freelance work on the side in addition to my journalism career. And one of my clients asked me, She goes, hey, could you build a website for me? And I knew how to code HTML from school, and so I said yeah. And she's like, how much do you want for that? Like, I don't know, $50 an hour. She's like, oh, last guy wanted $100 an hour to build a website. Like, I should be doing more of that and less of this. So I started building websites as a freelance designer, and then built that up into enough of a resume to have a full-time job as a My job title in 1997 was webmaster. I kept a couple of those business cards because that's not a title you see much around anymore.

No, that's an ancient title, my friend.

Yeah, yeah. It went the way of Friends, except webmasters aren't on Netflix anymore. So I got into digital communications and having a digital communications and a writing background led very easily into a role where I went from building websites to developing strategies for how companies could better communicate and engage with consumers, originally through digital media, but then as social tools started becoming more and more mainstream, using those tools. So first discussion forums and then things like YouTube and then Facebook when it blew up and Twitter and Twitter and so on. I didn't come at marketing from a marketing background, but I've been involved with it for most of my career now.

So how has journalism is— and by the way, I'm a journalism major. So, and it's not something that I did it for a couple of years, I think 3 to 4 years in an agency. I'm an agency guy. And so I did it for a couple of years and then eventually it grew into other things which grew into digital. But then social media happened and I felt like maybe a part of my journalistic background was back again. Do you feel like the same way? Do you feel like your journalism background really, you know, is being kind of put to use a little more than before once social came into play?

Yeah, it does. Because one way I like to think about it is being a journalist was about writing on the human condition and how that affects, you know, typical human life.

I did warn you.

And with social media, it's fundamentally changed how people consume news, but I also think it's changed and allows those of us who are marketers, content producers, communications professionals to get different reads into how people interact that they didn't have before. And so through, with using that lens, there's a bit of that journalistic questioning and curiosity that's, I think, really increasingly necessary to be successful.

Absolutely, absolutely. So let's dive in. You did something that's like no small feat. You took a company like McDonald's, and I do want to get it— we're going to get into Kellogg's, so that's eventually where I want to land. But I think there's some learnings from perhaps, if you're willing to share, from what you did at McDonald's and how you took You know, something that really didn't exist before and you had convinced and worked with, probably rather than convinced, but worked with a company to move them into the digital world and then the social world. How does that happen? How are you able to gain their trust and to build this thing, this machine that grew into something so awesome?

Yeah. Well, it was a long journey. It was, I mean, I worked with McDonald's on the agency side for 4 years before I went in-house and was there another 4, almost 5 years. So, you know, 8 years going from having a very basic digital presence up to a fully articulated social media presence. And where it really started from was looking and for ways that we could experiment, put a toe in the water, learn some things, and then, quite frankly, get out again. The first social program that we did with McDonald's, again, and this was when I was at Golin Harris on the agency side, was we were doing a— each year McDonald's around World Children's Day and around McDonald's House Charities would do a big fundraising. And this particular year, Fergie, the Duchess of York, was the spokesperson for Ronald McDonald House Charities, and she was going and visiting different Ronald McDonald Houses around the world to show people what they were all about. And so as part of this, we suggested, in addition to her world tour of these different Ronald McDonald Houses, what if she writes a blog along the way? And so she can talk about the people she meets, post pictures of the events and the experiences, experience, and then we'll partner with a blogging platform to help promote her blog, to have other bloggers write about their own experiences, and kind of bring together those, you know, those different voices into one for this campaign. And it was a big success, but part of the reason it was a success was that we had developed a lot of parameters for how we could control that. And oftentimes when you hear the word control in social media, you hear the platitude of social media is about giving up control.

Yeah.

Which you've gotta give up some control, but you also aren't gonna be successful by just saying, okay, well, whatever goes goes and whatever happens happens. It's just that's outta the comfort zone for many corporations. Right. And so that's gonna be a non-starter in most cases. And so with this particular program, we were able to— her blog was set up as something where we pre-wrote the blog posts for her and then she wrote it into her own voice. We had most of the content set up ahead of time so we could get it through legal review. The bloggers that we worked with along the way were ones that were very carefully screened and pre-vetted to make sure that they were ones that are going to be friendly to the brand. Because this was a tour, we also had a natural start and stop time to this thing. This wasn't launched to be a corporate blog that will live, you know, for eternity. This was meant to be a way to interact with people over about a 6-week time period. And so, and that also gave us an extra set of, extra measure of control because if it started to get outta hand, if people weren't receptive to it or if a bunch of haters came on and tried to take it over, we had an end date built in so we could get out of it again. And so we had a lot of those control measures in there. It proved to be successful. It was one of the most successful campaigns for that particular charity. So then a couple months later, when we had another idea to add social to an existing PR campaign, the company was more receptive to it. And in each one of those was another little success that we built up to the point where the company realized that we're having a lot of success here. We need to go from having social be a bolt-on to other marketing PR campaigns and start developing its own social discipline in and of itself. That's the point when they decided to create the position of social media director. And then I raised my hand for the job and was able to get it.

