Kraft Foods: How Oreo Learned to Fish Where the Fish Are — Live from BlogWell

4:30 — Kurt Vanderah thanks our sponsor, ICUC, and introduces Kraft Foods‘ Digital and Social Marketing Lead, Beth Reilly.

4:32 — Beth: Once upon a time, a brand URL was the place to go for brand communications. Today, Facebook has become the de facto brand destination

4:33 — Beth: Oreo is one of many Kraft brands in social channels right now. Oreo launched in 2009 with 2.8 million fans (via migration of existing fan pages). Oreo created a single focus for all IMC efforts, with a sign-off  that explicitly drives consumers to Facebook.  Today we have 8.4 million fans, and  tens of thousands of fans are added daily.

4:35 — Beth: Our early investment in Facebook has led to dramatic increases in growth in Q3. Our monthly growth is six times higher than that of the average Facebook page.

4:37 — Beth talks about “reaching Mom where she is.”  Beth: Since moms are on social networks, it makes sense for us to reach out to them via Facebook.

4:38 — Beth: Oreo is one of the top Facebook pages, worldwide. Oreo is a social cookie

4:39 — Beth: A little about our digital vision — Facebook is still at the core. We are focusing on brand love and our community by implementing things like “Fan of the Week.”

4:40 — Beth: We also use Facebook for product innovation with trials and sampling. We really only use coupons if they are related to a new product launch.

4:40 — Beth: All of our promotional communication is done through Facebook — it is the center of our integrated marketing communications.

4:41 — Beth gives some examples of various promotions the brand has done through Facebook.

4:42 — Beth: So What does this mean? Fans are open to engaging in dialogue with our brand. Fan engagement drives brand advocacy.

4:43 — Beth: Making the most of the Oreo ecosystem — we have YouTube, Twitter, Oreo.com, and traditional media. We try to have consistent messages across these platforms, but each channel is unique. Facebook is in the center of this matrix. It’s the core of what we’re doing.

Q&A

Q: Martha from Fidelity Investments: You have so many fans, how do you manage expectations that you can respond to and interact with everyone.

A: We’ve found that people in the community responds to each other. We do monitor and respond to incorrect information about our brand, issues with product, etc. I don’t feel there’s a need to respond to every consumer. It is something that would be hard to do — and this is only one of our many brands. We rely on a lot of collaboration with our consumer relations and branding teams.

Q: Richard from Dell: Can you clarify what you mean by organic growth on Facebook?

A: Kraft works with Facebook quite a bit, but we haven’t done any advertising on Facebook for Oreo. We do use Facebook advertising for other brands though.

Q: Ramon from Domino’s Pizza: What are your thoughts on adding links to social media sites on packaging?

A: We’ve done it once, but we tend not to do this. Unless it’s some huge promotion, we’d rather not link to separate entities on our packages.

Q: Tom from Abbott: You mentioned you only use coupons for new products on Facebook. Can you talk more about why?

A: Our fans go to our Facebook page for information and to be entertained. Our current strategy is to only use coupons with promotions.  We don’t feel there is a need to do it regularly, but it’s a good way to get trial with new products.

Q: What other kinds of metrics are you using to show ROI?

A: We don’t approach social media as a short-term sales generator. We see it as a long-term, brand-advocacy strategy. Oreo’s sales are doing well, but we can’t attribute that directly to Facebook. We look at things like the number of people responding to judge success.

Q: Is there a downside to driving all traffic to Facebook?

A: Facebook is kind of like how TV used to be. It’s always on in the background.  That’s where everyone is. This approach won’t make sense for all brands, but for Oreo, it makes sense to drive people to our Facebook page. There doesn’t seem to be many downsides.