At every marketing event for at least the past 5 years you hear marketers telling you to use social networks in you marketing campaigns. This because you have to join the conversation, hear what everyone has to say about you, create your free fan base and most important: let your fans promote your brand for you! But they never tell you how to do that..

How to create the perfect social network site campaign? The possibilities are endless! Unfortunately the creativity hasn’t reached most marketers yet. Let’s take Facebook as an example. You don’t see a lot of brands who come up with inventive ideas. Next to paying Facebook to place a banner, most companies just create a Facebook page and hope everyone will look for them and join the page. And then they go sit and wait. Of course this won’t work. Why would I look for your page? Why would I join? What do you have to offer me?  I want to be entertained! Let’s have a look at two examples of brands who did go beyond a simple page or banner. 

Pink ribbon started a campaing to create awareness around breast cancer. They asked women to tell their friends where they like to put their handbag when they get home. The assignment was to start their status update with ‘I like it..’ and then tell where you put it. Of course you don’t say it is about your handbag! The ‘assignment’ was spread through private messages on facebook. Once you posted your ‘I like it..’ status update, of course you have to tell your female friends what it means, and ask them to do the same, by sending them the private message. Result: a lot of men confused because their female friends telling them where “they like it”, and because of that a lot of people talking about it. Buzz created! A very simple and of course free way to spread the word! I think the power of this campaign is the ‘fun’factor. It’s fun and even a little bit naughty, and.. it doesn’t scream the brand name, but still at the end it is linked to pink ribbon.
pink ribbon
 

Ikea used a totally different way to promote their brand on Facebook. They used the tagging-tool that facebook has on their foto’s. They created a facebook account for the brandmanager of the new store that needed to be promoted. At the photo page they placed pictures of different ikea showrooms. And then the fun began. If you would tag a piece of furniture in one of the pictures with your name, it would become yours. But you had to be quick because they could only gave away each piece once. A very successful campaign what only cost ikea a few pieces of furniture, nothing more, nothing less. Once people found out that they could win furniture, they started posting the ikea campaign on their profiles, and the word got spread. I think a very creative way to use facebook!

What these brands did was look at the basic functions of facebook and how people use it, and use these as a way to promote their brand. They gave the people something more than, ‘please tell everyone my brand is so great’.  Let’s hope marketers get inspired by examples like these and that we’ll see a lot more of these creative ways of using social networks in the future.

tagged with: pink ribbon, ikea, facebook, social media, Marketing

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