NESCAFÉ® Dolce Gusto® Sends Lebanese Tweeps Coffee Machines to Test

NESCAFÉ recently launched its new product, NESCAFÉ® Dolce Gusto®, into the GCC market and was about to launch it in Lebanon. This is a relatively small coffee machine for the home. For this reason, it selected around 30 tweeps from the Lebanese online community to receive and test the machine and give their feedback about it on various social networks. Below are the pros and cons of this campaign.

Pros:

• Who doesn't love free stuff? This campaign was received very well by the tweeps it concerned and most of them are happily engaging with the campaign, posting photos of the machine and the coffee regularly on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
• The packaging was customized to show each person’s Twitter profile and most recent tweets.
• The package did not only include the coffee machine but also 5 boxes of different coffee capsules to last two months.
• Each capsule box had a suggested tweep name on it to make it more engaging. For example: Have an espresso with @FidaChaaban.
• The machine is great: very simple to use and the quality of coffee it superb.

Cons:

• The packages were shipped from UAE by DHL. DHL didn’t take notice that each box is intended to a different person so some people received boxes intended for other tweeps and hence the customization was useless.
• The online community management of NESCAFÉ® Dolce Gusto® Middle East did not start with the campaign. Once the machines were received, the tweeps started tweeting to a ghost account that was not activated until days later. It is still not being managed at full force across all platforms.
• The selection of tweeps seemed a bit random, or following an old list of active tweeps. Some tweeps are not as active anymore while others who were selected do not usually interact with brands or are too cynical and will not tweet positively about the product. Choosing the people who received the product is very important and this was obviously not studied well for the campaign.
• Many tweeps were upset that they were not chosen to participate in this testing phase and tried to ask for machines. They were told that the company was out of testing machines.
• The time between asking for the tweeps addresses and time of delivery was too long; some of the tweeps thought that the community manager who was using her personal account for this campaign is a spammer.