Social media is all about networking and connecting to your audience on a more intimate level, but lunchmeat companies Sara Lee and Land O’Frost are taking the ‘meat-up’ capabilities of social networking to a new medium within their industry.
Sara Lee’s first push into the social media spectrum was with their ‘Mama Saga’ web series. Their Senior Brand Manager, Paula Shikany tells Business Wire in a press release that Sara Lee understands the importance of creating an opportunity to speak with moms one-on-one in the immediate and engaging nature of social media. Their focus is on moms who already active in this spectrum, so the ‘Mama Saga’ videos are available on their Facebook Fan Page, Metacafe, Youtube and more.
The goal of this campaign is to help moms with everyday dilemmas in a humorous way that will spark conversations, all while driving them back to their Sara Lee deli products through coupons and discounts. This is important to note because Sara Lee is not just creating a social media presence because it is what everyone else is doing right now but because it’ll ultimately help the company’s bottom line, which is selling its products.
Their videos star real moms who are eating, preparing, or sitting by a Sara Lee product. Here is an example of one of their video entry’s of a mom “Dealing with Disaster:”
Land O’ Frost is conducting a similar campaign that again, drives its customers and moms back to buying its product with discounts and coupons but they are utilizing a blog, called Land O’ Moms, as opposed to just a video channel. They are also targeting moms who are already active in social media and they have a Facebook and Twitter page where if you become a fan/follower, they will donate $1 to Youth Sports programs. On Land O’ Moms people can exchange recipes and parenting advice, get articles from women’s magazines and communicate with popular mommy bloggers.
As with many social media strategies and tactics, the primary goal is to first create a lasting relationship with your audience, in this case moms, and secondary to promote your brand. Land O’ Moms barely mentions the brand in the network in that it is their as support for moms everywhere. The president of Land O’ Frost was shocked by this. This is a good example of how CEOs and other executives may be hard to convince when the brand they spent so long building is not in the forefront of the campaign. To get your projects under-way you need the “OK” (as I discussed in an earlier post Social Media Strategies) and that means you must be able to show how your tactic is going to help the organization overall. It takes a lot of effort to transform your company’s campaign and goals to an integrated campaign especially since success measurement is difficult and when taking the control out of the exec’s hands and accepting people’s comments, whether positive or negative.
Regardless, both Land O’ Frost and Sara Lee both have very successful social media campaign strategies in that everything is uniform to their goals and they are not push campaigns.
Maybe I’m not looking at the campaigns in the right way, but I don’t know what Sarah Lee is really achieving through their videos. As I was watching the video inserted into this post I kept waiting for something to reference the Sarah Lee product that she was using. I understand the message that she’s a busy mom, etc. But what I didn’t understand is how Sarah Lee was helping her. Isn’t the video supposed to be a way for the company to connect one-on-one with their customers and ultimately drive them back to Sarah Lee products?
It’s more like moms helping moms, letting them know they aren’t the only ones going through the same dilemmas. By being part of the community, you get special coupons and discounts. Sara Lee is providing the space for discussions like this to take place, but the point is not to push their product.
I never would have thought that lunch meat would have social media presence, but this post obviously proves that there is one. I thought the video was funny, though I have to agree with Taylor on the point that they maybe should have worked more into the video about what that lunch meat was doing for her. Other than that though, I thought that the video was entertaining and I think that it is clever of Sarah Lee to have a social media presence because I don’t think many other companies like it will (except for Land O’Frost as you mentioned).