Jory Des Jardins knows a thing or two about social media. In 2005 she co-founded the BlogHer conference with two partners, Elisa Camahort and Lisa Stone, to build a community among women bloggers. In 2006, the trio added a BlogHer ad network that hooks brands up as advertisers and sponsors to more than 2,500 targeted, qualified blogs, chosen from among the more than 18,000 blogs in the total BlogHer network and reaching 14 million unique visitors a month.

So we thought it would be well worth talking with Des Jardins about the interest brand marketers have been showing in using social media to reach customers in new ways. What campaigns and channels does she think offer the chance of building strong new relationship with consumers, and which fall into the category of brand marketers chasing the latest Shiny New Thing?

Admittedly, Des Jardins and her organization have a dog in this fight: BlogHer gets revenue and its sponsored bloggers get visibility by working with brands such as General Motors, NBC’s iVillage, Bravo.com, HP, Roomba makers iRobot, and Pepsi, which will be a first-time premium sponsor at this year’s BlogHer conference headed for Chicago in July.

Still, she’s recognized as being one of the most informed and thoughtful commenters on developments in social media. And as things stand now, she thinks some brands are doing social particularly well while others seriously need to consider a change in their tactics.

Among the brands posting standout performances in social media is retailer Walmart, according to Des Jardins. The biggest of big-box value retailers rolled out a social network concept last year called “ElevenMoms,” built around selected blogger influentials that post stories and videos about money-saving ideas and product reviews—including those relating to items sold at Walmart.

The ElevenMoms, who now actually number about 21 bloggers, post to a Walmart-branded Web site. But it’s located at http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Community.aspx, not on the main Walmart shopping site, although links at the bottom of that main page do lead there.

“I think what they’re doing is really smart,” Des Jardins says. “It’s not about the destination Web site. That’s where I think some brands get confused, thinking, ‘Why don’t we start a Web site?’ Walmart has created it in a way that the bloggers are able to tout what they’re doing [for ElevenMoms] on their own blogs. Very commonly, Walmart will simply say, ‘Hey, we’re doing something with Pampers,’ and the bloggers involved can run giveaway promotions on their own blogs for that campaign.”

Des Jardins points to a joint campaign from Walmart and Pantene shampoo to publicize some reformulated products in that line. “They had women in the ElevenMoms program try it, so they actually had their hair done, took their notes and then wrote about it on their own blogs,” she says.

In other words, this was not primarily a scheme to build traffic for the Walmart site, or even the Walmart community site or its YouTube channel. “They weren’t looking to bring it all back to Walmart.com,” Des Jardins says. “They were starting the conversation there but then allowing it to move out into the blogs.”

This is an issue that comes up with the brands that offer to work with the BlogHer network, she says: the question of where you go after you’ve built a microsite. “That is not in itself the end result,” she says. “The conversation has to start somewhere and live somewhere, but it has to move out into the blogs. And that’s where Walmart has been incredibly successful.”

They’ve also given a large measure of freedom to the ElevenMoms bloggers in terms of what they can talk about and how they can review any products involved in campaigns—to the point where bloggers can even talk about offerings from rivals such as Target. The bloggers involved get to feel that they’re providing a real money-saving service for their readers rather than simply flacking Walmart inventory for freebies. That’s the value proposition that keeps them involved in the ElevenMoms program.

“If you talk to any of those women involved, they are absolutely over the moon about not getting paid for writing for Walmart,” Des Jardins points out. “That openness pays for itself in blogger karma.”

Of course, Walmart has an advantage over many other brands in being able to tap into the products stories coming from their thousands of suppliers. “While they’re not paying bloggers, there’s a lot of cool things that the suppliers can ante up. Walmart can pick up the phone, call a supplier and hey, a thousand bottles of Pantene, coming right up.”

But it’s not about the free stuff, and brands that try to buy loyalty with freebies and samples will fail to build the strongest relationships with consumer advocates that they can get from social media, says Des Jardins.

“Social media is not a direct marketing medium, but many brands who get into it try to use it as such,” she says. “Yes, you do get some initial short-term sales benefit. You will get people who love your free stuff and will definitely tweet about it. But it strikes me as defaulting to a Pavlovian marketing model that relies on constantly rewarding users of questionable influence.”

A better approach is to find out what’s already going on in the blogosphere and seeing how your brand or product can make a contribution to those efforts, perhaps enabling them to reach a higher level.

That’s what Tyson Foods did last Thanksgiving when it partnered with a number of bloggers who were working to feed hungry residents in the San Francisco area. The campaign arose when Tyson noticed that several top food bloggers were working on the problem and offered to help spread the word with a Twitter campaign. The result was a program that brought in 200,000 pounds in food donations and a lasting outreach effort, embodied in a Web site at http://hungerrelief.tyson.com/, that now unites food banks, student food drives and disaster relief groups from New York to Texas and Colorado and throughout California.