Oh, that's great. So it sounds like success built on success built on success. But there's— that's the— what I would think is the initiative level where you're purposefully building something that people can interact with. But then there's the side for any company that size that hasn't done that before, that has locations worldwide. How do you approach You know, localization from nothing to something? Did you have a process there that you worked with, perhaps with your agency or your thought process there?

Yeah, so, and it's interesting you mentioned that because while this was happening at the McDonald's US level, there were local initiatives that were going on, even individual franchisees in specific markets, they wanted to get started getting active in social. Other McDonald's entities in other parts of the world also were wanting to get into the game. And so the global team did a really great job of putting together some guidelines for here's how the— here's how to bring the McDonald's brand into a new social channel. So, and these were things in terms of how to evaluate and examine different social media platforms, especially ones that aren't as prevalent in the US or as popular in the US, how to set up a program for measuring risk on these platforms, how to measure appropriate use, how guidelines for branding and how the brands could be manifest in these different areas. And so, again, so much of social is talking about giving up control. But the governance and guidelines for a big company, being able to create those is what was a very important early thing that we needed to do as a company. But what we were trying to do with these, especially, I helped draft guidelines for local marketing efforts using social media for McDonald's in the US. And part of that was developing frameworks for, here's the rules and kind of the regulations for how McDonald's uses social, but within there creating a lot of opportunity and creativity for like a local agency in Atlanta who wants to do a radio promotion around a concert. You can still do that, but here's some things that you need to do to make sure, to help ensure that this promotion is all that it can be for the local market and not something that looks like it's for the whole country.

Fantastic. So just real quick, we're here with Rick Wyan and we're talking about We're talking about the platform that you build within, within companies, talking about the sizes of McDonald's, and we're going to talk about Kellogg's next. And we've got some questions coming in. If you're new to H2H Chat, head over to Twitter, use hashtag H2H Chat. That's number 2, hashtag H2H Chat. You can take part in the conversation. There's lots of conversations going on. Dan Gingas just wanted to make sure that you knew that you were wearing a Cubs hat in your Twitter profile. And there's lots of other conversations around some fun Kellogg's Rice Krispie photos and all kinds of good stuff from Stephen Forbes. And thank you. Thank you guys so much. And then we've got some questions coming in. Keep the questions coming in. Keep them focused, please, on social media or building social platforms inside of companies. That's what we're talking about today, especially around these topics. So thank you guys so much. Welcome your questions. Keep them coming. I'll ask your questions in about 15 minutes. OK, so, Rick, you moved on. You moved. You did this awesome stuff. You worked on the McDonald's brand and learned, I'm sure, a heck of a ton of stuff about what to do, what not to do. What did you learn not to do?

What's not to do? Well, that's a good question. I think one thing that I would point at is never start something without having a backup plan for what to do if it goes wrong or if it's not as successful on things. And what's interesting, because You know, Kellogg's— McDonald's is the kind of brand where it's got a lot of passionate fans. It also has a lot of passionate haters as well. And so people always want to know, like, oh, you know, these people are bagging on McDonald's. What was that like? And, you know, I had a couple of incidents like that that I dealt with, but we also were— I think the team was really great about making sure that we had contingency plans in place and backup plans. So, like, if we're promoting a hashtag and the hashtag wasn't performing well, we would always have backup phrases and things that we could use so that if we wanted to switch direction, we could very easily do so with some of our paid media. We also developed a process where, as we were putting a campaign together, before the campaign would launch, we'd have a small group of people do kind of an anti-campaign brainstorm. We would call this a hater session where we would take our campaign and we'd say, okay, let's take off our company hats or our brand hats and put on the hater hats. How will people wanna pull this apart or how will people want to take this in different unintended directions? And then we could set up plans for this. And that did 2 things. One is it helped strengthen our overall plans because it gave us an opportunity to find some cracks. And shore them up. It also really created an extra level of comfort because, again, anytime that a brand is talking, there's gonna be somebody out there who wants to try to make a joke or try to, you know, do something negative. But if your team has already thought through some of those negative things, when they see it on screen, it's not so jarring and it's easier to manage through.

