In the process of my pre-show speaker check-ins, I had the opportunity to speak with Angel Djambazov of Jones Soda,who’ll be speaking on Thursday in the session Translating Online Success into Offline Retail Sales. I like this session because neither the product nor the speaker is one of the “usual suspects,” by which I mean that we don’t normally think of selling soda as a typically web 2.0 marketing effort, and that Angel hasn’t presented on this at other conferences. But it’s a very natural fit, and there are some great lessons in Jones’s experiences with community, user-generated content, and conversational marketing.

“Jones was Web 2.0 before there was a word for it,” Djambazov told me. By this he means that as a brand, Jones has always been street-focused. They had an early presence on college campuses, marketed at youth-oriented events like the X-Games, and engaged in various other offline community-building efforts. But they were a late adopter to the Internet, being unsure how this digital medium could help move heavy cases of flavored water. Their early efforts in social media involved display advertising on Facebook, but the results didn’t impress anyone at Jones headquarters. Angel was tasked with coming up with online efforts that created true engagement.
“No one at Jones had heard of I Can Haz Cheezburger, so I had to pitch wacky cat photos to an executive team,” said Djambazov, of their next online foray. “Luckily, they were used to wacky ideas.” The team figured that what Jones did well was mesh with niche communities with a strong sense of personality, and the popular Lolcats site fit the bill. (ICHC’s CEO Ben Huh gave a great presentation at Web 2.0 Expo New York last year, which you can watch here.) One of Jones’s differentiators is their customized labels; Djambazov created a contest that put the best Lolcats (captioned photos submitted by users) on a run of Jones soda labels distributed nationally. Ultimately, they expanded the program and put them in Target and other mainstream retail outlets.

Pitfalls in the program? “Well some of the submissions were, um, inappropriate.” That’s par for the course with user-generated content, and hopefully at least good for a laugh. But the results were remarkable. Jones saw a 42% uplift in online sales during the time of the promotion, the largest selling period outside of the holidays. Offline sales of soda featuring lolcats sold 30% more than bottles in the same run featuring other photos. Djambazov attributes the success a strong fit with the brand. “If Coke did it, it would have fallen flat,” he says.

Djambazov more targeted community marketing campaigns in the works and should have some more strategies and metrics to share with the audience next month. I’m looking forward to his session.

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