Recently Crocs Malaysia participated in the Social Media Club KL event to show their case studies which includes informing the social media world about us bloggers being official ambassadors, w00t! Kinda exciting to see their plans for social media, along with 4 other promiment brands such as P1, Canon, BFM and MyEG (of which I haven’t told you my AWESOME experience with them yet!)

The pointers made were exciting, and here’s the gist of it with a little bit of Bytebot‘s summary and my comments:

They invest heavily in Facebook – they have the regular Crocs Malaysia page, as well as a Crocs Ideas page (Crocsideas.force.my). They have over 14,652 fans that like their page. Content is largely what’s coming out in the stores, and what’s to become available before it hits the stores. It is a tool to reach out to all Crocs fans on what to expect, somewhat like a sneak peek which I see it’s a benefit to all fans out there.

There’s some Twitter engagement (@crocsmalaysia), but it does not seem as popular as Facebook (other speakers had similar comments). Its usage being similar to Crocs Facebook fanpage- to inform fans on Crocs related promos & products and to also have a 2 way conversation between the brand and the consumer to further understand what consumers want and expect from the brand. Simply put, it is an avenue for Crocs to “listen” to customer’s feedbacks as it is a key assessment in terms of marketing.

They’re doing blogger engagement. For the year 2010, they’ve picked five:FeeqSays, Rebecca Saw, Marcky.my, MissyCheerio, and Christopher Tock. These bloggers are known as their “official bloggers”.

While the arrangement isn’t made clear with the official bloggers, it is made clear that the official bloggers get free Crocs, in exchange for writing about how Crocs have influence on the daily life of the blogger. Bloggers are basically selling stories, pushing experiences, where their Crocs get involved. I don’t know if there’s a minimum post count/amount of engagement required, or its something you do in passing (which is why I said the arrangement isn’t clear). I do however think that with the proper metrics, story telling and sharing experiences, totally rocks.

To engage with their readers, these official bloggers also get to run competitions on a weekly basis, and the rewards are free Crocs and premiums for winners. Good, it gets more Crocs out there, especially to the non-believers 😉

The only one issue that happened to have sparked the audience interest was when Crocs was asked how the official bloggers were chosen- to which I know for a fact that they were great reasons for each of them, including mua, as explained during the Crocs official launching of site event!

The simple point of it all is that Crocs wants to reach out to all segment of market (undeniably race is one of the main key points in segmentizing demographics in Marketing 101 and many marketers in Malaysia would agree with this as seen in Bytebot’s blog comments), and their strategy was to find out how to tackle the issue at hand, hence having Feeq as a representative of the Malay blogger community! And she wasn’t wrong about it: since then, Feeq has done a lot of outstanding projects to help with it, for example, creating a video of responses between fake and original crocs at his university (recommended to watch!)

Selling fake crocs is a serious offence, the guys at Kakibranded was forced to put this up at their site for a year. Say NO to fake stuff!

All in all I think this goes to show that however hard it is to admit, we still need to have race baced marketing strategies because of our multicultural country. Doesn’t it make it more unique, and challenging, compared to other countries? Yes it does, and to be honest, it’s not much of an issue to start with at least

among marketeers. In the end I suppose it’s the wrong choice of words that sparked it all…

In the end everyone was here to get the Swarm Badge on FourSquare, innit!?

Apart from that, though, the event I thought was a great success! SMCKL events happened every month, so feel free to join in, and as for Crocs Malaysia, I’m very excited to find out what’ in store for us for the next 6 months. Of which, we’ll definitely have something for you by the end of this month, so stay tuned 😉