Monday 14 May 2012

I've been watching how Kraft Foods handed over their Mac n Cheese social media accounts to Dottie and Frankie, as part of the "celebrations" around their 75th anniversary.

Non-Americans clicky here to found out what Mac n Cheese is.

And I smell something fishy in the state of Denmark. (hmmm now *there* is a mixed metaphor) as this whole escapade poses a number of questions...

1. What kind of damage will this do to the Kraft brand? Being patronising (calling your 2 new brand advocates "gals" for instance) to a demographic group that is important to sales of this product is probably, in hindsight, not such a good thing
2. If you're going to publish content to YouTube, try not to over-polish it. The Kraft official videos have the lingering odour of being heavily scripted, and the 2 ladies don't come over that well. And definely a whole lot less spontaneous than Kraft would have liked, I'm sure. Check them out for yourself
3. The language of the tweets is all out of kilter. Clearly there is someone behind the scenes (the mac n Cheese ad agency  CP+B is all over it, and so they should be) so why claim you're handing over your social media to the 2 ladies, if actually you're not? Check out the tweets here https://twitter.com/#!/kraftmacncheese and look at the language.

What are the takeaways from this? (oh, and can you see what I did there?)
1. don't make claims about your social media that you might find difficult to follow through
2. don't patronise the elderly. Ever.
3. don't allow your ad/PR/marcomms agency unfettered access to your customers. They may mean well, but don't always get the brand tone in the right space
4. things that look good in a PowerPoint presentation don't always translate to the real world.



I'll be speaking at a conference in June

I'm one of the speakers at the forthcoming Web Effectiveness Conference in Budapest talking about devising and implementing web governance.

As it's only a month away, I suppose I'd better start preparing!