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Source.

Oh my god my sides, I'm actually dying right now. This might deserve an event entry, this is pretty goddamn amazing. I might even have some free time later if you want me to do it.

Oh that is cute.
This is great enough to deserve an entry.

I really liked the idea, so I had to contribute. We'll see if they respond.

(original)

Simple Question:

In Japan, there are many major companies official twitter accounts where persons in charge are freely tweeting their (Otaku) hobbies, jokes and their ordinary lives that are apparently unrelated to their business, and followers are enjoying communications with them on the social networking service. This kind of twitter accounts became to a famous method of online advertising managements several years ago. Therefore, this kind of twitter fads are quite predictable from my point of view.

Haven't Westerners web experienced this of Twitter fads yet?

Not really. It's actually rather unusual for companies' social media accounts to act like real people, more of them opting to just promote the product or at most make bad attempts at viral media (which is one reason why Denny's Tumblr is so popular, it's highly unusual in the way that it actually acts like a real Tumblr with frequency). Another reason that it's unusual is the focus on anime, as I sincerely cannot remember any mainline US company so straightfacedly embracing anime as a promotional device.

So yeah, this is very, very odd.

Haven’t Westerners web experienced this of Twitter fads yet?

Yes and no. I mean meme references occasionally happen in corporate social media, but typically are met with negative responses. You might get a shout out from say a company like maybe at&t towards tv show like say The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, but those are usually either single events or paid/mutually beneficial advertisements. Corporate Twitter accounts are generally kept pretty tied down so as to avoid negative backlash due to one's personal opinions. They pretty much only use them as Customer Support/Service fronts for a company.

I think the key thing in this event though is that Nature Valley actively supports national parks, so it's kinda a shock to see them respond so positively to anime and retweet pictures as often as they have. Anime and the wilderness don't really match up in people's heads. Same thing happened to Jet Blue and Chili's when they responded to MLP content. A good non-pony example would be what happened with Windows-tan which spawned pretty much in Japan. It's the kinda stuff you don't really see everyday here as I guess you would in the Japan-web.

@Twilitlord, @The Cute Master :3

Thanks. Indeed, it's a quite rare case that anime becomes to a conversation piece of public relation sections in western corporations.

Meanwhile, I feel intense deja vu to that user reaction because it has been already a predictable advertising strategy to invoke users self-motivated contributions to corporate branding on the social networks by friendly personality of the persons in charge. Many companies has tried this strategy and some of them got painful mistakes and severe backlash from users. So, nowadays, it's a bit outdated strategy.

A bit out of the main topic here but I'd just like to say that Internet Explorer's Inori

Despite trying to appeal to anime fans (which to be fair did strike up a bit of impact in her debut) hasn't struck the popularity goldmine that Nature Valley amassed. She has a bit of fan art here and there, but yeah nothing that garnered much attention I believe.