“The folks at Tyson really do have a Twitter strategy,” Des Jardins maintains. “They’re not just spamming people constantly with announcements but really reading the tweets that relate to their subject areas. And they noticed the traffic around this hunger area and said, ‘We can help you get this project together.’ And now they’ve got the relationships and can reach out to these bloggers whenever they want.”

She points to computer maker Dell as another company that has managed to forge strong relations though social media by offering value rather than free merchandise. Several years ago, the company was so cut off from its customer base that a Google search on its name turned up a raft of “Dell Hell”-style complaint Web sites. But by a consistent program of outreach to the user community at large and to specialized segments within that market, Dell has been able to turn its customer-relations failures around.

Des Jardins has particular praise for a Dell Facebook page that offers tips to small businesses that want to integrate social media such as blogs and Twitter into their marketing plans. It’s a good example of how to use a resource like Facebook for more than simply amassing a group of faceless, aimless “friends” of your brand.

“It’s interesting to see this diametric change in how consumers perceive Dell—not because they were throwing free stuff at them, but because they built resources for targeted groups,” she says. “They offered small businesses useful tools—not specifically Dell tools—and now they’ve got some of the most influential bloggers in the small-business arena as members of the site.”

Not every brand can take advantage of the supplier relationships of a Walmart or the expertise of a Dell. But just about every product has some core constituency within the blogosphere, and those consumers have something that they want. Being able to give them that valued thing—while stopping short of paying for endorsements—can be an effective way to get good, long-lasting exposure for your brand in social media, Des Jardins says.

She points to the example of a small Canadian company called Mabel’s Labels that sells customized name tags for children’s clothing and household items and other safety products. This January the company launched a contest that asked mommy bloggers to write a short statement about the rewards and benefits of taking part in the blogging community? Readers would then be asked to vote for the entry they liked best, and the contest winner would receive something a woman blogger would most likely value highly: namely, an expense-paid trip to the Chicago BlogHer convention and the job of chief correspondent for that gathering to the Mabel’s Labels corporate blog, “The Mabelhood”.

“The company went on Twitter and announced that they were going to send one winner to the conference free of charge—not 10 people or 20, just one,” Des Jardins says. “They ended up getting more than one hundred entries and perhaps 2,300 blog mentions out of it, and tripling their Web traffic from the previous monthly record.”

All that for the estimated cost of a $1,200 airfare-conference-and-two-night-stay package. “In this case, we had just announced the dates for the next BlogHer conference and many mommy bloggers were looking for help with travel,” she says. “But it’s something other brands can do with other offers. You just have to know what the ‘get’ will be for your target group.”

Jory Des Jardins knows a thing or two about social media. In 2005 she co-founded the BlogHer conference with two partners, Elisa Camahort and Lisa Stone, to build a community among women bloggers. In 2006, the trio added a BlogHer ad network that hooks brands up as advertisers and sponsors to more than 2,500 targeted, qualified blogs, chosen from among the more than 18,000 blogs in the total BlogHer network and reaching 14 million unique visitors a month.

So we thought it would be well worth talking with Des Jardins about the interest brand marketers have been showing in using social media to reach customers in new ways. What campaigns and channels does she think offer the chance of building strong new relationship with consumers, and which fall into the category of brand marketers chasing the latest Shiny New Thing?

Admittedly, Des Jardins and her organization have a dog in this fight: BlogHer gets revenue and its sponsored bloggers get visibility by working with brands such as General Motors, NBC’s iVillage, Bravo.com, HP, Roomba makers iRobot, and Pepsi, which will be a first-time premium sponsor at this year’s BlogHer conference headed for Chicago in July.

Still, she’s recognized as being one of the most informed and thoughtful commenters on developments in social media. And as things stand now, she thinks some brands are doing social particularly well while others seriously need to consider a change in their tactics.

Among the brands posting standout performances in social media is retailer Walmart, according to Des Jardins. The biggest of big-box value retailers rolled out a social network concept last year called “ElevenMoms,” built around selected blogger influentials that post stories and videos about money-saving ideas and product reviews—including those relating to items sold at Walmart.

The ElevenMoms, who now actually number about 21 bloggers, post to a Walmart-branded Web site. But it’s located at http://instoresnow.walmart.com/Community.aspx, not on the main Walmart shopping site, although links at the bottom of that main page do lead there.

“I think what they’re doing is really smart,” Des Jardins says. “It’s not about the destination Web site. That’s where I think some brands get confused, thinking, ‘Why don’t we start a Web site?’ Walmart has created it in a way that the bloggers are able to tout what they’re doing [for ElevenMoms] on their own blogs. Very commonly, Walmart will simply say, ‘Hey, we’re doing something with Pampers,’ and the bloggers involved can run giveaway promotions on their own blogs for that campaign.”

Des Jardins points to a joint campaign from Walmart and Pantene shampoo to publicize some reformulated products in that line. “They had women in the ElevenMoms program try it, so they actually had their hair done, took their notes and then wrote about it on their own blogs,” she says.

