Are you a Fan of Oreo?

Nom Nom

Facebook Fan Pages are the newest installment of The Social Network as it tries to constantly reinvent itself. As I learned in my Social Media class, typically businesses set up a Fan Page because of the following reasons:

1. There is no limit to the number of Fans you can have – Profiles are limited to 5,000 "friends".
2. You can email all your Fans at once –Profiles are limited to sending 20 emails at a time.
3. Fan Pages automatically accept Fan requests – Profiles require you to manually accept requests.
4. Fan Pages have more customization options.

One Facebook Fan Page that has received a lot of attention is Oreo, as they recently tried to win a Guinness World Records entry for most Facebook likes. Sure, shortly after their record was broken by Lil Wayne, but it sure gained a lot of attention. 

Photo courtesy of KRAFT FOODS INC.

 "Oreo Man" receiving Guinness World Records mark for "Most Likes on a Facebook Post In 24 Hours".

Oreo is the #4 rated global brand on Facebook, as I pointed out in this post. So why does an American cookie company, once criticized for having a high amount of Trans Fats, as you can read about in this blog post, have so many fans on Facebook? For cookies that are basically nothing more than sugary Crisco (that’s right, no butter, milk or vanilla) how could they get to 17,427,180 fans, as of March 22, 2011?

Photo from AlmightyDad.com

Well Oreo is doing a lot of things right on their Facebook page. For example,  

1.       Obviously they got the name right, step #1, so they are easy to find via search. If that wasn’t enough, on the homepage of the Oreo website there are also links to their Facebook (and Twitter) pages. A great way of integrating across platforms.

2.       They customized their landing page so they engage visitors immediately with a customized message: “Oreo & milk moments are best when SHARED”, which encourages fans to upload a photo of themselves sharing Oreo cookies. Right now it’s a cute picture of a boy and girl (almost) sharing an Oreo cookie, in a “Lady and the Tramp” spaghetti dinner type moment. Cute. They also continue their brand’s theme colours (blue, white) throughout the page.

3.       Besides the Shared moments, they also are promoting User Generated Content (UGC) through their Oreo “World’s Fan of the Week” contest. Fans can submit photos of themselves to the Facebook Fan page and each week Oreo will chose one photo to highlight on their Fan Page’s side bar. This week it’s Abby A. from California. I don’t think they win anything, but they do get “world” recognition and this seems to be enough to encourage a lot of submissions from fans. It also means there are tons of pictures of people enjoying their sugary Crisco yummy Oreo cookies on Oreo’s Facebook page – great PR!

4.       Oreo obviously updates their content frequently, and beside the weekly fan contest, they post a new “Status Update” on their Wall about every day two. I already talked about how they asked fans to ‘Like’ their status, but they also pose questions to their fans, (eg. Oreo: “What is your favorite part of an Oreo - the cookie or the creme?”) post recipes (eg. Oreo: “Your sweetheart would love an Oreo treat”…Oreo Sweetheart Strawberry Tarts Recipe) and share information about current promotions (eg. GEAR UP with OREO! Enter the unique PIN code found in your specially marked OREO package and you could win a brand new set of hockey equipment! Kraft | Canada Assists IWG). So not only are they marketing their brand, they are making sure their content shows up in fan’s News Feeds – another great way to encourage more responses from fans.

5.       Right now Oreo is also providing unique, Facebook only content through their crazy ass “Double Stuf Racing League” game, (DSRL) which is promoting their new(?) cookie, Double Stuf (half chocolate, half vanilla). I think it is basically like a cookie eating contest, (“ready, set, lick!” its says on Race Rules for the Lick Race) and contestants: 1. Select their choice of 4 celebrities, 2. Upload a photo 3. Share it with others. I think you also need to “like” Oreo on Facebook, which I couldn’t quite bring myself to do. 

Maybe this video explains it better:

Anyways, I’m sure you could spend hours on there. All the better for engaging fans of Oreo and bringing in those marketing $$.

