Not too long ago Mentos had launched a campaign through an interactive site mentoshelpline.com. If you have been a regular watblog reader since the last 6-8 months or so then you would have surely read our rave review of mentoshelpline interactive site. Even internationally mentos has been very innovative in their use of social media. We had covered their international mentos intern campaign as well earlier.

Now the guys at mentos have not limited their thought process after tasting success with the mentoshelpline campaign. They have gone ahead an launched something known as the mentosfriendsline!!

Mentosfriendsline is nothing but a blogging platform where the you can “Unload your Mind”. I discovered this site when i was browsing through technorati by clicking on a banner ad. I guess the mentos guys were targetting bloggers like myself. The blogs can be categorized into categories like cricket, entertainment, travel, love, work, college, civic and random. A clear signal that they seem to be targetting the youth.

Product/Feature wise there is nothing exceptional bout Mentosfriendsline but one has to give it to the mentos guys to have the brains and the initiative to extend the helpline concept from something like a one time gimmick viral to something like friendsline which is trying to be more of a hangout (a la sunsilkgangofgirls.com which we have analysed before).

I foresee many brands (especially the non transactional in nature i.e. non financial) adopting this approach of social media + online advertising = branding/brand engagement.

This approach will surely attract lots of non lead based branding/engagement oriented advertising to the online advertising world. What remains to be seen is whether the same online advertising agencies and brand managers can scale a level higher by taking this short term engagement (social media + online advertising model) to a longer term engagement (purely social media model in the longer run) by adding real value & conversations around the brand than just vying for brand recall by attracting eyeballs through online advertising.

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