25.10.09
12.10.09
Success on Facebook
We looked at eight major product categories to find the brands that gained the most traction on the site, comparing their Facebook pages to those of competitors to determine which were best and worst at taking full advantage of the platform.
Some big-name players -- Coca-Cola, Best Buy, Starbucks and Microsoft among them -- are performing especially well on the social-media site. Others, however, including Burger King, Walmart, Dell and Geico, might be missing some prime opportunities to interact with their current and potential customers.
Contents:
- Consumer Packaged Goods ... Retail
- Restaurant/Food ... Technology
- Apparel ... Insurance
- Automotive ... Airline
The granddaddy of Facebook brand pages wasn't even started by the soft drink giant. Two fans created the page in August 2008 and it went on to become the top product page on the site. Perhaps Coke learned its lesson from the Diet Coke-Mentos phenomenon, when it objected to the use of its product in a viral Web video hit. This time out, instead of playing the corporate heavy, Coke brought the two consumers to company headquarters and invited them to continue to run the page with backing from Coke.Stats: 3.7 million fans; regular promotions include one that solicits videos for a shot at appearing in a Coke commercial.
Missed Opportunity... Pepsi. The company makes a disappointing showing on Facebook, given that it's a digitally and socially savvy brand. The Refresh Everything page has 250,000 fans, a fraction of rival Coke's. The company mostly uses it as a channel for pumping out updates of marketing activities.
RETAIL: BEST BUY
At a tough time for electronics outlets -- witness the demise of Circuit City -- Best Buy is pushing the envelope with social shopping. Its Facebook page doesn't just tout products, it lets visitors browse from the site and get feedback on items from Facebook friends. It's also using the site to get general feedback from its customers, sometimes to a fault.A recent post asking users what they thought of the company offering a BestBuy.com in Spanish ignited a firestorm of hostile and offensive comments. The company acted quickly by taking the post down.
Stats: 842,000 fans; one of the richest retail pages on Facebook, featuring "shop and share" and "gift ideas" applications.
Missed Opportunity... Walmart. The retailer might be the biggest on the face of the Earth, but you wouldn't know it on Facebook. The company clearly has its work cut out for it in the give and take of social media, but hiding is a dubious strategy. Its page has less than 17,000 fans and no content.
The chain has flexed its brand muscles on Facebook, running several ad campaigns to plumb its fan base, even to the point of offering free ice cream this past summer. Some say luring fans in with freebies means fleeting success, but Starbucks' fan page is growing over 3 percent per week, according to AllFacebook, putting it on track to overtake Will Smith in popularity on the site.Stats: 4.5 million fans; ice cream and pastry giveaways clearly resonate with consumers; the company's social strategy was enough for Altimeter Group to rank it the No.1 most-connected brand.
Missed Opportunity... Burger King. Not many ad icons nowadays have the appeal of Burger King's mascot, but the brand is curiously absent from the social networking platform. That's too bad because it clearly has cachet among users as evidenced by the avalanche of responses to the short-lived "Whopper sacrifice" campaign last January.
TECHNOLOGY: MICROSOFT
Unlike its nettlesome rival Apple, which is so beloved it doesn't need a Facebook fan page, Microsoft typically has to go the extra distance. The company has a sophisticated Facebook strategy with fan pages for several different product lines. This helps build focused fan bases for Internet Explorer, Windows, Surface and its MVP Award Program of product evangelists. The approach lets the behemoth act smaller.Stats: Over 300,000 fans; used the Bing page to solicit feedback on features the new search engine needs.
Missed Opportunity... Dell. Despite a concerted effort at social media, Dell hasn't cracked the Facebook code. It has about 40,000 fans who get a regular stream of product releases. What's missing is the feedback loop Dell started with its Ideastorm site in 2007.
For a brand used to playing second fiddle to big-spending rival Nike, turnabout is fair play. Adidas Originals is a Facebook powerhouse thanks to its trove of quality content and event information. The brand has a "your area" tab that populates with localized content.Stats: 2.1 million fans; posts photos and videos; updates a few times per week.
Missed Opportunity... Nike. As the ultimate passion brand, Nike would figure to be quite popular on Facebook. And it has amassed 382,000 followers. But talk about anti-social. Nike hasn't updated the page since July. Just do it, Nike.
INSURANCE: AFLAC
For some brands, fan bases are best built around characters. That's been the case for Aflac, which has attracted fans for its trademark duck's quirky updates. The brand gets the character's voice right, mixing charity pleas with offbeat takes on news from the duck's perspective.The company, seeing how far it can go, has taken the duck to Twitter where he's attracted over 3,000 followers.
Stats: 161,000 fans; mixes updates with charity pitches and contests; posts daily.
