Manitoba Pork Council reports an internet based holiday promotion has dramatically increased the number of hits on the recipe pages of its web site.

As part of its 12 Days of Christmas Holiday Giveaway the public was invited to register through Manitoba Pork Council's web site to win one of 12 one hundred dollar fresh pork packs.

Susan Riese, the manager of public relations and consumer marketing programs with Manitoba Pork Council explains the contest was designed to get the public thinking about pork as a great alternative at Christmas.

Susan Riese-Manitoba Pork Council:

The contest was open to the public.

It was meant for our target demographic, ideally mostly women aged sort of 25 to 54.

Of course men could enter as well so just a general contest to engage the public and get them thinking about pork and then we wanted to encourage them to go to our web site to view our holiday recipe page and actually use the pork products that were in the pack to create some of the recipes that we were suggesting that were festive and kind of geared toward the holiday season.

We find that, for the most part, our recipe pages do get more probably views than any other part of our web site.

In this particular case with the contest we saw our web site hits go through the roof into the thousands and we had about 890 people enter the contest which is huge for us.

We've never really done anything like this before so the numbers seem really positive but it did generate an incredible number of views to our recipe pages in the hopes too that people would look at all of the other information that we have to offer, whether it's information about how pigs are raised or information about the industry.

It's a good way to get them to our web site.

By  Bruce Cochrane