Rubbermaid was originally founded as the Wooster Rubber Company in 1920 in Wooster, Ohio, and originally manufactured toy balloons. A decade later it added household products. It went public in 1955 after the company had success with a bathmat with suction cups on the bottom, and it changed its name in 1957. It was purchased in 1999 by the Newell Company, which also owns such brands as Sharpie, Paper Mate, Calphalon, Graco, and Levolor, among others.

Today, Rubbermaid is still positioning itself as a company focused on helping to make homes more comfortable places for families to be together. And at the age of 90, the company isn’t showing its age. Its using the Internet and social media to help build its revenue and its brand.

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While its homepage at Rubbermaid.com is dominated with rolling warm images of organized homes and changing texts that encourages readers to “Design Your Perfect Closet” or get involved in “Operation Teamwork” or makes sure they know that “Recycling Matters,” the site is mostly focused on selling product.

Rubbermaid is not bashful about its intentions. After all, the first three section of the five links at the top of the home page are Shop Online, Browse by Product, and Browse by Room, which are all essentially about selling Rubbermaid gear. In each, the consumer can get blow-by-blow descriptions on every product. Here’s just part of what they have to say about ice cube trays: “The compact design is great for stacking while freezing or nesting for storage.” Or a laundry hamper: “Reinforced handles and rim area offer superior durability and performance.”

And underneath each product is a link to order it online. If that isn’t an option, a link is there to show consumers what online outlets or actual brick-and-mortar retailers do have the product.

This focus on sales has buried a few cool elements. On the home page, below the dominating central image, four content areas are called out: Tips & Solutions, Your Reviews, Best in Blog, and Featured Products. These more interactive and interesting areas be very easy to miss, though, since the instinct when the top image fills the whole screen is to click on a section rather than scroll down to see what’s there.

One effective interactive tool found on rolling home-page images allows users to design their closets by inputting dimensions and then dragging and clicking Rubbermaid products online to see what could work in the space you have.

The last two sections “Organizing Ideas” and “Blogs” are where the more interesting content is stuffed. The company has nearly 20 bloggers writing on its Adventures in Organization page. They cover a wide variety of subjects, everything from how they organize their home office to interviews with CPOs (that’s certified professional organizers to you, pal).

The blog home page also provides links to the company’s Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube pages, something you’d think Rubbermaid would be dropping a lot more links to (at least on the home page) throughout the site in order to build that traffic.

One thing that is important to note is that Rubbermaid takes its social media seriously (so seriously the company has its own YouTube channel in case you wanted to pass along any Rubbermaid commercials to your friends). The company goes out of its way to listen to its commenters, even taking negative comments to product designers to help shape the process of redesign.

Rubbermaid will use its Twitter feed or Facebook page to solicit ratings and reviews from consumers on particular products. Once a product is redesigned, Rubbermaid has been known to go back to the consumers that had negative responses to offer samples of the improved product. You can bet that converted more than few people who had been walking around saying negative things about the company into absolute proselytizers for the brand. Holy Tight-Fitting Lids!

Rubbermaid has more than 9,600 followers on Twitter. The marketing people fill it up with such Tweets as “Do you have outdoor plants that need to be brought indoors? Here's an article with some tips.” And then provide a link that pushes readers to the Rubbermaid site. Not exactly engaging, but helpful.

Or “Want to update your closet? Try our online closet design tool & visualize your perfect closet.” This, of course, pushes readers to the aforementioned cool closet-design tool on Rubbermaid’s Web site.

Members of the marketing department also maintain other Twitter feeds, such as RubbermaidTwo and RubbermaidErin, which have lower numbers of followers (more than 2,100 and more than 1,100, respectively), but seem to have a more personal touch. Tweets from here are more along the lines of “Was reading @BHG in the doctors office this am and was delighted to see friend @OrganizeAtlanta had a organized party tip on pg 93.”

On Rubbermaid’s Facebook page, the more than 2,800 people who like it can find such updates as “Do you have outdoor plants that need to be brought indoors? Here's an article with some tips.” Or “Does anyone else use a Lazy Susan in their home?”

The idea here is to consistently drive Facebook visitors back to the Rubbermaid Web site with various teasers and prompts. The Facebook page also has tabs for Promos as well as Deals. Both of those areas allow people to save money and print coupons for Rubbermaid products. There are also often money-saving codes to use online in these sections as well.

One interesting thing about the Deals section is that, in order to increase its own stats, the site offers readers a special offer if they click on the “Like” button.

The front page of Rubbermaid’s Facebook page is dominated on the left side by a large image of a smiling African-American woman who happens to be holding four Rubbermaid food-storage containers. Her massive smile is saying that she either cannot wait for the party to get started or is happily relieved that it’s over. The choice of model is effective. While attractive, she pulls off looking like an everyday Mom who uses Rubbermaid products in all sorts of ways.

The other two tabs on the company’s Facebook page are for Videos and Photos. The Videos are commercials, Japanese versions of commercials, behind-the-scenes videos, etc. Meanwhile, the photos are both canned product shots from the company as well as images uploaded from everyday consumers of Rubbermaid products in action, such as an image of a simple stack of kitchen containers with labels scrawled on them. A Rubbermaid employee smartly noted to the person whose image it is: “Great job! Very neat and love the labels.” A Rubbermaid fan has been solidified for life.