Missed Opportunity... Geico gecko. If a duck can do it, a lizard can, too. Yet the Geico gecko has never found his footing on Facebook. The page has just 6,800 fans. The lizard's droll tone doesn't carry over to the site. Instead, his updates sound a lot like the voice of a PR pro.
The automaker has lately fared better across the board than its domestic peers. It's also beating its competitors in social media, including on Facebook. Ford Mustang has built up a loyal following, and Ford is an active updater on the company's official corporate page.Stats: Over 370,000 fans on the Ford, Mustang and Fusion pages; mix of product and event information with photos and videos.
Missed Opportunity... Toyota has nearly 50,000 fans, yet it hasn't updated its page since June.
AIRLINE: SOUTHWEST
It's hard to find anyone who's a fan of air travel nowadays -- but there are plenty of them on Southwest's Facebook page, which succeeds with a personal approach. Rather than craft a brand voice, for instance, Southwest introduces "hosts" Lindsey and Christi. Frequent polling keeps interaction high. Southwest has more Facebook cachet than hotter brands like JetBlue and Virgin America.Stats: 80,000 fans; high customer engagement thanks to fun promos.
Missed Opportunity... United Airlines. Not exactly a passion brand, United Airlines could stand to have something more than an empty page with 11,000 intrepid fans.
4.9.09
Per nytimes.com...Facebook Exodus
Facebook Exodus
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.
The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.
Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life. As Facebook endeavors to be the Web’s headquarters — to compete with Google, in other words, and to make money from the information it gathers — it’s inevitable that some people would come to view it as Big Brother.
“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group, Harmsen’s crowd, grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out.
My friend Alex joined four years ago at the suggestion of “the coolest guy on the planet,” she told me in an e-mail message. For a while, they cultivated a cool-planet online gang. But then Scrabulous was shut down, someone told her she was too old for Facebook, her teenage stepson seemed to be losing his life to it and she found the whole site crawling with mercenaries trying to sell books and movies. “If I am going to waste my time on the Internet,” she concluded, “it will be playing in online backgammon tournaments.”
Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.” Something happened to this drip painting that he won’t discuss. He said, “Postings that seem private can scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”
That friend was not the only Facebook dissenter who was reticent about specifics. Many seem to have just lost their appetite for it: they just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny. Some ex-users seemed shaken, even heartbroken, by their breakups with Facebook. “I primarily left Facebook because I was wasting so much time on it,” my friend Caroline Harting told me by e-mail. “I felt fairly detached from my Facebook buddies because I rarely directly contacted them.” Instead, she felt as if she stalked them, spending hours a day looking at their pages without actually saying hello.
But then came the truly weird part: “Facebook was stalking me,” Harting wrote. One day, on another Web site, she responded to an invitation to rate a movie she saw. The next time she logged on to Facebook, there was a message acknowledging that she had made the rating. “I didn’t appreciate being monitored so closely,” she wrote. She quit.
Julie Klam, a writer and prolific and eloquent Facebook updater, said in her own e-mail message, “I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it’s kids getting tired of a new toy.” Klam, who still posts updates to Facebook but now prefers Twitter for professional networking, added, “Facebook is good for finding people, but by now the novelty of that has worn off, and everyone’s been found.” As of a few months ago, she told me, Facebook “felt dead.”
Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique
15.8.09
Gap | Born To Fit
The Facebook hub for Gap's "Born to Fit" 1969 premium jeans launch campaign.
The site delves into Gap's 1969 denim collection with a virtual runway and fit spotlight that show 360-degree views of the various jean styles and outfit suggestions, accompanied by commentary from designer Patrick Robinson.
Also featured are videos from Gap models and actors appearing in Gap ads. Users are also invited to upload their photos into a gallery with their own "born to" looks and share their own styles through Polyvore, an online image-mixing app.See more of the 1969 campaign here.Full Credits
- Agency:
- AKQA, San Francisco
- Client:
- Gap
- Agency:
- Laird + Partners
Category
10.8.09
How to Use Facebook for Professional Networking
How do you use Facebook? Is it to connect with long forgotten friends or share fun tidbits of your personal life with extended family? If that’s you, well… you are not alone. A great majority of Facebook users maintain Facebook profiles exclusively for personal networking and do not feel Facebook is appropriate for professional networking. I disagree with this approach. Facebook social networking experience should be what you want to make of it and more and more professionals turn to Facebook to maintain professional and/or business presence in addition to a personal one.
What’s wrong with using LinkedIn for my professional networking?
Nothing really. LinkedIn is definitely the channel of choice for professional networking. However, Facebook continues to grow and mature making its security and sharing options more and more robust. All this to ensure that you have choices and your social networking experience is precisely what YOU want to make of it. While you won’t post pictures of your family vacation on LinkedIn, a balanced mix of professional information along with a limited and tasteful glimpse into your personal life could prove to make Facebook the new LinkedIn for those who what to use Facebook for both.
