Kronos Uses Cartoons to Go Viral

Kronos Uses Cartoons to Go Viral:

Who says workforce management solutions humor isn’t good for a laugh?

Kronos, an industry leader in time management and talent management solutions, wanted to extend their brand, reach new prospects and engage with employees—and do so by cutting through the content clutter.

The answer ended up being unexpectedly simple: cartoons.

In September 2009 the Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based company launched a weekly cartoon campaign that made light of the very services Kronos provides. The company sends them out via email every Monday to their more than 3,000 employees as well as to industry analysts, customers and the media, and then posts them on a website dedicated to the series, www.timewellspent.kronos.com.

“We needed to have some frequency to build a following,” said Laura Souza, senior manager of public relations for Kronos. “It’s been amazing to see the response. When we decided to do this, we thought we could leverage it in different ways. Even we didn’t realize just how many different ways.“

Going Viral, Globally

HR.com and HRBartender.com are among blogs that regularly run the cartoons, along with publications located as far as India and in the UK, Souza said. A customer included a link to one of their cartoons in their email signature. Kronos ran a captions contest last fall and got 500 entries submitted from people outside of the company. Souza said they’re planning to run more contests soon.

Internally, the cartoons have been embraced as well. The salesforce at Kronos uses them in slide deck presentations to prospective clients. “They introduce the concepts of what our tools do in a humorous way,” Souza said.

And for its own employees, Kronos puts the cartoons on T-shirts and sometimes gives employees a signed print to keep. This year, they even published a calendar.

“Everyone is looking for content all of the time,” Souza said. “Cartoons are a great way of taking complex ideas and making them easy to understand and funny. They are a good embodiment of our branding principles as well.”

The Kronos cartoons are the product of Tom Fishburne, a classically trained marketing professional who started drawing cartoons 12 years ago in business school.

Break Through the Clutter

“Cartoons have interesting characteristics as a form of media,” he said. They help companies “break through the clutter. Businesses find that they are a really amazing asset that can pop up in lots of places, from textbooks to a Forbes magazine article.”

Fishburne worked with Kronos as any marketing consultant would: He met with several of Kronos’s senior executives and subject matter experts in order to get up to speed on the culture of the company, what they do, and the governing brand ideas. From those meetings, he started to sketch ideas. A team of three internal reviewers at Kronos reviewed them and offered feedback. The process became an ongoing part of Kronos’s marketing efforts.

“It’s important to have quality content published on a frequency that you can keep up with, even if it’s not every day. Make sure it’s quality,” Fishburne said. “The early days of content marketing emphasized quantity over quality. There was a lot of irrelevant fluff and the result is a lot of social media ghost towns. “

Cartoons as a form of content marketing need to strike a balance between providing entertainment and offering a valuable insight into what a company is trying to do without being a hard sell. What does a business stand for? What does their product stand for? What will the foil of the joke be that touches on an insight about a company?

“A cartoon is like a Trojan Horse. People can read, comprehend and enjoy them. It brings people back to learning more about a company,” Fishburne said.