Yesterday I had an interesting phone conversation with Alise Sjostrom. She’s the marketing coordinator for Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese and she’s doing an amazing job promoting their products on the internet. In fact, solely because of her recent Facebook comments, I bought one of their gift packages for my parents.
I also made this awesome tiramisu.
Let me momentarily digress to the tiramisu. I know this isn’t food photography at its best, but this is all that was leftover from my dinner party the night before. Let me tell you, the tiramisu was awesome. I made it from a recipe on this Italian Dessert blog. I even made my own lady finger cookies, also from the blog. Let me repeat, it was awesome.
Certainly much of my tiramisu success came from using an award-winning mascarpone cheese, which takes me back to Alise Sjostrom and the Crave Brothers.
Alise joined Crave Brothers this past year and has really taken off with their social media marketing.
“Crave Brothers had started social media before, but didn’t use it to its full potential,” says Alise. “I previously worked for a cheese company in Vermont where much of my time focused on social media and website management.
“Social media has given Crave Brothers’ marketing more bulk. We’ve simply added it to the marketing we already were doing. The only cost has been time. I have the tools to have it (the internet) up all the time and I work social media in throughout the day while I’m doing other things.”
I like Alise’s approach. She wants to educate people on agriculture and cheese, and she wants to bring them together with her posts on Facebook, Twitter, a blog and an e-newsletter, all of which draw people to their website.
“My focus is to be very real,” says Alise. “Real time on what’s really happening. I feel people want to connect with us and know what we’re doing. They love to talk about food and are looking for ideas. Social media makes it easier, since otherwise it would be difficult because we don’t have our own retail store.”
She’s right. People do want to connect. We want to feel like we’re “part of the club.” Last week I felt just that when I commented to Crave Brothers’ Facebook post about tiramisu.
And then I went out and bought two tubs of their mascarpone cheese.
