Reddit Case Study: New Belgium Brewing’s Snapshot Wheat

This reddit case study post focuses on New Belgium Brewing’s Snapshot Wheat campaign, which complimented the intelligence of reddit and sparked an invite for New Belgium to do an AMA on r/homebrewing.

Contents
1. Snapshot Wheat
2. Complimenting And Collaborating With Reddit
3. New Belgium AMA

1. Snapshot Wheat

In early 2014, New Belgium Brewing released its Snapshot Wheat beer, which was accompanied by an interactive map that users could be featured on by using the #SnapshotWheat hashtag on Twitter and Instagram. Screen Shot 2014-04-22 at 9.19.23 AM

There are also themed weekly photo challenges (e.g. photos with your pet; photos of your happy place) on the #SnapChallenge hashtag, which gives users a chance to be featured on the New Belgium site and beer bottles.

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2. Complimenting And Collaborating With Reddit

Instead of asking reddit to submit photos to #SnapshotWheat and #SnapChallenge, New Belgium instead asked redditors to help come up with topics for the weekly #SnapChallenge. This was a compliment to reddit’s collective intelligence, in that New Belgium trusted the community to help craft their marketing campaign into something brand-relevant and engaging. In New Belgium’s own words, “We don’t need your help, be we certainly want it — because we like you, and you’re smart, and that Lil’ Jon AMA was awesome.” (That last part refers to a very silly AMA with the rapper Lil’ Jon in February.)

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The comments from redditors were overall positive and relevant, and New Belgium’s community manager Nic responded to many submissions, and even tried to help users improve their submitted photo challenge ideas.

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New Belgium’s community manager Nic liked one idea so much that he instantly made it that week’s challenge: “I love this idea. How about we make it the snap challenge this week? Gimme 15 minutes and we’ll have it live at newbelgium.com/snapshotwheat.” Screen Shot 2014-04-22 at 8.07.29 AM

3. New Belgium AMA

The conversation also sparked an invite for New Belgium to do an AMA on the Homebrewing subreddit, which is a sign that the reddit community valued New Belgium’s promoted presence enough to request them to partake in an organic, community-generated reddit experience.

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The AMA occurred on 4/8/14 and was extremely positively received, generating a 90% approval rating (meaning a 9:1 upvote to downvote ratio). It featured one of New Belgium’s head brewers, Andy Mitchell, in addition to their community manager Nic.

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