taginlineimport The second presentation I attended at Blogwell in Philadelphia on November 9, 2010 was that of the Hershey Company; not a household name in some parts of Europe so we have to explain that it is a confectioner producing sweets and chocolate bars and other foodstuffs under the Jet-puffed, Honey maid and Hershey's brands.
The presentation was delivered by Anna Lingeris, PR manager at the Hershey Company. "Blogher" is a large network (25 million plus, mostly women), probably the largest blogging organisation for women. The question was "how to engage this very exacting crowd". the Hershey company wanted to start a buzz on the S'more snacktivity suite (the booth at the exhibition) at blogher while spending $15,000 on suite sponsorship vs $75,000 as the minimum expo floor budget.
The idea was to show usage occations of these products, both indoor and outdoor. taginlineimport 2,400 people attended the Blogher confrence, 600 came to the Suite, spending more than 30 minutes in the suite on average and more than 200 blogposts were generated. The twitter chatter for S'mores was big: more 500 uses of the hashtag namely. Results were monitored with Radian 6, a popular buzz monitoring package in the US.
A separate website with photos taken by a professional photographer was put together, and it generated 500 visits in 2 days Anna said. " Smart doesn't mean big", Anna Lingeris added, so the success of that campaign was not based on big rewards and freebies but on how they shared their main experience with them.
Key learnings include
- the fact that "You can't do all by yourself" and you need to work not only with agencies but with other parts of the company too.
- explore larger spaces for more engagement
- ...
I specialize in information systems, HighTech marketing and Web marketing. I am author and contributor to numerous books and the CEO of Visionary Marketing. As such, I contribute regularly on this blog for Orange Business account on cloud computing and cloud storage topics.