Hershey's House Parties - A Lesson in Tapping an Offline/Online Groundswell

When experiential marketing, or WOM, or buzz, or whatever you want to call it works...it can work big time. Take Hershey's who has been having Bliss house parties. According to PROMO, looks like they're working - more than 129,000 people have attended the parties, plus 22,000 digital photos and 15,000 blog entries. Yowsers.

I'm just finishing up Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Good book for the most part, but they don't talk about the offline component that much - how an offline event like Hershey's Bliss parties can drive blog posts galore and social network buzz.

Check out the stories at CandySnob here and here.