Sara Lee on Facebook.

Land O’Frost has started its own community Web site, Land O’Moms.

You’ve heard of Meetup, the online social networking portal? A couple of consumer marketers are bringing out campaigns that could be called “meatups.”

The brands, Land O’Frost and Sara Lee Deli, both sell lunch meats, cold cuts and other sliced-meat products. Coincidentally, they are both introducing campaigns that are centered on the social media.

Or, more likely, it is no coincidence. More advertisers of prosaic household staples are adding social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to the tactics they use to reach current and potential customers.

Initially, it was marketers of technology and telecommunications products that tried out the social media, reflecting how their consumers were among the first into that realm. Now, as familiarity with the social media becomes more mainstream, companies like Clorox, Coca-Cola, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble are arriving there — not to mention purveyors of bologna, ham and turkey.

For Land O’Frost, the campaign represents the company’s initial foray into the social media. There is a community called Land O’Moms, housed on a Web site, where consumers can exchange recipes and parenting advice, download coupons, read articles from women’s magazines and communicate with popular mommy bloggers.

Land O’Frost and the campaign also have presences on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

For Sara Lee Deli, a unit of the consumer products giant Sara Lee, its campaign represents the second stage of an initiative that began last fall, known as “Mama Saga.” The focus of the sequel, “Saga Solver,” is again the brand’s Facebook fan page , where visitors will be able to watch humorous video clips and interact with experts in fields like food preparation and family advice.

The videos can also be watched on YouTube and, among other places, a channel on Metacafe . And Sara Lee Deli also has a Twitter account.

“It’s a whole revolution,” David Van Eekeren, president at Land O’Frost in Lansing, Ill., says of the social media. “We need to be part of it, obviously.”

Land O’Frost, started by Mr. Van Eekeren’s grandfather, is a company that only two years ago “decided to step into the television world,” he says, to augment its advertising in print, coupon inserts and in stores as well as on radio.

But with its “prime consumers, moms,” increasingly devoted to the social media, he adds, it was time for Land O’Frost to figure out how to join in.

In discussions with executives at Henson Consulting, a public relations agency in Wheaton, Ill., “they told us we should be tying all we’re doing” to a single Web site, Mr. Van Eekeren says, where mothers “can come and spend time and we can engage them on a different level.”

The idea, he adds, is “to be a resource” to them and “not a sales pitch,” the better to “build loyalty from a product perspective.”

That “takes a little swallowing,” Mr. Van Eekeren acknowledges, recalling that when he looked at an early version of the Land O’Moms Web site “I said, ‘Where’s Land O’Frost?’ ”

He soon called a “time out,” he says, realizing that “we don’t want to be the commercial splashed in someone’s face.” So landomoms.com was designed “with only one link to our brand page,” he adds, which is landofrost.com.

The home page for Land O’Moms describes it as “a great community for moms brought to you by Land O’Frost.” There are sections devoted to topics that include recipes, “moms like me,” children (Land O’Kids, of course) and youth sports, a favorite corporate cause of Land O’Frost.

“This brand is recognizing what a lot of other brands are recognizing,” says Kathleen Henson, president and chief executive at Henson Consulting. “It’s important to reach moms online because that’s where moms are right now.”

“I’m a mom of five,” she adds, “and I spend a lot of time online.”

And reaching mothers online and through the social media means “reaching them in ways that are way more engaging than direct advertising,” Ms. Henson says.

That is where the mommy bloggers come in, she adds, because they are “credible as authentic voices” and also “have followers who will be talking and Tweeting” about Land O’Moms.

There are three bloggers taking part in landomoms.com as “brand ambassadors” for Land O’Frost. They are Jennifer James, the founder of the Mom Bloggers Club; Rachel Matthews, who writes a blog called A Southern Fairytale and has worked for brands like Old Navy and Velveeta; and Audrey McClelland, a founder of the blogMomGenerations.com who has worked for brands like Hanes, Hasbro and Johnson & Johnson.

“I thought this was exactly the thing as a busy working mom that spoke to me,” Ms. McClelland, who has four sons, says of landomoms.com.

“Every mom has that common thing: we have to feed our families,” she adds.

Ms. McClelland says she also appreciates Land O’Frost as “a family-owned company run by a mom,” referring to Mr. Van Eekeren’s mother, Donna, who is chairwoman and chief executive.

