{"id":21131,"date":"2009-07-02T05:52:08","date_gmt":"2009-07-02T04:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/blog\/?p=21131"},"modified":"2020-07-20T13:56:48","modified_gmt":"2020-07-20T12:56:48","slug":"cadbury-corporate-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/main\/cadbury-corporate-site\/","title":{"rendered":"Chocolate, Cadbury and the Corporate Site"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about chocolate recently…<\/p>\n

Not much new there, obviously, chocolate featuring as one of the major food groups in our house. But in particular, I\u2019ve been thinking about Cadbury<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"we<\/span>The Cadbury corporate site has long been one that I would visit regularly when benchmarking… \u201cneed an example of X done well? Nip over to the Cadbury site to see how they deal with X\u201d. Their graduate site, for instance, did a lot of innovative things with videos and blogs before others were very active in this area.<\/p>\n

Things have changed a bit; their redesign slimmed the site down a lot, and other major corporate sites have worked hard to add innovative and useful functionality over the last couple of years.<\/p>\n

However, Cadbury have continued their innovative work \u2013 but off the corporate site. The Cadbury approach seems to be to maximise the brand benefits they can get from their customer-facing social media outposts, while retaining the static and more corporate information on the corporate site. <\/p>\n

There are hundreds of thousands of fans of Cadbury fans on Facebook. These are mostly brand pages (Dairy Milk: two pages with over 400,000 fans; Creme Eggs: two pages, with over 500,000 fans; Mini Eggs: two pages with over 300,000 fans … and that\u2019s just on the first page of results). But there is also a corporate page with over 248,000 fans, and even a page for their recent Eyebrows advertisement campaign with nearly 225,000 fans. That is more than a glass and a half of customer love…<\/p>\n

Cadbury is clearly doing something very right here; Facebook works well for them, and they are making the most of their advertising successes, and welcoming the mashups and spoofs that their loyal customers create. (You\u2019ll no doubt remember the Mars\/Snickers<\/a> episode from a few months ago). <\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t just Facebook: there are many Cadbury inspired videos on YouTube, and there\u2019s at least one Cadbury channel<\/a>. There also seem to be several Cadbury-owned Twitter accounts (such as @ButtonsFOTF<\/a>, @haveyouearnedit<\/a>, @Cadbury_Gorilla<\/a> and @GoingFairTrade<\/a>).<\/p>\n

And Cadbury\u2019s new Fairtrade blog<\/a> links out to Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. <\/p>\n

But the main corporate site doesn\u2019t make a point of linking to the social media outposts \u2013 or only to the FairTrade blog, and to a CEO video on YouTube. So why have Cadbury chosen not to link out from the corporate site to these waves of customer love that come their way on Facebook and Twitter? <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve one thought, and one question…<\/p>\n

The thought is about the authentication of social media outposts. I found the many Cadbury social media outposts by searching, and by making an educated guess as to whether they were corporate-owned or customer-owned. Here\u2019s what I look for:<\/p>\n