As an ongoing celebration of Cadbury Dairy Milk becoming officially fairtrade we decided to do celebrate fairtrade fashion. We bought the 8 coolest fairtrade T-shirt we cold find, got the lovely people at Bournville to model them for us and now all you need to do is tell us which one you like best for your chance to win the all.

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simplez

The Cadbury going fairtrade blog is going on for four months already. It was my very first project in my (not so) new job at HyperSocial and it makes me very proud and happy. Admittedly, it was a dream brief from the beginning: the biggest and most loved chocolate brand is going fairtrade – what can we do on the interwebs? And for an old-fashioned dude like myself that still wholeheartedly believes in the idea of a company’s blog, this one is a source of joy.

I so wish I could share more freely everything we are doing from the business perspective, like our objectives and where we are with meeting them and what’s great and what not so great. One of the biggest challenges with these projects is the lack of benchmarks so targets and all are to some extent as anyone in digital knows, based on educated guesswork. But the trend of radical transparency hasn’t reach most organisations yet, and so I can only write about some personal experiences.

Apropos benchmarking, this project got me to finally meet the lovely people from Innocent. Few weeks back I went to the fruit-towers to exchange some knowledge and learnings with Ted. Lots of diary milk bars made their way to the fruit towers, lots of smoothies made their way to hyper/cadbury. Nice

With the amazing skills of sniffing and writing great, tasty stories, Lea, the shit-hot blog editor, turned it into a storytelling garden, almost like Bournville. I’m still sometimes surprised at the breadth and interestingness of the stuff that comes out of digging in cadbury’s archives.

From Bournville to Ghana and back, there is not enough time to tell all the great stuff. For example, recently while doing some research to find more great stories, I stumbled on this fascinating Ghanaian hiphop culture called hiplife. I’m hoping to chip in and blog about it soon over at the Cadbury blog.

We’re getting really excited about the launch of the fairtrade bars very soon and prepared some shizzles and surprises that I can’t tell you too much about right now or i’ll ruin the surprise…but stay tuned, s’gonna be fun!

Go and check it yourself. and / or follow @goingfairtrade

One of the most sacred truism of social media is that it is no place for direct marketing and salesy messages. Yet recent developments and observations seems to suggest that this might become just another cliche’ as companies are experimenting with social platforms as sales and promotions and even a new breed of direct marketing, one where contact (lead) is being made by the indirect requests of people.

The initial change came from brands using Twitter for sales promotions like the successful story of DellOutlet, Jetblue and many other brands. This is a no brainer. if you have a good deal to offer people will follow.

But it’s worth paying attention to emerging practices of direct marketing. I’ve been thinking about it for couple of weeks now and don’t know what to make of it yet. Sometimes I think it’s plain wrong yet occasionally it seems to make too good of a sense sense and I’m tempted to convince one of my clients to experiment with. At the moment Twitter is where these experimentation can take place so a bit limited in scope but this indeed can be just the beginning of something big.

Let me start on a true story…

Few weeks back I #lazytweeted a question about a place to stay in Barcelona. Few nice people (not just from my network) have replied with recommendations. One @reply came from an apartment hotel offering their place.

Is this the holy grail or the greatest ever spam machine in the making?

Set up search words through twitter search of your category and you might find the goose on steroids or you might find a stinky corpse. I don’t know.

Here are some fictional tweets to bring this more to life:

Someone: anyone knows a good ethical wedding company?

I can think of hundred more examples, some obviously more promising than others.

There are, of course so many issue here, I don’t know where to start.

Do people want to be directly contacted by companies or is it intruding spam that will put people off Twitter and kill it? My instincts say sod off but seriously why not? If the right offer can come in the right time by the right people – how is that a bad thing?

I’m shouting out to my network, not to sales persons you say. Well, the emergence of the #lazytweet says otherwise. When people in need they want to throw their net as far and as wide as possible right?

That’s a spam full stop, you say. It will taint my experience and kill the network. But if these replies appear not on your main stream but on your @reply stream which you can access or ignore as much as you like that makes it less problematic right? And you can always block intrusive users. Besides, you bloody hypocrite, why is it OK for brands to ‘listen’ to your customer service rants and response very quickly but NOT with anything else?

Tricky thing, virtual social spaces. You can argue that in the physical world, a sales person won’t approach you in the pub saying, sorry mate, I just overheard you asking your friend about X. I’m Asi, I’m an X retailer, come buy from me. But we slowly change our perceptions of public/private in mediating social technologies and getting used to what Danah described as their persistence, searchability, and the presence of invisible audiences. So comparing it directly to physical spaces is a bit futile although I’d still suggest taking that test.

And there are of course loads of other issues from a business perspective – mainly resource and scalability. Please let’s not fall into the twitter trap. It’s still and probably will be just a noisy minority of the early adopters so take it with a pinch etc. I guess that just like with everything social interwebs, context is king and we will soon see another demo of Sturgeon Law – some companies/brands will get it and do it right and make some good business of it, most will fail.

Please tell me what you think of this one – your opinion (as usual) is hugely appreciated.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, smarter and quicker people have thought about it. It’s getting hot in here…

Yesterday Cadbury announced that Cadbury Dairy Milk, UK’s best-selling chocolate bar is set to become Fairtrade certified towards the end of summer. When the bars go on sale the value of Fairtrade chocolate sales in the UK will leap from £45m to £225m. Cadbury’s commitment to buy 10,000 tonnes of cocoa under Fairtrade terms will triple certified sales from Ghana. This is huge news and I feel fortunate to be working with them on this project.

As some of you know already, we helped them launch a lovely blog where over the next 6 month until the CDM fairtrade certified bars hit the shelves, both Cadbury and the Fairtrade foundation will tell all the brilliant stories that involve that complex process of a massive corporation like Cadbury going fairtrade as well as lots of other stories from Ghana, Bournville and everything in between.

The fairtrade conversation is taking place for many years now and we’re hoping to tap in and contribute to this conversation. One of the objectives and greatest hope of this blog and everything we’ll do around it, and this is where I’d like some free advice from you is to try to take the fairtrade conversation and stories to more and more mainstream audiences and by mainstream I mean people outside the converted/advocates circles.

As you can expect it’s a pretty niche conversation and at first we are humbly joining this dedicated community but as I see it, the greatest challenge for the near future is to leverage the weight of Cadbury Dairy Milk as the most loved chocolate bar in the UK to galvanise a wider community of following for the fairtrade movement. I believe that there is an opportunity here for an educational/promotional job for fairtrade but with the frivolous touch of gorillas and eyebrows

It is my ultimate wish that in retrospect this move from Cadbury will be considered the tipping point that has transformed the Fairtrade movement from a niche preference to a mainstream ethical benchmark.

We’ve got some cool surprises coming along the way but we are open for any ideas or suggestions – we love partnerships and collaborations and are planning to do nice things with different communities (foodies, crafties, greensphere, students etc). The next big thing is the Fairtrade’s fortnite Go Bananas event where we plan to come along and bring a big hairy fella with us.

Your feedback is hugely appreciated.