Last month, Cadbury announced the creation of the special Dairy Milk +1 candy bar to coincide with the announcement of their Google+ page. Now, Cadbury has used their Google+ account to reveal their latest candy bar:

In order to make more fun for Bubbly (I presume Boily was not appetizing to focus groups), Cadbury also announced that they will be making use of Blippar, the iPhone and Android app that uses the phone’s camera lens to reveal more multimedia games and information simply by holding the phone up to the candy bar’s rapper.

You got a weird little candy bar comin’ to the British food aisles near me soon, Cadbury, but I’ll probably still try it just so I can play that weird duck game that appears when I Blippar the wrapper.

Why?

Why not?

Cadbury says, “Remember our 1kg Dairy Milk+ Bars? We’ve had some special personalised ones made, including these delicious ones for Google founders Larry & Sergey. Whose name would you like to see on a bar?”

Notice the +1 on the packaging.

Cadbury actually introduced the Dairy Milk +1 bar as it launched its Google+ Page earlier this month.

Here’s a commercial for their Dairy Milk:

This seems like as good a time as any to point out how Cadbury is utilizing the Google+ brand page for engagement. Last week, the company shared the above video, commenting, “We put a glass and a half of joy into each of our adverts… which is probably why they were the thing you most requested for us to post! Can you match these impressive eyebrow moves?”

A day before that, the company said on the page:

We like to start our Mondays by getting things in order, so if you’d all like to stand neatly in Circles that would help us immensely

Oh but seriously… Just let us know if you’d like to be in any of our Dairy Milk, Wispa or Creme Egg circles and we’ll add you in! – Jerry

That post got 38 comments. This isn’t a tremendous amount when you think about Facebook pages, but not too bad for getting some engagement going on the young Google+ brand pages.

Cadbury has been pretty active on Google+ throughout the month, posting many photos, comments and videos.

If you’re looking for ways to make your brand page better, Cadbury’s isn’t a bad example to look at.

Is it an example of using TV to primarily launch activity on the web?  After all the advert itself does have that Heavy-style sociability quality.  Then over the weekend this article about agency-du-jour, Fallon, which made the ad, and their ‘bi-lingual’ approach made me wonder if this ‘straight-to-web’ TV strategy was more than just an accident. 

Pretty interesting if it is, especially if they are using it to hoooover up budgets by streeetching tired paid media metrics – regardless of the affect on actual sales.

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Facebook’s Power Studied

First, a refresher: we’ve covered the comeback of the Wispa candy bar.  There was also the way in which HSBC decided not to charge interest on overdrafts, and although they were interested, most onlookers (your humble author included) thought both occurrences were pretty much lucky shots.

Data from Hitwise’s Robin Goad suggests otherwise, however; it seems that Facebook users constitute a force that every intelligent company should try to please.  “Facebook currently ranks 20th in terms of delivering traffic to retail websites,” reports Goad.  “Four percent of people leaving Facebook go to a retailer – and this number has doubled during 2007.  As [the] graph below illustrates, the major UK banks are also receiving more traffic from Facebook.”

And sure enough, four lines representing four banks are all angled sharply upwards.  HSBC’s red line is particularly steep.

“[T]he banks’ customers are also increasingly visiting social networks after doing their online banking,” Goad continues.  “The challenge for banks, retailers and others is to ensure that this traffic is benefiting their brand, rather than harming it.”

Well, as long as banks, retailers, and “others” continue to bring back candy bars and lower interest rates, I think we’ll all get along just fine.

So now comes the widely reported story of Cadbury, which is bringing back its Wispa candy bar. The decision was prompted by a variety of online intelligence, including multiple petitions and Facebook groups (shown below) which, cumulatively, provided Cadbury with evidence that there was enough of a market to justify re-launching the candy bar. That evidence most likely wasn’t available through more traditional research techniques. Cadbury has stated explicitly that this was the first time “that the power of the Internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand.”

So how have most of the media positioned Cadbury’s decision? The typical headline proclaims that Cadbury “bowed to pressure.” (Examples here, here, and here.)