Who would've ever thought that That you would open a campaign up to other people helping to create the campaign, only to try and figure out what could possibly go wrong so that you can minimize it back to what it is again. Social media— I

have to say, those, those hater sessions, they're kind of weird, but they're kind of fun. If nothing else, it's something I recommend everyone do for a project or campaign. Just as a mental exercise to help your future.

That's a great idea. It's a great idea. And I'm thinking you're, you know, these are non-inebriated sessions.

Usually, yeah, they can go beyond 5 o'clock.

Oh, good. Okay, so, so now you're, you've moved, you've moved into this role and Tell us about what your role took on at Kellogg's and what were you kind of walking into at the time?

Sure, sure. So I joined Kellogg in 2015, in January of that year, and they were creating this new program called Open for Breakfast. And it's a really cool but also very simple program. It's about transparency. Kellogg had realized that there's a great opportunity that the company has with their consumers in terms of telling people what's in their food. It's very simple, but that's the most common question that they were getting to the 800 number, through the call center, through social, is people wanting to know what's in their food. And so we built this program to very simply tell people what's in their food. And so on the site, we're constantly posting stories about how food is made, the nutrition of the food, where it comes from, how the great work we're doing in sustainability, and how we're giving back to communities. And the reason that we're doing this is, as I mentioned, people want to know what's in their food, but we also have done a lot of research to realize that there's such a passion about food that's out there. People don't want to know— taste is always going to be the most important thing. The value of food is also an important factor, but people want to know if it's responsibly grown. They want to know if the company that they're buying from is a good neighbor and is doing right by farmers and doing right by other suppliers and people in the world. And through this website and the social campaigns that go along with it, we're able to tell consumers, hey, you love cereal, but guess what? There's more to it than you realize. We've got 35 active projects around the world to help increase the sustainable farming in different parts of the globe. We've reduced the amount of salt and sugar and sodium that's in our cereal. We're committed to removing artificial colors and flavors. And so I am in a very lucky position because I get to tell great news about a global company through storytelling on literally a daily basis.

So, so I'm curious because you're— when you're working on a smaller or a mid-sized brand, the, the thought process towards success is usually tied to something different than something global. Mm-hmm. And I say that on the most part, not all the time, but on the most part. How do you measure success? What perhaps— what's your— what is your role How do you see success as part of your role?

So, you know, we actually look at it in a couple of different ways. So the program is global. It is active in, but it's locally activated in different parts of the world. So it's in the US, it's in Mexico, Latin America, and Australia. Those are the most active markets right now. But then we're able to measure success in different ways. So There's qualitative measures that we do where kind of the pre and post, we ask people, did you see this information on Facebook or Twitter or on the website? What did you think about it? Did it make you want to buy more cereal? Will you buy more Kellogg's product? Do you think better about the brand? But in a more basic level, there's also a— we also measure success in terms of how are these stories performing? In looking at the media, we always are benchmarking how our stories are performing against other corporate benchmarks. So is our ad spend on Twitter, is our engagement rate on Facebook outperforming other benchmarks that the company has set? So in those cases, I may not be sharing as much of a commercial message that says, go buy Frosted Flakes. I'm saying, I'm telling the story of here's how Frosted Flakes are made. And so those are both good stories. Those are both positive to the brand and hopefully will lead to more sales. But if I can do so in a way that's showing that good corporate news, in addition to commercial news, is both driving success, then we're in a really good spot.

And how much, what are you focused on analytics-wise?

Engagement rate is kind of the base-level one that we look at because we're able to see that on a daily, weekly, monthly process— I'm sorry, monthly basis. We also look at our ROI, so how efficient are we using our ad dollars across social and for driving people to the website. On openforbreakfast.com, the first tile there is Ask us a question, ask us anything about cereal. We also look at the number of questions asked as a proxy to success, and then the qualitative measurements in terms of the program's ability to change purchase intent.

Wow. So you were describing to me offline before we got on about a campaign that you were working on with Rice Krispies. You want to tell everybody about how that worked out and what What surprised you there?

Sure. Yeah, so one of the things that always fascinates me is how, just how humans interact with content and stories and characters. Oh, and I suck at that. I gotta get human in here a lot more often.

Sorry, you said it again.

