My name is Tim Malbon, and I am a Soreen Addict

I’ve been meaning to post thanks and share my exciting Soreen unboxing moment. Yup, *amazingly*, the good people who look after Soreen’s PR sent me a hamper of malty goodies for my birthday recently.

Yes, they sent it addressed to “@Malbonster”. Nice touch.

I say “amazingly” because along with some other fans of ‘the dark loave of malty fruitfulness’ (notably @SaulPims) I initiated an experiment…

…in what we called ‘brandstalking’ a little over a year ago. We decided to ‘stalk’ Soreen on Twitter. Motivated by a genuine love of the curious dark brown malty loaf, and a little mischief, we have been tweeting hard about Soreen – and not always in the way Soreen’s marketing people would have necessarily endorsed.

The idea behind brandstalking wasn’t too serious, but I was interested in what happens when consumers sort of take the marketing into their own hands, and intrigued to see how much further you could go in promoting a brand that wasn’t your client.

I say “genuine love” because *I do really love this stuff*. It tastes like nothing else and I am a malt-fiend. But it also has this really curious and, frankly funny, texture and density. Even as a child (usually as I ate shed-loads of the stuff, usually for tea on a Sunday as we watched Howard’s Way and The Wonder Years as a family). My obsession is based on it being Funny + tasty + unique. Oh yeah, and my warped and infantile sense of humour.

A lot of people think we work for Soreen as a result of the sheer volume of tweetage emanating from the Made by Many group. We don’t. I want to make that really clear. Quite honestly, considering some of the dark things we’ve tweeted about ‘the loave’ ver the past 12 months I’m a little surprised that anyone might seriously have thought we were officially sanctioned to promote Soreen like this. Here’s a taster:

Not forgetting our suggestion of a Lord Of The Rings tie-up and limited edition:

And the dark, quasi-religious, Wicker Man stuff:

I’d like to thank Soreen, and the people at Tangerine PR, who have been such great sports. I hope we’ve had some positive impact and it’s been great tracking #soreen for the past year (a permanent column in my Tweetdeck for all that time), and to see how much more sophisticated their use of Twitter has become. I’d be really fascinated to discover of any of this stuff has had an effect.

Do let us know if we can ‘help’ any further.

Many thanks to all of the awesomeists who have joined in, notably Rick Liebling (@eyecube) – with whom Stuart and I spent half an hour in Manhattan Bar discussing ways of selling Soreen to the US market. Soreen, take note, Rick believes you can make it big in the US. Yours is the malty loaf they have been waiting for. See below for pic from our hotel bathroom showing how we got several ‘nine-bars’ of Soreen into the States. Use your imagination.