Crystal Lindell

I’m guessing it would come as no surprise to you that as a writer for Candy Industry magazine, I typically have chocolate for breakfast. I’m also guessing you would not, in fact, be shocked to learn that I usually have another little piece after my lunch to help digest my food. Or that I always have a chocolate in the evening before bed because it helps me sleep.

That’s literally part of my job.

I’m also guessing you also wouldn’t be surprised that — as  a woman — I’m hard-wired to consume chocolate. You know us crazy females and our love of chocolate. We’d bath in the stuff if we could just get it to come out of the faucet at a consistent rate.

Which is why I’m not at all taken aback that a new survey from Skinny Cow Candy reports that more than half of women feel life would be, “a lot less fun without chocolate.”

Umm, duh.

If anything, I’m astounded that the result wasn’t something like “more than 98% of women feel life would be a lot less fun without chocolate. The other 2% are in a coma.”

However, the report also showed that 42% of women couldn’t go longer than a week without chocolate. And see, that’s what made me think the survey was flawed. Because I have never met a woman in my life who can go a whole seven days without chocolate, much less 58% of the women I’ve ever met.

So, I decided to go on over to the Skinny Cow Facebook page and see what the whole survey business was all about.

While there, I was prompted to, “Take a quick quiz to see where you land on my LOL-O-Meter.”

Now, I have no idea what the heck an “LOL-O-Meter” is, but like any self-respecting female, I love taking quizzes to find out how I compare to other people. Who could forget: “How romantic is your boyfriend?” Or the informative, “How much do you really care about the environment?” And of course, my favorite, “What does your desk say about your creativity level?” (Hint: Messy is a good thing).

So I clicked through, and in the process signed over my Facebook soul to Skinny Cow’s app.

The questions weren’t exactly like the survey the company’s been promoting in their press release about more than half of women believing life would be less fun without chocolate, but they were fun.

Hmm, have I ever, “laughed until I snorted?” Yep. What activity do my girlfriends and I spend the most time doing? That would be “having heart-to-heart talks and lending a shoulder.” And, What’s life’s greatest pleasure? That would be chocolate, of course.

Things got interesting though when the survey also cleverly worked in some of my personal Facebook data, asking me which of my personal photos makes me laugh thinking about when it was taken and which of my three Facebook friends would make me laugh the most on a road trip.

In the end, I was told I was “Genuinely Funny!” (which I will be sure to pass along to my Editor-In-Chief Bernie Pacyniak) and I got a coupon for some Skinny Cow candy.

All this is to say that Skinny Cow rocks at social media marketing. They aren’t just asking you to “like” their candy. They’re giving you gushing compliments like “You’re genuinely funny” and then posting it to your Facebook wall with a photo of their cow mascot. They’re indulging every woman’s love of self-analysis with fun quizzes. They’re incorporating personal photos and making you associate your friends with their product in some weird, subconscious ways. And they’re using lots of pink.

In short, any candy company doing any less with its social media marketing is getting left behind.