Charlene Kingston in her blog post advocates keeping two separate profiles on Facebook: your personal profile for friends and family and your professional one by creating a “fan page.” This works great for small businesses where the owner of the business has the authority to set up and control the fan page. What if you work in a big company and do not have that luxury? You can still use your Facebook profile as a professional networking tool as long as your follow some basic rules.
Polish your Facebook profile for professional networking
Let’s start with some basics which includes using your real and full name in your profile. This is not only important to ensure that you are easily found on Facebook and on Google when your profile is indexed but also to keep the profile professional. Don’t use nicknames, fictional names or maiden names unless that’s the name you are using in your professional life. Remember to secure your facebook vanity domain name to make it easy to direct others to your Facebook profile with a clean and easy to type in URL.
Also, don’t forget to include your photo in your profile. No avatars, no images of kids or wedding photos please. A simple, tasteful head shot of you will do the trick.
Include detailed information about your area of expertise, your company where you work including website and any other social media channels where corporate presence is maintained. Your contact information and all of your social media channels you maintain presence on should also be listed.
Adjust your security settings
What might be appropriate to share with your family and close friends might not be appropriate to display or share with your colleagues or professional contacts. Don’t just assume the default security settings will keep you out of trouble. Take the time to go through each link in the Privacy area and make adjustments. Nick O’Neal has a great blog posts that will guide you to choose wisely when adjusting your privacy settings.
Consider setting up friends’ groups to control what information is viewable by whom. The groups are also IMPORTANT because according to Facebook you soon will have precise control of what gets shared with whom on the level of individual wall post. You will be able to direct your weekend planning posts to just your family or friends and send posts about the latest whitepaper you’ve read to just your colleagues and professional contacts. Having your friends divided into logical groups will make appropriate sharing a snap. Here is more info. about Facebook’s new privacy settingsincluding the timeline for rolling this enhancement out (courtesy of the Marketing Pilgrim blog).
Add apps selectively
There are tons of applications available for download, but it does not mean that you should go for quantity rather than quality. Yes, you can send virtual gifts to people, play games or display love quotes, but aside from being great time wasters these types of activities will greatly diminish the quality of your profile. Opt for socializing with others through conversations, asking and answering questions, sharing resources and advice rather than playing games.
Join groups related to your business interests
Similarly to LinkedIn, finding and joining quality Facebook groups opens up great opportunities to network with professionals who are interested in what you are interested in and who will pay attention if you display your subject matter expertise there.
Not sure how to find groups? Search for them and see what groups your colleagues have joined. If you find that there is no group that matches your expertise create one, but before you do that please think about your own commitment to maintaining the group. There are a lot of dead groups on Facebook. Don’t let yours be one of them.
Interact with your Facebook friends and group members
There is nothing more powerful than personal interaction. Facebook excels at it and gives you lots of opportunities to engage. Remember though to separate your personal posts from your professional content.
For your professional network interactions consider the following activities
- Asking/answering questions or starting a new discussion thread
- Sharing a resource on your group’s wall particularly articles you have written or articles that quote you
- Commenting on a status message of your colleague
- Sharing a list of your favorite industry books or online resources
- Inviting others or accepting invitation to professional networking events
But don’t attempt to send bulk commercial or self-serving messages to all your friends. Maintaining a professional presence is about finding and developing relationships and not spamming people.
20.7.09
Free Starbucks ice cream for Facebook users
Facebook users can already send each other real flowers, candy and drinks. Now they can add ice cream to that list as well—free, no less—thanks to a new promotion from Starbucks and Unilever.
Beginning this week and extending through July 19, Starbucks and partner Unilever are giving away coupons for more than 800 free pints of the newly launched Starbucks Ice Cream on Facebook every hour. US-based users of the social networking site need only visit the special promotion page on Facebook at the beginning of any hour and be ready to click quickly before that hour's set of coupons is gone. If they succeed in claiming one, they can choose to send it to any friend on or off Facebook, or they can elect instead to treat themselves. Either way, the coupon can then be redeemed for the Starbucks Ice Cream flavour of the recipient's choice: Caramel Macchiato, Mocha Frappuccino, Java Chip Frappuccino or Coffee. There is a limit of one coupon per household; those who fail at first to get one can keep trying, as a total of some 20,000 free coupons will be given away each day before the contest's end.
One part Facebook perk and one part tryvertising, the wisely targeted Starbucks Ice Cream promotion is sure to win many a fan for the new ice cream, particularly since there's almost certainly a significant overlap among devotees of the two brands. Pick the right audience, give away ice cream in July, and it's hard to go wrong! ;-) (Related: Food blogger turned purveyor & intermediary.)
Website: www.starbucksicecream.com — apps.facebook.com/starbucksicecream
Spotted by: Brandweek via Raymond Kollau
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