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At the first glance this promotional campaign for Fazer Oululainen Jälkiuuninappi bread might seem like any other boring promotional campaign for everyday consumer products. I first ran into this on Facebook and after partially unintentional closer inspection it proved out to be rather inspiring.
Instead of hiring seasoned Promo-Professionals to force consumers to try this new (?) product they simply shipped the promo-products to carefully selected retail locations and adviced consumers to go pick them up free of charge. This was done with targeted facebook ads and a campaign site with more info on the schedules and locations.
Another inspirational thing in this campaign was that it drives consumers to several directions. It's possible to run into this ghost-promo in store, pick up the product and check out the campaign site later on via mobile/desktop.
And people who don't click banners (or click but don't have the time to go to browse campaign sites) will still be aware of the in-store promo as long as they see the initial ads on facebook.
I was going to K-Supermarket Kamppi anyway and didn't even actively remember the facebook ad I saw earlier, but when I noticed the stack of products with no price sign (while I was actually looking for the competitors product) I instantly remembered the ad and picked up the product, whilst feeling a bit more clever than the consumers next to me unaware of the promotion..
Key learnings from this Finnish grocery promo: 1) Facebook Ads can be used to send a message / increase awareness - you don't always have to get the consumer to click 2) Giving consumers several options where to proceed from the initial stage of traffic driving can increase campaign efficiency 3) Creating a promo without using any promo personnel worked perfectly with this product/setting 4) You can make the consumer feel clever by not giving all the information out on a silver platter.
The light gray lines of text below most facebook status updates are more important than most people realise. They present the device and/or application used to create the post. Through which handheld one average facebook user posts doesn't really make a huge difference, but what happens if the poster happens to have 25M followers or if everyone starts to pay attention to what devices they post on.
Developers of some Social Media applications have already done their homework on this topic. For example the social web-browser Rockmelt always gets its name & logo presented when it is used to posting on Facebook, which creates great ambient marketing for the service especially if influential people use the software to post user-engaging things.
In one of the groundbreaking studies on online viral marketing by (Subramajani & Rajagopalan, 2003) four different Viral Marketing Initiatives were identified:
While Rockmelt presented above is viral mainly through targeted recommendation (as the fact that posting has been done via Rockmelt doesn't add any value to the receivers), some services have already taken it even further.
WhoSay is a service that has integrated authenticating the medium of the message into it's core value proposition: WhoSay is a service that helps artists, athletes and iconic personalities connect with their fans. When you see someone posting via WhoSay, you'll know that it's real, authentic messages, photos and videos coming from your favorite people. And the list of celebrities using the invite-only service is already impressive. WhoSay provides value for the fans too, as it authenticates the content coming from celebrities and makes it easy & ad-free for them to view.
And you can't claim that people wouldn't pay attention to what devices others use to post in Social Media. I tested that after a recent phone update and a post that simply showed the specs of the device started a small debate on smartphones.
Cars are all used for transportation from one place to another and most cars can handle daily commuting. Still most people want to have a car that suits their personal brand. When all smartphones handle basic social media tasks equally well, will the luxurious equipment for online presence become the modern equivalent of luxurious cars.
How Social Media services like Facebook and Twitter present the medium for posting has already opened some great opportunities for innovative marketers of applications and devices as usage exclusive software and mobile phones is ambiently presented in the everyday online behavior of consumers.
Currently celebrities and early adaptors of technology are leading the pack, but it's likely that the day will come when the grey text below your facebook status update is an equally important part of your personal brand as the car you drive.
Social Media, geolocation and gamification have been the rising trends in modern marketing for the past few years. Social Media has already proven it's importance because at the end of the day most people are social and a bit curious as well. Geolocation is important as it gives existing services and concepts a new dimension. The game layer has not been equally greatly leveraged so far. Most people are competitive so there's definitely potential in leveraging that competitiveness in marketing.
Marketers can approach gamification from several angles. The most traditional approach is tying the brand to positive experiences in existing game-like environments, which can mean simple product placement like placing branded boots into a football game or branding the whole game and distributing it for free. Good example of the latter would be EA Sports FIFA Superstars on Facebook - a social football manager game created by Playfish and branded by EA to promote the EA Sports FIFA series.
Another approach is creating games that are strongly tied to the core values of the brand and the product involved. Nike Football Sweden recently introduced a game called ZlatanZuperfly where young footballers can step into virtual boots of Zlatan Ibrahimovic in a simulated attack in a football game. The scoring system evaluates the player in speed and courage, two key elements in the bigger campaign ZlatanZuperfly is a part of. The athlete involved also introduced the game to his following of 1M facebook fans.