I'm always interested in how people are looking at content, how they consume content, how they share it. And I'm doing so trying to find what are those interesting hooks that stories have that can make things more successful. Because, you know, I'm in a role where I'm telling stories about Kellogg. Everyone knows about Kellogg, but not everyone knows all of the great work that we do for people around the world. And this— but we're also trying to be very efficient with our stories as well. So this one particular piece that Bryan's referring to, last year we developed a video about how Rice Krispies are made. Stories, especially video that shows how food is made, is very, very popular for Kellogg, but for a lot of other brands as well. And so we produced this very short video showing from farm to bowl how Rice Krispies are made. So rice is grown, it's harvested, it's cooked, it's popped, and it's put in a box, put in a bowl, and then people eat it and enjoy it. It's really, really simple. It's something that people don't realize is the process of making rice crisp up, like into a Rice Krispie. Each one, right, each single Rice Krispie is a grain of rice that's been popped like popcorn. It's very simple. It's very interesting. We did a 19-second video, posted on Facebook, and we got about a 30% engagement rate on that. Now, most— you just simply don't see engagement rates that high on Facebook anymore since they changed their algorithm 2+ years ago. Single digits are good. Above 10% is great. It was so high that when the media person was giving me the report, she said, you know, I want you to know that's not a typo. 'Cause I saw it first, I'm like, oh, 3.5%, that's okay. She's like, no, it's not 3.5%, it's 35%. And I was like pleasantly shocked. But then I spent a lot of time, we spent a lot of time trying to, okay, let's unpack that and figure out why, how did that perform so well?

Yeah.

And we realized that we had a couple things going for us. Now, one was that it was good content. It was a simple question that a lot of people have and a very simple answer to that question presented in video. Video is always the best thing for social insofar as we've seen. It was a short video that worked without sound as well as it did with the sound. The Facebook autoplay feature— I forget the numbers, but a certain number of people watch videos without ever turning on the sound. And so this video was produced to work without that, without the sound.

That's true.

Plus, we had some good timing on our side. Rice Krispies are a very popular ingredient for Rice Krispie treats and other holiday cookies. And so we produced that video in November and posted it in November. And so we saw that huge engagement rate and nearly 2 million views in 2 weeks right around this time of year last year.

Wow. So timing is everything, but so is storytelling. And, and also, it seems like the— I mean, it was 19 seconds, so you did a lot within a short amount of time. And, and there was a lot of, a lot of learning. Have you been able to then replicate, replicate kind of the, the essence of what you just said? Not that you were— not that you're going to get the 30— I think it was 35% again, but maybe come close to it or be able to actually dissect it and move it Into other areas?

Yeah, so we definitely are doing that. We're trying that. One of the things that I'm looking at is just the power of autoplay on Facebook. If we can tell a video without any voiceover, then we're gonna try to do that. Videos that work without sound, I think, are gonna be increasingly important. Just like if we were— if you're on Snapchat, you gotta do vertical video. If you're gonna be on Facebook, you gotta use videos that work without sound. I think it's just, it's a new basics that you have to follow.

So, so Rick, I hate to sidetrack from our conversation, but we just got tweeted from the Chicago Cubs, the actual Cubs, with a winning GIF of their Their last moment when they won. So, so I think that's, that's winning. The second thing I'll tell you, and this is a congrats to you and congrats to everybody on HTH Chat, we just are now trending at number 38 in the United States for this Twitter chat. So thank you everybody, and especially you, Rick, for bringing some great content and some great tweets and conversation our way. I've been collecting a lot of questions that I'm going to be posing back over to Rick here. In just a moment. But congrats. I mean, we got the Cubs going and we've got Trending United States. I'm sure Rick would say the Cubs are more important than Trending. So, and—

I became a Cubs fan in 1983, and so this year in the household was just, just beyond. I'm still like, I can't, I can't watch any videos of Game 7 without still tearing up a little bit. Ah,

I bet.

Emotional.

I bet. Um, All right, well, congrats to everybody in Chicago that's watching right now or excited about the Cubs. I myself was like— I was actually in an airplane and we're all watching the Cubs game together. Like, every seat back had it all the way up the entire plane. And it just started then. That's so cool. So then I got in the Uber ride and the whole way home I made the driver play it over the radio. And then I just walked in the house for the final moment, and my wife is sitting on the couch, and I'm like, get the channel! Turn the channel on! And we caught the last second. And it was like, that is the best game I've ever seen.

Yeah.

OK. So I'm going to switch over to some questions now. Keep the questions coming. I will try to get to all of them and see if we can't get everybody here to get your questions answered. Again, we're going to be answering questions specifically around social platforms, building platforms, marketing within Rick's experience here. So we've got JS Gilbert, always brings the questions. He always brings the goods to every H8 Chat. JS, what has— he said, what has helped keep Kellogg's growth and relevancy in a heavily changing marketplace? He said, I think this is an example, like particular strategies for millennials or whatever. How have you maintained your relevancy?