Of course, Oreo’s Fan page isn’t perfect (they are only #4!) and they could use some improvements in the following areas:

1.       One area where Starbucks (#2 global brand) has a leg up on Oreo is in the area of two-way communication. Scanning their post I mentioned above “What is your favorite part of an Oreo - the cookie or the creme?” there were over 9,794 comments, but I couldn’t find any actually from Oreo. They pretty much asked the question and stepped back. Starbucks seems to be doing better in this area, so I think they could improve this in the future.

2.       Ok, I can’t really think of anything else. Can you?

So overall, I can’t say I’m really a big fan of Oreos (unless it is a layer of a delicious DQ cake) but I really got sucked into their Facebook page, especially the whole DSRL thing. So I would definitely give Oreo’s Fan Page an A+. Check it out!

Tracking Starbucks in Social Media

This week I wanted to review some of the tracking tools available to gather data and monitor conversations about brands. I personally like to use Google Analytics on my blog, but this only analyzes website data, so I thought I would check out some tracking tools that work across social media platforms, like HowSociable and Addictomatic. These are both free applications that you can use online, and since they don’t require you to sign up, or download anything, they are easy (and quick) to use.

Side note: As a big Google fan I like to use Google Alerts, but since you can only receive data via email or RSS feed, it’s not really practical for this one-time-only type of search. It’s much more useful if you want to monitor information on an ongoing basis.

To test out how HowSociable and Addictomatic work, I thought I would take a look at conversations people are having about Starbucks, since it is such a huge global brand and one of the top-10 brands on Facebook, as I wrote about in this post.

So what are people actually saying about Starbucks? Here are ten relevant conversations I found on March 17, 2011 while searching Starbucks on HowSociable and Addictomatic. I will rate them according to how positive or negative I think they are, with positive = +1, neutral = 0 and negative = -1.

Social Media Release - The New Official Beer of the NHL

For beer brands, only the Olympics is more important than the NHL in terms of sponsorship rights for high-profile events. Not only are the official sponsors of the NHL the only ones able to sell their beer at stadiums and market to fans watching the games, but they also gain access to key League events, such as the NHL Face-Off™, NHL Winter Classic®, NHL Heritage Classic™, NHL All-Star and the highly rated Stanley Cup. A sponsorship deal also provides the brand with opportunities to engage fans online, through NHL.com, NHL Network™, NHL Mobile™ and NHL Social. 

For the last ten years Labatt had been the official beer of the NHL and they were in the process of negotiating an agreement with the NHL to continue their sponsorship until 2014. However on February 22^nd, the NHL announced that Molson Coors (NYSE: TAP) in Canada and MillerCoors in the U.S were to replace Labatt as the official beer of the NHL, starting in the 2011-2012 NHL season. According to Marketing Magazine, this “monster” deal cost slightly more than US$375 million, believed to be the largest in league history.

Read Labatt’s response in the social media release below.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Social Networking: What are you doing?

Although most large companies still spend millions of dollars on advertising, sales promotions and public relations, (as well as possibly direct marketing and person selling) internet marketing is gaining in popularity among companies. Social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Linked are a huge reason people go online,  and as I showed in this post, Americans spent over 900 million hours using social networks in June 2010 alone.

It only makes sense for companies to use social networks in an effort to achieve their marketing goals. Social networking, along with blogging, multimedia sharing, collaborating and providing entertainment on the internet has become a great way for companies to interact with fans and gain customer feedback, increase brand awareness and maybe even generate sales.

So why isn’t every company taking advantage of these online resources?  Lots of reasons! A big one being there is a lack of direct ROI (return on investment) measurement that makes marketers wary that they are effectively generating sales for their company through social networking. Of course, it also takes a whole lot of time to do well, it may not have the support of upper management and in worse case scenario, it could lead to negative results. 

According to a study done by WongDoody (yes, that’s the real name of a US marketing agency!), even the leading global brands who have the resources to effectively utilize social networking could use some improvement on the social networking juggernaut Facebook. That is, if they use it at all, which sixteen of the top 100 don’t!