Sweet Social Media

Yes, I like Milano Cookies. Orange, raspberry, mint … bring them on. I like them with milk. I like them with tea. I like them out of the bag. I like them artfully arranged on a platter with strawberries and whipped cream. I also like them on Facebook.

I found out that Pepperidge Farm has a Milano Cookies Facebook page when I made a post that mentioned Milanos, and for a week, the right side of my page was cluttered with ads for Pepperidge Farm products and a prompt to "like" the Milano Cookies page. So I did. Then posts from the page started popping up on my wall two or three times a day: "What type of Milanos will you be enjoying after dinner tonight?" "Who do you like sharing your Milanos with?"

In what I must now assume was a fit of deadline-induced procrastination, I responded to one of the threads. Not long after, I got an alert that said I was mentioned in a comment on the Milano page. I clicked through, and yup, the "page" had responded to my comment, mentioning me by name (thus prompting the alert) and talking specifically about what I had said. I just thought that was cool, and I found myself getting involved in conversations about cookies at least once a day, sometimes more. I tried to egg the people behind the page into talking about their social-media strategy, but they stayed in character and brought it all back to the cookies.

A few weeks ago, I got a message from the page saying that it had sent me a private message. There's an "Other Messages" area on Facebook that holds messages from pages rather than from people, and it's something I never knew existed so I never checked it. The comment on my page from the Milano Cookies page alerted me to the message, and I went and checked it out. It said that Pepperidge Farm wanted to reward me for being such a "sweet part of the online conversation about Milanos" by sending me a gift.