Facebook: Take a leaf out of Bebo’s book. It’s not all about Social Ads.
Posted on 13. Nov, 2007 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Engagement Marketing
Marketing on social networks is less about Social Ad(vertising) and more about Engagement Marketing.
The former, a word play on ‘Social Ads’, is about targeting marketing messages to users on Facebook through the news feeds of their friends.
Engagement marketing, on the other hand, is about engaging a user with brand/marketing experiences that makes such an impression that they willingly share it with their friends.
This approach has been used successfully by global sports and fashion brands on the ‘other two’ social networks, Bebo and MySpace.
This post is a follow up to Saturday’s open letter to Facebook in which I suggested they considered introducing a monthly subscription option that offered users averse to sending and receiving Social Ads a way to opt out.
Disclosure: Real Fresh TV works with a number of online publishers to provide content owners a one stop digital distribution service for publishing multimedia content online. Our publisher partners include YouTube, Bebo, Brightcove, Veoh and Azureus.
This post came about because I was mulling over how Facebook Social Ads would work in principle if the advertiser took the time to ‘fan’ me first.
This got me thinking about which ‘kinds’ of advertisers I would consider ‘fanning’ in return and what an advertiser stood to gain from me as a ‘fan’. The distinction is subtle. The implication is that if you become a ‘fan’ of mine, I’ll strongly consider becoming a ‘fan’ of yours in return.
For those completely lost by all this talk of ‘fanning’, I use the phrase copiously because Facebook’s newly launched Social Ads emphasise Facebook users becoming ‘fans’ of businesses and brands on the site in much the same way users send and accept ‘friend’ requests on the site.
The term used is ‘Fan-sumer’.
All this got me wondering why none of the main sports wear brands were involved in the launch of Facebook’s Social Ads. Where’s Nike? Adidas? Puma? Not even Puma? ;o)
And the complete absence of fashion/clothing brands, what’s that about?
You’d think G-Unit Clothing Co (50 Cent’s clothing range) would at least be all over Facebook. They have over 7000 friends on MySpace.
Sports wear and fashion companies spend more money in branding each quarter than I dare think about. Why aren’t any of them spending some on Facebook?
There are precedents to show they spend money on social networks: Adidas successfully ‘leveraged’ MySpace for a World Cup promotion in 2006 and Nike’s recent Nike Dance Clash on Bebo attracted scores of women interested in dance in the UK. Why aren’t they trying out Social Ads on Facebook?
Hmm, perhaps these companies are adopting a wait-and-see approach with Social Ads.
Judging by initial reactions to Facebook’s announcement of Social Ads around the web, a lot of people think that supplanting natural, word of mouth recommendation between friends with ‘trusted advertising referrals’ using the ’social graph’ is somewhat counter intuitive to how effective marketing works in real life.
Successful sports wear and fashion brands recognise that effective marketing is about encouraging a consumer to express positive association with a brand organically; through what they express of themselves by choosing and using the brand’s products.
Organic branding is the purchase of:
- football boots that show off respect for David Beckham
- a roll neck jumper that conjures images of Tiger Woods
- Chanel perfume that flaunts the wearer as a Keira Knightley fan
The leading sports and apparel brands appeal to this need for people to associate with people they respect through their purchases first. They attempt to ‘fan’ you by expressing ‘fanatical’ interest in things you are already a fan of.
The really good sports wear brands also recognise that appealing to young people online involves engagement marketing that puts this organic branding front and centre in an advertising campaign.
The successful Nike Dance Clash campaign on Bebo is a fitting case study.
Nike’s PR refer to Nike Dance Clash as “a competition to unearth the best female urban dancer in London”.
My understanding is that it was designed to promote the Nike Woman Dance Collection clothing range amongst young women in the UK and to encourage interest in dance as an exercise activity.
Attracting women and girls from all over the country to events held predominantly in London, the competition ran over a period of weeks in August on Bebo and started with aspiring dancers within the Bebo community travelling to auditions and competing to win places in the main Final event in round after round of ‘dance off’ competitions.
Eventually, 44 videos of the dancers that got through the initial stages were put up to the public vote on Bebo with the community whittling down the winners to 6 women who then faced off in the ultimate dance off showdown in Cirque, Leicester Square, London, in front of a panel of some of the world’s most elite dancers.
