Ben Brugler: I’ve Ben Thinking...

Not sure if you saw the excitement a few weeks back regarding the Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts, but I used twitter to voice not only my love for Pop-Tarts (I'm a brown sugar cinnamon guy) but also my life long obsession with Kellogg's releasing a Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tart. 

 

Seriously, what's not to love about it? Think the graham crust from the S'mores variety with pumpkin flavored filling, topped off with vanilla icing and some cinnamon drizzle. Yea, I know - seems like a no-brainer! 

 

Well, a lot of people agreed with me and we of course created #pumpkinpiepoptarts, hoping to get the ball rolling on this. I even emailed a few folks from Kellogg's with the link to TweetBeep so they could see the conversation (no reply yet, but they were on our site so I know they heard about it).

 

Surprisingly, we were unable to find a twitter handle for Kellogg's (US, that is; there is a UK handle). This got me thinking, I wonder how many good ideas are out there for companies that are never realized because they're not on it? We kick around a lot of ideas here like this, so I thought just for the sake of conversation, we'd start sharing them as they come up.

 

This week's is appropriate given the cold weather November is bringing us and the onslaught of sinus infections it has caused. The subject? The Ricola Mystery Cougher.

 

Turns out H1N1 has gotten to Ricola too, as this year's Mystery Cougher, the campaign where you can win big if you offer a coughing stranger a Ricola, has moved online. (Think about it - who wants to even be standing next to someone coughing, much less make contact with them.)

 

So, we were thinking Ricola could create the virtual cough drop and engage certain twitter users to tweet some coughing, then, if you offer them a #Ricola you could be eligible to win. Pretty simple. No risk. And, if nothing else, gives them a quick and easy group of people to connect with beyond cold season. The metrics would be easy to see, beyond connecting with other people on twitter, they could monitor how long #Ricola is a trending topic, among other things.

 

Come on. Admit it. You want to yell 'RI-COLAAAA' right now.

11/4/2009 12:58:03 PM