Andy's Answers: How ConAgra is creating online communities for its diverse brands - SmartBrief

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Andy’s Answers: How ConAgra is creating online communities for its diverse brands

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Brands & Campaigns

ConAgra Foods’ brands span dozens of household names, including PAM, Chef Boyardee, Slim Jim and Orville Redenbacher’s.

Each brand has a different focus, tone and audience — and when it comes to social media, it’s up to Genevieve Mazzeo and her team to help these brands extend their voice to online communities.

At her recent BlogWell presentation, Mazzeo walked us through a few case studies of how different ConAgra brands have built healthy and sustainable fan bases that are generating valuable feedback, word of mouth and revenue. A few of her tips on how you can do it:

  • Start by asking a lot of questions. When a brand is looking to establish a community, Mazzeo’s team asks dozens of questions: What do we want this community to be? What do we want to learn? What do we want the consumer to do as a result of interacting with this brand?
  • Look for a community manager to whom your fans can relate. ConAgra’s Slim Jim Facebook community grew slowly and organically until it found Scott — the “Sultan of Snap,” as members have dubbed him — to lead the community. Today, the community has more than 300,000 fans and is getting fan engagement and feedback that the brand uses to make better products.
  • Create sharing incentives. For its Healthy Choice Facebook community, ConAgra created a sharable coupon that increased in value as more fans shared it. Fans got behind it, and the value went from 75 cents off to buy one, get one free. More importantly, the community expanded 900%, and the coupon had a conversion rate twice that of normal digital coupons.

Watch Mazzeo’s case study. Slides are available.