That's a really great question. It happens at a couple different levels. One is just on the food itself. One thing that I've been really interested in, I think that's really interesting to see, is that within a company like Kellogg, I— there's so many, uh, really smart people, different expertise from recipe developers to food scientists to distribution people. We have a whole cadre of grain experts. One of our, one of our food scientists, she's got a doctorate in wheat growing and wheat management. Her license plate says Dr. Wheat. And so it's really awesome to to work in a company with experts like that. And so we're always watching lots of different trends that come up. But what's the interesting challenge that I've seen, and this is a little bit outta the area I work in, but I've seen this in different presentations, in different discussions with groups, is that food is, there's so many trends in food, but not all trends end up going mainstream. And so there's different parts of our business that serve the more interesting and edgier types of trends, you know, like our bare naked granola brands, our kashi do that. But then Kellogg is more traditional brand. And so we're looking, we're constantly analyzing food trends and audiences to figure out how do those things fit together? Mm-hmm. And what should we do as a company? One really cool thing that we did over the summer was we launched a cereal cafe in New York, and this was pretty big in the news. It's in Times Square. It's a cereal cafe where we've partnered with some top-flight celebrity chefs to develop interesting creations from cereal beyond just a box of cereal and a bowl of milk. So some of these are super interesting avocado cinnamon Special K type of creations. And so that lets us really extend and change cereal from, again, just being something that you throw in a bowl with milk into kind of the base ingredient that you put all these other types of flavors and combinations on top of.

You are probably making everyone hungry right now on Twitter. Does this happen to you? I mean, you're talking about food all the time. Sorry, I'm throwing my own question here. How do you stay skinny when all you're doing is talking about food?

I try to run a lot.

It seems like the most awesome job ever, and yet it could really hurt.

Well, there is a taste lab, and I'm signed up. There's like a corporate email that goes out where they need people to taste test foods.

Yeah.

And they do that about 2, 3 times a week. And so I try to judge like, all right, I'm gonna have a smaller lunch because I know that they're doing cookies this afternoon, or I'm gonna have a bigger lunch because I don't— I'm gonna skip it for today.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, I'm gonna keep— I'm gonna keep— oh God, help me if I had a taste lab. All right. So Gary McIntyre said, what was the ratio of top-down versus bottom-up Is there a way to influence adoption from the front lines?

I'm guessing he's probably talking about just adopting social programs within a company.

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Yeah, well, it's interesting because when I was at McDonald's, a lot of it was very ground, you know, from the ground up, as I mentioned. The approach that we were taking was, let's do small bolt-on campaigns to try to get people to, well, to, you know, a lot of these are like a proof of concept. So let's do something in a safe area with a start and end time, prove success from it, and then try to build on that success later on. But if you're in a position where you've got someone in leadership who can be a champion, all the better. And in fact, if you've got some frontline people who can do some things and you can impress on leadership to also be a champion, then that's where you're going to have your ultimate success. And I can point to examples with both companies. The Open for Breakfast program, a major reason it was able to launch was because the CEO of Kellogg's saw the opportunity and said, yeah, we need a platform where we can demonstrate who we are as a company to our consumers. And so that helped the program get off the ground.

Wow, Rick, you just gave me goosebumps. Anytime you get a CEO to buy into something that direct and that global, that's a huge win right there. That's fantastic. And— yeah,

go

ahead.

One other building block on there too that I always like to point to. When I was at McDonald's, I spent a lot of time working with different people around the organization to help explain why it's important for us to be in social. And I probably gave a presentation like that once a month, it felt like, for a couple of years. Mm-hmm. And in looking back at it, I'd always have stats around how big Facebook is, how many tweets go out in a day, but those stats kind of— they never seemed to resonate that much. But I did have a story about how We helped a mom whose son was devastated on Twitter because he was collecting a full set of Happy Meal toys, and after the promotion ended, he couldn't find the last toy. And so his mom tweeted to us. We sent the tweet— we sent the toy that was missing to complete his collection. And the story of us using Twitter to help a customer, to help a real human, was something that resonated with the executives more than any stat we could put in front of them.

Man, and those kinds of stories, those, those, I'll say it too, those human-driven stories, they're going to be there. I would imagine that they're, that they're, they're, they're plenty of them with a company like that and what you're, what you're doing, what you're helping to do with nutritional value. And, and, and I think hopefully one of the questions will get into that because I want to make sure we also hit everybody's questions. Questions here. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna next one I'm gonna do is Mitch Jackson. He said Rick has developed profitable e-learning programs with robust online communities. What programs or applications apps? Sorry, he broke it into two. What what programs or applications? Shoot! I'm gonna have to go back and look because he broke it into a second tweet. Oh, here it is. Do you recommend for small biz to use to build their own private online communities? Is that something that is in your skill set to be able to answer, or do you want

to— You know, it's a little bit— I'm a little bit removed to recommend particular tools because that's going back 3, 4 years now.