The eventual winner, Clara Bajado, earned the prestigious title of Nike Dance Athlete and won £10,000 to help develop her dance career.
I reckon Nike invested in creating and running the Nike Dance Clash campaign not just because it would sell ‘product’ but because it created enthusiastic fans that would take the experience away with them, evangelise it to their friends and plan and dream about winning the next Nike Dance Clash.
The happy by-product of creating new customers came naturally. These serious dance fans are probably more likely to express a preference for the Nike Woman Dance Collection clothing range because in their minds, “who else understands their love for dance better than Nike, who organizes brilliant events like the Nike Dance Clash?”
The Nike case study proves that engagement marketing can work very well online because it fuses natural, word-of-mouth recommendation offline with real life online activity amongst fans of a brand. The Bebo community actively got involved with the Nike Dance Clash page on Bebo, leaving messages of support for the competitors and posting congratulatory notes to the winners. It worked both ways, with winner Clara, leaving a touching message of thanks to all that voted for her.
How does Social Ads stack up in comparison?
Well, despite the backlash against Facebook’s Social Ads, I still think the idea itself is worthy of note.
The execution needs a little work though.
For instance, the idea that I would sign up to be a fan of Blockbuster and share this with my friends in return for a discount off future DVD rentals is absurd.
Why should I when I can bet you I’d be presented with the same discount in a Sunday newspaper, positioned alongside adverts about time share holidays and Christmas shopping vouchers and completely overshadowed by the Annie Lennox album giveaway that inspired the purchase of the paper in the first place ;o).
I made most of the preceding paragraph up, by the way, but if Annie Lennox is releasing an album and making it available for free to readers of a UK newspaper, I will convince my entire street to buy it that Sunday.
That is what fans do.
Now back to Social Ads.
The upshot is that if Blockbuster becomes my fan on Facebook by offering me something I cannot buy, like an experience through which I could express my love for soppy action films like ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’.
This could be a themed fancy dress film event featuring film star look-alikes, for example, I’d gladly promote said event through my news feed and turn up to it (yes, I’d also pay good money for tickets) and forward videos of it to my friends.
Therein lies the rub. Engagement marketing is effective because it is people intensive, it involves a lot of ‘expensive’, people investment.
Social Ads, on the other hand, seem so easy.
Set up a business page on Facebook (known as a Fan page), add a few videos and pictures to it, create a cute app people might want to add to their pages, insert ‘trusted referral’ promotional messages into a couple hundred user news feeds and hey… your brand is the hottest thing on the hottest social network on earth and only in a matter of minutes!
The whole idea overlooks a simple flaw.
The very news feeds that are designed to promote a brand or business can be used to mercilessly tear it apart.
God help your brand if you inflame a well connected ‘fansumer’ on Facebook. Within minutes, your carefully crafted messages will be reduced to tatters and the community will band together to vilify you.
Why wouldn’t they? What’s in it for them to promote you anyway?
So, for brands and businesses diving into Social Ads and creating Fan pages on Facebook, I urge you to make sure your campaigns are well thought out and that they satisfy the very basic human need for people to talk about products and services that allow them to express themselves in some way.
Make sure you invest considerable time and resources in the ‘people’ side of running social ads because successful social ads will have a strong engagement marketing element to them.
Make sure you have ‘real people’ responding to messages written on your Facebook Fan pages wall, ‘real people’ communicating your brand in groups on Facebook.
Otherwise, as they say round these parts, you are on a hiding to nothing. On the social graph, there is nowhere to hide.
Related posts:
- 75% of UK Facebook Users Would Not Purchase a Product or Service from a Brand’s Profile page
- Future of Social Advertising: Branded Content and Branded Social Media
- Hey Facebook! I’d Gladly Pay Not To See Any Social Ads
- The Future of Social Advertising: Social Media and Social Experiences
- A Fresh Beginning… and Facebook is worth $15bn and you know it.
A great way to promote products! A perfume named after a basketball genius before had its sales shooting up! this is what all sellers need to do but unfortunately, some of them can’t afford to pay up endorsements made by popular figures but it really helps! If they can have somebody who’s fat and very popular and endorse a diet program called Fat Loss 4 Idiots , and that person has lost pounds, it would be a wonderful strategy, y’know what i’m sayin’?