This characterization really cheeses me off. Here is an organization that is paying attention to the social media space in order to be more directly connected to its customers. The company listened and acted based on what it heard. That’s engagement, not capitulation. Time’s decision to continue publishing Business 2.0 while looking for a buyer—rather than simply suspending publication, as was originally planned—also was prompted by a Facebook group. Again, that was an act of listening, not bowing to pressure.

If more companies “bowed to pressure” like Cadbury and Time, customers would be a happier lot.

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“There are 93 Bring Back Wispa groups on Facebook with approaching 14,000 members and the rival directories MySpace and Bebo are catching up,” according to The Guardian’s Martin Wainwright.  And the Wispa, which was produced between 1981 and 2003, will return to shelves in Britain in October.

This is no coincidence – Cadbury’s spokesman, Tony Bilsborough, told The Guardian, “We had noticed the web interest for some time.  It reveals a consumer passion which swayed our opinion about relaunching Wispa.”

Bilsborough’s observations seem to be backed by media coverage; from the Chocablog to the BBC, British sources are taking note of social networking’s win.  Granted, “more chocolate” might not be quite as desirable as “world peace,” but it’s something.  And that’s assuming, of course, that this wasn’t a planned marketing campaign, as Branwell Johnson suspects. 

In any case, Cadbury has hinted that the permanence of the Wispa’s comeback will depend on sales.  Hat tip to Andy Beal.

Quite a bit of time with release candidate 2 of version 2 of ecto for Windows, the offline blog manager and editor which I’ve been testing over the past few weeks.

I’ve been giving the developers a bit of feedback in the ecto Windows beta forum. Lots of typing messages to post there. Yesterday I had a tricky concept to explain where writing it would have taken ages and would unlikely have enabled the developer to see what I was getting at. So I recorded a video using Camtasia Studio to show what I was getting at which seems to have done the trick. And another one this morning. If you’re testing ecto, you might find these helpful, too. Links in the thread on the forum.

A (moving) picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

This afternoon, I installed Mint on my server. This is a stats tool that will give me loads of useful info about who visits this blog, where they’re from, what they read, where they go, etc.

But just saying Mint is a stats tool doesn’t do it justice. That’s about the same as saying Cadbury’s is just a bar of chocolate.

Amazingly, I couldn’t find even a simple description on their website that concisely summarizes what Mint is and does (but there is an FAQ). Here’s a pretty good review that explains it all well. Mint doesn’t work on hosted blog services like TypePad or Blogger, by the way, only on a Linux server (see the requirements for details).

Google Analytics offers much of the same features as Mint, plus additional/different ones, and it’s free (you pay $30 for Mint). Yet I feel pretty good about supporting an independent developer. Plus Mint’s running directly off my own server. And there are some very neat add-ins called Peppers written by other independent developers. Quite a community out there.

Next up – install Gizmo. This is an internet phone service that I tried last year. Wasn’t too impressed then (and I’m still not convinced about it now) so I continued with Skype.

But if you’re a regular listener to the FIR podcasts, you might have noticed in the last couple of shows that the sound quality when I speak has been a bit iffy. Shel and I record each show over Skype, with me here in Europe and him over there in the USA doing the actual recording. We have no idea what’s causing the poor sound quality with Skype. Anyway, we’ve decided to try something else for Monday’s show. Likely to be Gizmo.

Time’s marching so I’d better get it installed

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Cadbury Schweppes, who makes Dr. Pepper and Trident gum just to name a couple of its brands, posted 2004 underlying pre-tax profits of 933 million pounds ($1.78 billion). Analysts had previously predicted 927-953 million pounds.

The following is taken from the company’s press release:

2004 was a good year for Cadbury Schweppes with progress made against the Group’s goals and priorities.

Fuel for Growth cost savings are expected to be in the region of GBP100 million. Raw material costs are not expected to rise as sharply as they did in 2004. We will, however, be investing more heavily behind the long-term growth of the business, building on the successes we had last year. This increase in investment will be weighted toward the first half of the year.

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