Yeah.

I mean, I've worked with Jive software in the past. Yeah. really good platform. I work with Dynamic Signal right now. I'm an advisor to them. They have a great tool for running employee advocacy programs that I would point to as well.

Dan just said, why didn't I give myself applause for saying human? Because I control the button. So And one other, Mitch, that I'll say is you might want to check out Lithium for communities. It's got a great platform as well. But I also am a huge Dynamic Signal fan as well. And they've got a great small business platform if you just want to get started as well. So just to kind of double up on what you're just saying there, Rick. Courtney said, who is behind the real Tony the Tiger Twitter handle and how much guidance is needed to maintain character voice? Courtney Smith, who happens to be my business partner and I'm married to her. So this is a great question. Just— no, I'm just kidding.

That's a good way to get the

question in.

Yeah. So the folks behind the real Tony the Tiger, it's a combination of some creative support from agency and then our in-house social media team. We've also done the same thing with Ernie the Elf. on the Keebler brand, and they're both great. Ernie is— I love Ernie because imagine your grandfather who'd never been on Twitter all of a sudden discovered it and is trying to learn it. That's a lot of his voice. It's very sweet and it's very endearing. And in the case of both of them, there's a lot of care and feeding that goes into Managing that voice. So, you know, prepping ahead of time— who is this character? Even though they're not human, how do they react and interact with humans? Double shout out, right? And then putting the voice out there, seeing how people react to the voice, and then changing and refining that over time is also very important. That's not, that's not the kind of thing you can do where you write 200 tweets ahead of time and just schedule them with a planning tool.

I could imagine, I would imagine that, you know, it's a little bit of everything. I'm gonna keep going on the questions here. Let's see, we have Dawn Renshaw. Love us some Dawn. How do you get everyone rowing in the same direction?

There's a lot of different things I try to do to make that happen. There's regular status meetings that we do that we try to get people involved in where we go through, here's what we've done, here's how it worked, here's what we're doing next. I've also developed kind of a Kind of an internal mechanism where I— we do status meetings as a team who's involved in this program, but then I also have folks who I know just aren't as engaged in the meetings, and so I try to hit them up one-to-one separately on things. We also try to do regular sessions where we talk about future content that we're planning, not so much to develop assignments of who is doing what, but just to talk through ideas and try to see if they're— try to find those territories where we think that there's more opportunity for us to play in before we actually put pen to paper. And those sessions are also great for having our subject matter experts involved in because like our food scientists who I'm gonna hit up because we need to know more about rice production and sustainable rice production, I don't wanna go to them 2 weeks out before we're gonna publish a story and say, hey, I need 2 hours of your time to interview you for something. I want to hit them up 2 months ahead of that, or even 3 months ahead of when we're going to write the story and say, hey, I'm thinking about a thing about rice. Tell me a little bit about rice and greenhouse gases. You know, how is rice grown? What are some new technologies in terms of managing greenhouse gas and rice production? And so there's a lot of exploration that I try to do ahead of time with the purpose of not just learning to develop content and stories, but also getting some early alignment to what those stories could be from the subject matter experts as well.

Fantastic. No easy job for anybody. So hats off to you. I actually am going to slip in my own question here real quick because we still have other questions. I'll get to your questions, don't worry about it. But I am curious about employees sharing. I mean, because this is the perfect— like you said, Don had a great question about how you get everyone moving in the same direction. What about employee advocacy? Employees sharing in the same direction.

Yeah, that's something that is— it's a great opportunity for Kellogg. It's something that we started rolling out at McDonald's right before I left. Employees as advocates is a tremendously powerful tool. I mean, if you think about it this way, the average person on Facebook has like 300 or 400 friends, and my friends are as likely to believe what I say about Kellogg as what they read in the newspaper. In fact, probably even more likely to believe what I say about Kellogg because I'm on the inside. And so developing a program where you can find and share the information and empower employees to share that information is, again, it's just, it's a very tremendous and powerful opportunity. I think unfortunately a lot of companies are in a position where their social media policies may not encourage sharing, or they're written to protect the company and they look like they don't encourage sharing, even though they want employees to share. And so there's that. You got to make sure your social policy is written not as much as a legal document, but as a human document. And so something that people can see and encourage folks to use. And then you got to get them the right fodder, the right stories that they can share. You also have to train people too, in terms of how to— Yeah. How to behave correctly. Not that people don't know how to behave correctly, but just giving them some tips on how to make sure you're representing the company in the best way. And then also what to do if a conversation starts to go south and they need some help from somebody else to step in and say, yeah, actually this person's not the expert, let's go talk to this person over here.