In other words, this was not primarily a scheme to build traffic for the Walmart site, or even the Walmart community site or its YouTube channel. “They weren’t looking to bring it all back to Walmart.com,” Des Jardins says. “They were starting the conversation there but then allowing it to move out into the blogs.”

This is an issue that comes up with the brands that offer to work with the BlogHer network, she says: the question of where you go after you’ve built a microsite. “That is not in itself the end result,” she says. “The conversation has to start somewhere and live somewhere, but it has to move out into the blogs. And that’s where Walmart has been incredibly successful.”

They’ve also given a large measure of freedom to the ElevenMoms bloggers in terms of what they can talk about and how they can review any products involved in campaigns—to the point where bloggers can even talk about offerings from rivals such as Target. The bloggers involved get to feel that they’re providing a real money-saving service for their readers rather than simply flacking Walmart inventory for freebies. That’s the value proposition that keeps them involved in the ElevenMoms program.

“If you talk to any of those women involved, they are absolutely over the moon about not getting paid for writing for Walmart,” Des Jardins points out. “That openness pays for itself in blogger karma.”

Of course, Walmart has an advantage over many other brands in being able to tap into the products stories coming from their thousands of suppliers. “While they’re not paying bloggers, there’s a lot of cool things that the suppliers can ante up. Walmart can pick up the phone, call a supplier and hey, a thousand bottles of Pantene, coming right up.”

But it’s not about the free stuff, and brands that try to buy loyalty with freebies and samples will fail to build the strongest relationships with consumer advocates that they can get from social media, says Des Jardins.

“Social media is not a direct marketing medium, but many brands who get into it try to use it as such,” she says. “Yes, you do get some initial short-term sales benefit. You will get people who love your free stuff and will definitely tweet about it. But it strikes me as defaulting to a Pavlovian marketing model that relies on constantly rewarding users of questionable influence.”

A better approach is to find out what’s already going on in the blogosphere and seeing how your brand or product can make a contribution to those efforts, perhaps enabling them to reach a higher level.

That’s what Tyson Foods did last Thanksgiving when it partnered with a number of bloggers who were working to feed hungry residents in the San Francisco area. The campaign arose when Tyson noticed that several top food bloggers were working on the problem and offered to help spread the word with a Twitter campaign. The result was a program that brought in 200,000 pounds in food donations and a lasting outreach effort, embodied in a Web site at http://hungerrelief.tyson.com/, that now unites food banks, student food drives and disaster relief groups from New York to Texas and Colorado and throughout California.

“The folks at Tyson really do have a Twitter strategy,” Des Jardins maintains. “They’re not just spamming people constantly with announcements but really reading the tweets that relate to their subject areas. And they noticed the traffic around this hunger area and said, ‘We can help you get this project together.’ And now they’ve got the relationships and can reach out to these bloggers whenever they want.”

She points to computer maker Dell as another company that has managed to forge strong relations though social media by offering value rather than free merchandise. Several years ago, the company was so cut off from its customer base that a Google search on its name turned up a raft of “Dell Hell”-style complaint Web sites. But by a consistent program of outreach to the user community at large and to specialized segments within that market, Dell has been able to turn its customer-relations failures around.

Des Jardins has particular praise for a Dell Facebook page that offers tips to small businesses that want to integrate social media such as blogs and Twitter into their marketing plans. It’s a good example of how to use a resource like Facebook for more than simply amassing a group of faceless, aimless “friends” of your brand.

“It’s interesting to see this diametric change in how consumers perceive Dell—not because they were throwing free stuff at them, but because they built resources for targeted groups,” she says. “They offered small businesses useful tools—not specifically Dell tools—and now they’ve got some of the most influential bloggers in the small-business arena as members of the site.”

Not every brand can take advantage of the supplier relationships of a Walmart or the expertise of a Dell. But just about every product has some core constituency within the blogosphere, and those consumers have something that they want. Being able to give them that valued thing—while stopping short of paying for endorsements—can be an effective way to get good, long-lasting exposure for your brand in social media, Des Jardins says.

She points to the example of a small Canadian company called Mabel’s Labels that sells customized name tags for children’s clothing and household items and other safety products. This January the company launched a contest that asked mommy bloggers to write a short statement about the rewards and benefits of taking part in the blogging community? Readers would then be asked to vote for the entry they liked best, and the contest winner would receive something a woman blogger would most likely value highly: namely, an expense-paid trip to the Chicago BlogHer convention and the job of chief correspondent for that gathering to the Mabel’s Labels corporate blog, “The Mabelhood”.

“The company went on Twitter and announced that they were going to send one winner to the conference free of charge—not 10 people or 20, just one,” Des Jardins says. “They ended up getting more than one hundred entries and perhaps 2,300 blog mentions out of it, and tripling their Web traffic from the previous monthly record.”

All that for the estimated cost of a $1,200 airfare-conference-and-two-night-stay package. “In this case, we had just announced the dates for the next BlogHer conference and many mommy bloggers were looking for help with travel,” she says. “But it’s something other brands can do with other offers. You just have to know what the ‘get’ will be for your target group.”