Alpro – a Conversation Management case

So when we relaunched our smoother and more fruity soya yoghurt variations, I thought it was an ideal opportunity to check the conversational potential of Provamel. I selected some people who wrote about the Provamel brand, some people who had a vegetarian/vegan blog, some people from our Facebook-page and asked them whether they would like to be the first to taste our new soya yoghurt variantions. Reactions were positive and a cooling bag full of products together with a letter was send to the 12 selected people. As I wanted to test and convince some people it worked, I started small. The 12 cooling bags resulted in 10 blogpost. Enough for me to call it a success!

To end this blogpost I’d like to share some personal lessons from my first experiment:

Making it a successful action starts at the beginning. In my opion, the selection of your participants is key. A few criteria to keep in mind for those participants: involved, willingness to share their thoughts, open, curious and enthusiastic. I selected most of them via sites that look for keywords on blogs (www.blogpulse.com, www.trackur.com,…). Other interesting sites I received from my webagency. They were considered to be important SEO-websites.

These kinds of actions are not for free. Sometimes it looks like in social media everything is for free. Of course, the financial input can be limited but the effort of a marketeer is not. Of course by doing it all myself I took some more time but I am also not a big believer of doing this completely via an agency. I built up a “personal” relation with the participants enabling me to ask some efforts of them… . One blogger even asked me to organise a contest. An agency can never have this kind of flexibility and ownership.

But on the other hand, cooperate with other people and agencies. They have other ideas, other experiences and other skills which can only enrich the ideas you have.

Make sure you have something to tell. In this case we had a nice story. We explained them what was improved to guide the discussion/the blogpost they made about the subject.