It's a lot of moving parts and my hat's off to you for taking this on. It sounds like it's an initiative that's coming up here in the next year. But I agree with you, one of the most important things that can be done, and you've got some great tools in place to do it as well. Let's see, Randy Theo said, how do you ensure the control or governance required of brands' SoMe efforts not get in the way of creativity and authenticity?

The— I'm sorry, you said so me efforts?

Yeah, yeah, it's like me too.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's something where inside Kellogg, brands have the leeway to determine what their own brand stories look like. And so it's really up to the brand managers then to make sure that they're doing things that make sense and are authentic and not doing things that are not worthwhile. And so like in working with brand managers, the thing I would counsel to them is you gotta be careful of the me-too type of efforts because so many brands do them that you're gonna have to work harder for your information to be seen and be worthwhile. Like, I think probably the best example of this is there was that trend for a while where it seemed every time, you know, for the Oscars or the Emmys or the Super Bowl, all these brands were using their control centers to push out content about their brands tied to the Oscars or the Super Bowl or the Emmys, which people chasing an Oreo moment is tough because Oreo moments don't happen. every, you know, happen very often. And you have to have a really great combination of timing and luck and a brand story that fits to make it worthwhile. 'Cause if your brand story doesn't fit and you're trying to create an Oreo moment and you got nothing to do with football or sports and you're trying to do something around the Super Bowl, then you're spending a lot of time chasing something that's probably not gonna happen.

That's great advice, great advice.

Now, I'm sorry, one other thing I'll add to that.

Yeah, go.

So let's say Emmys roll around this year and Stranger Things gets awarded. You know that our ego team is going to be all over that,

right? And, uh, that was an awesome show, by the way. You, um, I wouldn't doubt it. So, so that's a, that is the, that's a pretty, um, uh, interesting point that you just made. There are current events that are happening all the time like that, where a movie, you know, has— is using your product. How do you stay in front of everything that's out there with the co-branded experiences like that to be able to utilize that Oreo cookie moment at the Super Bowl? That one moment when something happens where you're co-branded or you're, you know, You know, and you want to be able to stay in front of it.

Yeah, so that's where the agility of the enterprise really is going to be your make or break on something there. And we've got the social media war room, we call it the cube, that's set up so that we can spot trends as they're unfolding. You know, they're set up with all the keywords for all the different brands, and if we see something, then we've got different mechanisms in place to react very quickly to make a call of, is this something that we want to be involved in? If so, then what is our involvement? And that involvement could be anything from we're picking it up and promoting it in our own social channels, maybe we're just using some paid media to amplify a story further, or maybe it's something where we want to do more in issue like some corporate advice or media statements on something.

So what is a— first of all, you got my geek alert going with the war room. Once you said that, I was like, oh, I would love to see what that looks like. Is it physically a room?

You know, it's, it's, it's not a 4-walled room, but it's a space with big screens and the social feeds set up so we can see what's going on around all different brands and brand stories and different hashtags and things that are happening.

Awesome. And then the— let's see, again, there's a couple more questions I'll get to here in just a second before we close out. But what does the structure look like, if you don't mind sharing? Like, how— I mean, you obviously aren't managing everything you just said or Or you would probably not be on this video right now. How do you structure this to keep going with each of these things? Because there is the planning side, but then there's the engagement side. So where are you structured there?

Yeah, so we're set up where we've got 3 main business units covering all of our foods. So cereal, breakfast, morning foods. Snacks, which is Pringles and a lot of our snack bars, frozen foods. Morningstar Farms is one of the Kellogg brands. And so we've got teams of digital and social experts within each business unit who are managing their brands and publishing along those lines. I actually sit in the communications team, so it's kind of a— we'll be leaning in or out of different campaigns for each business unit, depending upon what's going on. Plus, we're also managing the reputation of the corporate brand as well as the corporate communications team.

Wow. So you're busy and so is your team. I can only imagine. So how do you— this question's from Top Cat. They said, should food brands create more brand ambassadors to counter the stigma of some of the negativity or the fast food stuff that is going on or any of the news items that's going on? Like, do brand ambassadors help in helping to create goodwill?

