Who Let the Dogs Blog?

“On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog,” the cartoon says. But if you’re a dog and don’t care who knows it — or a cat comfortable with your feline side — then Purina has a social network for both you and your owner.

It’s called PetCentric Place, and it’s one of a number of online initiatives pet brand Purina has either launched, re-launched or just buffed up in recent months, with an eye to strengthening ties with its human customers by getting more involved with its four-legged ones.

The PetCentric Place social network lives at www.PetCentric.com, Purina’s portfolio Web site for all its pet care brands and for general pet-related content. Motto: “Places to Go. Things to Sniff.”

Pet owners are a breed apart, of course, fundamentally defined by their relationships with their cats, dogs, birds, geckoes, ferrets, pot-bellied pigs et al. So Purina decided to use the PetCentric site to prove that it shares its customers’ DNA by offering them features that unleash their animal instincts.

“It’s a site where we can present our brands to consumers in a fun, engaging and light way,” says Kristin Ryan Fauss, director of marketing at Nestlé Purina Petcare. “It’s a different way for consumers to experience our brands, other than going to DogChow.com or Beneful.com. We wanted to reach the pet-owning consumer by combining useful content — most of which we create ourselves — with engaging activities that will appeal to pet owners.”

In December 2006 the site launched Doggie-Mail and Kittie-Mail, applications that let PetCentric users send e-cards of avatar dogs and cats delivering recorded or text-to-speech messages. The service, built by interactive agency Oddcast, quickly caught on with PetCentric.com’s 2 million registered users.

Over the last two years, Purina has also added photo and video uploads to the site, encouraging content sharing among its registrants. The company has recently run voter contests to find the funniest pet-based comedy and charitable campaigns for animal homelessness.

Late last year, Purina began sniffing around the notion of giving site visitors the chance to contribute more than just pet pictures and comments. The company called on the digital marketing expertise of St. Louis-based agency Infuz to help conjure up that community and manage it on an ongoing basis.

The result last April was a full-fledged social network on the site called PetCentric Place that lets users submit complete social profiles a la Facebook, become friends with other members and enter into instant chats. And here’s the twist: The pets get to have their own profiles, friends and, theoretically at least, chats.

And as with other social sites, befriending other members is part of the lifeblood of the site. Owners can befriend one another. Pets can, too, through their profiles, and owners can even befriend other people’s pets.

“It’s something we learned these users want to do,” says Infuz technology vice president Hans Gerwitz. “Some of them feel as close to the animals as they do to the owners.”

Visitors who come to www.PetCentricPlace.com will see the newest pet profiles. The info in these includes their pet peeves and favorite places, favorite pet foods (wet and dry, with frequencies) and “messages,” such as “Be persistent in trying to get adopted.”

It’s all in the service of increasing traffic and encouraging repeat visits. Before the PetCentric Place launch, much of that site traffic was driven through the Purina newsletter and through mailings to the in-house list, with much of the content created by in-house editors at Purina.

“It was essentially more of a magazine site,” says Tom Kasperski, Infuz vice president of account services. “I think Purina was trying to develop content that would drive traffic organically, so that people would contribute and then come back regularly just to catch up with other owners inside the community.”

By putting community members in charge of generating content, Purina got a better listen to just what interests their best customer advocates. “The beauty of social networks is that not only does the audience find content created by people like themselves more interesting to read, but it’s also free,” Kasperski says.

And if they like a social network, why not a Digg for dogs? At about the same time as the PetCentric Place debut, Purina rolled out its social bookmark site Petcharts (http://petcharts.purina.com) that uses a custom search engine to fetch pet-related news from major media sites such as The New York Times and Yahoo Pets, along with video from YouTube, photos from Flickr and blog content from some 50 influential pet sites.

Just as on Digg and other bookmarking sites, visitors can read or view content, then vote it up the ranks in popularity so that the highest vote-getters always appear first on the page. The pet tales can be sorted into cats and dogs, and consumers can even download a widget that pushes the content of their choice to their desktop via RSS headlines.

As for PetCentric Place, it’s still picking up fans of all species, and Ryan Fauss says it will continue to evolve. “We hope to add new features and functions every quarter or so to find new and different things that are relevant and engaging to this audience,” she says.

For more articles on interactive marketing go to www.promomagazine.com/interactive