Kraft Bets on Bloggers
Kraft Foods is making it easy for moms and other home cooks to use its Velveeta brand cheeses when cooking by continuing its push to increase the number of recipes available to consumers that incorporate Velveeta processed loafs.
In a recent campaign, five popular mom bloggers spent five weeks posting a total of 25 recipe ideas, menu planning and other mealtime tips around Velveeta.
The bloggers, also known as Kitchenistas, were: Tina from Mommy’s Kitchen, Rachel from A Southern Fairytale, Lori from My Wooden Spoon, Christy from The Southern Plate and Heather from The Domestic Diva.
At www.MommysKitchen.net, Tina talked up the promotion encouraging readers to become a fan of the Velveeta Facebook page, which has more than 1,000 friends, and to visit www.VelveetaKitchenistas.com, where each blogger was assigned to post one day of the week.
The bloggers were compensated for their time, which included writing about cooking experiences, tips and advice, developing one Velveeta-based recipe and hosting “office hours” on the Velveeta Facebook page where they answered questions and interacted with fans, Kraft said.
“Consumers may have one or two recipes that incorporate Velveeta, but they are not aware that there are many other things you can do with Velveeta, like making cornbread,” Sherina Smith, Velveeta brand manager at Kraft Foods says.
Velveeta processed loafs had sales of $495.2 million in 2008, up from $468.7 million in 2007, excluding Wal-mart. This year, sales were $319 million through Sept. 2, according to Information Resources, Inc., a Chicago-based market research firm.
The Velveeta Facebook page has more than 1,000 friends, most of them acquired through the mining of the Kraft Food and Family magazine database to determine who buys Velveeta cheese. Those buyers were sent invites to joins the Facebook page.
So, how does this all play when the consumer is shopping at retail?
“It’s hard to say,” Smith says. “What we do know is that this consumer is online looking for ideas for meals, we know she blogs a lot and looks to other bloggers for tips and ideas. The more that we can be where she’s looking for ideas, the more we can be top of mind when she’s grocery shopping.”
Vetting Online Voices
Public relations firm Edelman helped Kraft select the bloggers using a metric system and other criteria to determine which bloggers would have the best influence for the Velveeta promotion.
1. <b>Know the space.</b> Use search engines and blogger networks to find a relevant blog already immersed in the space you want your messages attached to. Create a list of search terms based on how people actually talk about the product in real life. Set up Google alerts to see who’s talking about your products.
2. <b>Start big, then go narrow. </b>If you want to find five bloggers start with 15 and vet them further. Make sure she never said anything negative about the product or brand. Read back at least three months to get a sense of the bloggers tone and style for writing to make sure it fits with the brand image. Make sure she doesn’t have an existing relationship with a competitor.
3. <b>Run the numbers. </b>How many followers does the blogger have on twitter? What is her estimated number of subscribers? Is she active and engaged on Flicker, Facebook, Café Mom or Blissfully Domestic? Take it beyond that to traditional media: Has she been featured on “The Today Show” or interviewed by a major newspaper?
“By following these guidelines you will see the Top 5 bloggers rise to the top,” says Danielle Wiley, senior vice president of consumer brands for Edelman.