They certainly can, but it's going to depend. on the brand and the food and who that audience really is. You know, I'll point to McRib fans. It's McRib season, it's back at McDonald's, as it has been for, you know, I think 5 falls now going on. McRib fans are a very super passionate bunch. We've actually done some influencer engagement around McRib fans to see if we can't get more people who've never tried a McRib to see the passion of McRib fans to go try one for the first time. And that had some really good success. On the flip side, a McRib fan trying to convince people that, hey, you know what, this sandwich is actually, even though it's fast food, it's not that bad for you, it doesn't have that many calories. that would not be a fit. And so influencer engagement campaigns, a big measure of their success is gonna be what the message is and who the audience is, because around some foods, certain people just don't care. Like, people don't care how much fat and calories is in bacon. It's just bacon. It's gonna be good. So an ambassador campaign to try to convince healthy eaters to eat bacon is not gonna— it's just not gonna work.

Right.

So finding out where that passion point is for your folks is gonna be important.

That's great. And another healthy food question here is from Patricia. She said, health food fads come and go. How do you meet these fast-changing demands? You kind of covered this a little bit earlier, but from, you know, even you built— let's tie this into the content piece. not as much as the social, but your content hub. You have this great platform that you built on openforbreakfast.com. And I'm going to weave in a question on top of this to say, how do you, how do you stay ahead of that using all the content that's out there and the topics that are out there to build the right content, the right pieces at the right time?

Sure, sure. So part of that is, is, is we, we have to kind of live in this stream of what's going on at any, at any point in time. Um, you know, when it comes to cereal and, uh, the nutrition of cereal, uh, yeah, there, there are cereals that have, uh, that are more on the sweet and indulgent side. There are cereals that have, um, 2 or 3 grams of sugar. sugar, and almost no sodium. We get questions every day. One of the most common questions we get is, what's the most nutritious cereal? Nutrition is going to be based on your lifestyle. Mm-hmm. If you're looking for a low-sodium, low-sugar diet, yeah, there's cereals that we have that do that. If you're the kind of person who needs a little sugar in the morning to get yourself going, That's why I eat Frosted Flakes most mornings, because I like a little bit of you know pep beyond the coffee to to get me going. So

and because they're great.

Yes, yes. I need a buzzer for you for that. Ding!

So just did that live.

Yeah, and and what what's really interesting to see is that nutrition is so much about is so. personalized and needs to be personalized these days. Again, what one person— a healthy diet for one person might not be a healthy diet for somebody else. And so that's why, as a food company, I'll sound very PR guy right now, but we offer 30 different cereals to cater to 30 different types of lifestyles and choices and things that people—

Right.

I mean, for me, My kids eat cereal at least once a day, every day. My 6-year-old, he'd rather have cereal than cookies for dessert. So if he wants a bowl of Frosted Flakes over 2 cookies and a scoop of ice cream, I'm more than happy to give him Frosted Flakes than 2 cookies and a scoop of ice cream. Right. And so when it comes to talking about nutrition and the stories, we have all kinds of different stories like this that we kind of put together and give out to people. So that our nutrition story is less about, uh, it's X number of grams of sugar and sodium and fats. And, you know, it's not about the numbers on the side panel as much as it is about find what's— what works for you, what's best for you, what tastes best for you. Because, you know, eating cereal for breakfast is a great way to start your day. We've known that for 80-plus years. It's still a great way to start your day. And so that, you know, that we're trying to To build up the stories that get back to that eternal truth.

Oh man, when I was in college, cereal was my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was amazing. I've grown a little since then, but it still is pretty amazing. Okay, so we've got, we've got unfortunately no more time for questions. I am just out of time, but there's so many tweets So many awesome things that people have contributed in terms of both questions and, and even comments. You've got all kinds of cereal GIFs happening right now. Everyone has gone cereal crazy. They are all cereal, cereal people. And anyway, I really appreciate everyone who joined us today. Rick, you made such an awesome hour happen so fast. Really appreciate you sharing all of your experience with everybody. Thank you. And letting everybody know what it is that your day-to-day looks like. Where can everyone find you? Twitter, obviously, everybody's got your Twitter handle. You have a website or another place to go to, or is Twitter the best place?

Hit me up on Twitter. Go to openforbreakfast.com. You can find me on Medium as well. I need to write some more stuff on Medium, I know. But any of those places, or Facebook.

Awesome.

Or Snapchat. I'm everywhere.

Good, good. All right, well, thank you so much again. Really appreciate it. Everyone else out there, we'll see you again same time, same place next Monday on H2H Chat. And then we're going to be announcing soon some changes, some fun changes. I've got a co-host that is going to be announced here in the next week about who's going to be joining as my new co-host next year, 2017. So we'll be announcing that next week. But, but please join us again next week. Same time, same place. Rick, cheers, my friend. Make it a great week. And to everyone out there, love you guys and we'll see you guys soon. Cheers.

Bye.