Feeling Salty

Knorr has reduced the sodium in many of its prod­ucts. To announce the change they’ve intro­duced a char­ac­ter named ‘Salty’ into their ads and social media cam­paign. The ads are the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of cute­ness. Who could resist the moment when the salt pours out of his eyes in place of tears?

The idea to per­son­ify Salty and gen­er­ate sym­pa­thy for him is really good. And the TV spots do a great job of being funny and orig­i­nal, and mak­ing some­thing as mun­dane as salt reduc­tion worth talk­ing about at the water cooler. Kudos to DDB Canada.

In the social media depart­ment, Salty has posted some pretty awe­some pic­tures of him­self on Face­book, like his most recent Olympic adven­ture (so patri­otic). The Face­book and Twit­ter cam­paigns called Saltys­Life are intended to bring the tiny fig­ure to life. The ded­i­cated Side­kicks sitelette invites us to “Fol­low Salty on His Adventures.”

But, do I want to? What would I get by fol­low­ing or friend­ing Salty? A novel, funny ad does not eas­ily trans­late into a solid or “follow-worthy” social media campaign.

My first con­tact with Salty was on Twit­ter when I noticed he was fol­low­ing me. When I checked out his Tweets, I found him very self-centered. Just links to Face­book pic­tures of him, some Knorr prod­uct and recipes. If I’m going to fol­low some­one on Twit­ter (even a fic­tional char­ac­ter) then I want that per­son to be fully dimen­sional. And, Twit­ter is the per­fect medium for Salty to tell us what he’s up to since he lost the Knorr gig and the stuff he cares about. Here are a few poten­tial Saltys­Life Tweets that would bring the lit­tle fel­low to life in a funny, share­wor­thy way.

• Hydra­tion is over­rated peo­ple. Eat more salt!
• Watch­ing the Olympics live in Van­cou­ver was no fun. Just alot of shoes.
• Got ice to melt? I’m available!

Beyond that like all good Tweet­ers, Salty’s Tweets need to be more use­ful and rel­e­vant. How? By shar­ing use­ful infor­ma­tion about salt, even if it’s laced with Salty’s dis­ap­point­ment with the “pro­pa­ganda” com­ing out against him. If I was Salty’s social media men­tor I’d advise the following:

• Link to impor­tant research about Salt, like this video by Mar­ion Nes­tle (Salty Tweets “Who believes Mar­ion Nes­tle any­way. What is she like an expert or something?”)
• Talk about the health ben­e­fits of Pep­per like this arti­cle does (Salty Tweets “Look at how my so-called-friend Pep is steal­ing the limelight”)
• High­light the health ben­e­fits of salt reduc­tion (Salty Tweets “Don’t act like you don’t like bloat. Don’t believe the hype about salt reduction”)

There you go Salty, you’re no longer job­less. Now you’ve got your work cut out for you.