Bloggers aren’t always better when they have large followings. Smart is better than big is what I learned from the second presentation I attended at Blogwell in Philadelphia on November 9, 2010. It 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.
The Hershey Company on bloggers: smart doesn’t mean big
“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.
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
- …
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Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique.
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Thanks for the blog post. It’s great to see that you found the presentation helpful and engaging. Just one point of clarification, the brands Kraft Jet-Puffed and HoneyMaid Grahams are Kraft brands not Hershey’s. During the S’mores high-season (that would be the US holiday’s Memorial Day through Labor Day) the three iconic brands join forces to help promote and support the classic S’more. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have. The Hershey Company is a member of SMBC.
Hi Anna. Thanks for your comments and sorry about the mishap about the brand names.
K rgds
Yann
The S’mores Suite was truly one of the highlights of BlogHer, I totally agree! I do have to clarify that $75,000 is not the minimum expo floor entry point. The 10×10 booths are about the same price point at the suites, but they are different kinds of investments, enabling different kinds of engagement. Hershey’s is an absolutely best-practice case study for how to make a sponsor suite really work for you! Thrilled they got to share it with the BlogWell audience.
Elisa Camahort Page, Co-founder
BlogHer, Inc.
Hi Elisa, thank you so much for your comments and corrections. Not always easy to collect all the information properly when one is blogging live and as I am not exactly a mom blogger and am not entirely familiar with the environment I may have gotten a couple of things rather wrong 😉
No worries…live blogging is challenging. I don’t even attempt it 🙂
I should know, I do it all the time 😉