Ms. McClelland’s first post for Land O’Moms is about milestones in a child’s life like “being off a bottle,” “sleeping through the night” and getting “the big boy bed,” the latter just achieved by her next-youngest son, Benjamin.

Mr. Van Eekeren estimates the cost of the new Web site is in six figures, including costs like compensating the mommy bloggers. But that total could change.

Land O’Frost is offering the first visitors to landomoms.com, which went live last Monday, an opportunity to download a $2 coupon for Land O’Frost products. Plans called for giving away up to 25,000 coupons — but they were all gone by Wednesday.

The amount was then doubled, to 50,000, but the additional coupons were soon gone, too. So as of this week, the amount was raised again, to 75,000.

“Our youth sports program started out as a six-figure cost,” Mr. Van Eekeren says, “and it’s now up to seven.”

For every person who signs up for the Land O’Frost Facebook or Twitter accounts, the company will donate a dollar to the youth sports program, which helps Little League teams.

Other agencies that work for Land O’Frost include two based in Atlanta, the Benson Company, for print ad creative, and Langston Communications, for promotions.

The return of Sara Lee Deli to the social media, scheduled to begin on Monday, is being handled by O’Malley Hansen Communications in Chicago, the same agency that handled the campaign the first time around.

Again, O’Malley Hansen has brought in Second City Communications in Chicago — the business-services arm of the famous Second City comedy theater — to create the video clips that are the centerpiece of the effort.

Part 2 is on its way because Part 1 “exceeded our expectations” in reaching the target audience, says Jonathan Drake, business unit general manager and vice president for Sara Lee Deli in Downers Grove, Ill., which is mothers ages 35 to 54.

“We had over 2.3 or 2.4 million views of the videos on Metacafe alone” last fall, Mr. Drake says, “and about 74 percent of those who watched the videos watched all the way.”

And the Sara Lee Deli Facebook page attracted 23,000 fans, he adds.

“Now we want to take the next step,” Mr. Drake says, by bringing in experts to help provide information of interest to mothers in three phases, each to last about six weeks.

The first phase, in February and March, will be about food preparation, helping “the mom who wants to feed her family better,” he adds. The second phase, in April and May, will be about how to better organize kitchens, shopping trips and other aspects of everyday life.

And the third phase, in June and July, will be about family time, pegged to the summer vacations for schoolchildren.

Some of those subjects may seem far afield for a brand of cold cuts, but the results of consumer research “more than give us permission to play in” those areas, says Paula Shikany, marketing director for Sara Lee Deli.

The humorous approach of the campaign is intended to assist the brand in that outreach. For instance, in one of the first two videos — there are to be six in the second phase of the campaign — a disorganized mother goes through her daughter’s lunch bag and finds that the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she had prepared was uneaten.

The mother also finds in the bag the note she wrote her daughter, which prompts her to recommend including a note with lunch because it “lets them know you’re thinking of them, even when you’re not.”

In a second video clip, two women chat about the difficulties of insuring variety in the meals they prepare for their families.

“Each kid wants a different kind of sandwich,” one woman says. “It’s not my job.”

After both videos are finished, a message from Sara Lee Deli appears onscreen, urging viewers to “help solve your mama saga” with the advice to be found on the brand’s Facebook page.

“It’s really incredible to the extent all demographics, especially moms in the 25- to 45-year-old age range, rely on social media to enhance their lives,” says Todd Hansen, principal at O’Malley Hansen.

“It’s a big challenge for marketers to figure how to participate in these forms of communication that moms go to by choice,” he adds, “in a way they don’t find off-putting or annoying.”

That led Mr. Hansen — a self-described active participant in the improvisational comedy scene in Chicago in the 1990s — to Second City Communications because, he says, “there’s a sensibility present” in improvisational comedy that “is perfect for social media.”

Tom Yorton, chief executive at Second City Communications, describes it as helping marketers by using humor “to get to the truth” about their brands and products. Among the other marketers with which Second City Communications has worked, he lists CareerBuilder.com, ConAgra, Heineken, McDonald’s and Procter & Gamble.

“This is a really, really fun project,” Mr. Yorton says of the “Saga Solver” campaign, which is intended to “put something out there for moms that they will find compelling, funny and rings true.”

In improvisation, “the characters are grounded in reality,” he adds. “For us, the ‘funny’ is always about holding a mirror up to the situation,” and in this instance it is a moment in life “moms will recognize.”