Linking real life with online games to create innovative marketing is surely a growing trend for the future. And there are several approaches to that as well:
In April 2011 Habbo Hotel and Leaf collaboratively launched a the Habbo Hotel easter egg, where the traditional plastic toy has been replaced with a code that can be used to redeem a virtual item in Habbo Hotel. Sulake has also shown strong expertise in how they balance the virtual economy inside this particular service. I was really impressed by a recent keynote I heard from their CEO Timo Soininen, as it has been over 10 years since I used the service I was unaware of the fact that they had actually built a working stock exchange for virtual items in a service that's mainly for kids.
Alternative Reality Games link virtual & reality by making people perform tasks in the real world while simultaneously participating in an online game. ARG can be used in the marketing mix to engage and reward consumers as well as to drive traffic to retail locations. Linking products with ARGs can help in differentiating from competition, but not as much as Lifestyle Ubiquitious Gaming - which is the way Marketing & Games are developing towards.
Lifestyle Ubiquitious Gaming was first introduced scientifically in this great article by Hamari & Lehdonvirta.
Lifestyle Ubiquitious Games are designed to enrich the player's experience in his/her daily activities. Gaming should be enjoyable and there should be no burden for the user. Especially in sports and other activities where consumers are constantly looking to increase their performance Lifestyle Ubiquitious Gaming has huge marketing potential. Especially if Social Media and the brand&product stories involved are all strongly integrated into the gaming experience.
There is plenty of different approaches to linking gaming and marketing. The trend is towards linking real life and virtual elements in commercial game-environments that are easy to use and add real value to the consumer experience. Integrating Social Media into games can increase marketing potential as well as the actual consumer experience.
Social Marketing professionals had been waiting for the official launch of Facebook Places in Finland for a while and on Wednesday (2.3.2011) it was officially released on iPhone, Android & Facebook Mobile HTML5.
The video above describes how the service is presented to consumers. Once there's enough traffic around Places it's likely that Facebook will enable Facebook Deals in Finland as well.
This is a clear move to compete against GroupOn's CityDeal. Even though Facebook has it's strenghts in the huge userbase and a clear strategic vision, it also has problems with customer service.
While Social Shopping dedicated companies have actual people working in the local markets with the advertisers, Facebook still remains faceless towards advertisers that aren't spending a certain amount with each campaign. This combined with the delays with verification processes of Facebook Places might lead some not so tech-savvy companies into choosing CityDeal or Offerium.
Tennispalatsi is yet to be Claimed by Finnkino
How 'Places' is going to affect Finnish social media marketing landscape? Even though Foursquare never became a big hit in Finland, I believe in Places. It already has the strong userbase of Facebook and the actual process of checking in to places is finally close enough to the natural usage patterns that it no longer feels like a burden and therefore seem pretentious to check-in.
In Finland there's only few examples of local businesses that have leveraged Foursquare, but with Facebook Places & Deals there will definitely be more companies involved. In the end sensible social media marketers usually want to be where the users are.
Here's some suggestions for Finnish companies on how to make the most out of these new features:
Set up the necessary places as soon as possible
Aim to be the first to check into your retail locations and also claim ownership of your places right away. The claim verification process can take time (up to 3 weeks) and if you begin only after the local competitors have their places claimed & running you will be too late to enjoy the benefits of early adoption such as having people nearby directed to your location even if they originally were looking for a different business to check in to.
Pay attention on where your Place shows on the map
At first this might seem trivial, but especially for businesses in big shopping centers it's a strategic decision to set the 'Places' mark clearly in a position that's easy to navigate to on the Bing-map that Facebook uses. Click on the small map on the Create a Place screen to open a bigger map where you can fine tune where to set the mark for your Place.
If you have just created your Place and others haven't checked in yet, you can modify the location by removing the place you just created and creating it again with at an adjusted location.
Integrate Places into your existing social strategy
If you have an existing Facebook Page that's built around a physical destination, consider claiming a place and merging the page with it - otherwise don't merge your existing Facebook Page with a Facebook Place.
And if you're planning on using different Places as content platforms simultaneously with separate content-focused Pages, remember to make sure that at least some of the content published on the Place is in some way local.
Event marketers can also set up & claim Places for of-the-moment communication with event participants, but don't forget to create the traditional Facebook Event as well, since that will remain the main functionality for users to share where they are going to be and where they have been.
Facebook Places is probably the biggest new feature on Facebook since the ability to 'Like'. Places was just introduced in Finland so there might be some easy wins for those who are quick to react. And what makes Places better than Foursquare for users and marketers is that Places already has the userbase and existing usage patterns of Facebook Mobile, so it's no longer pretentious to check-in.
Recently Oreo started a bid for a Guinness World Record of 'Likes' on one facebook post. The marketing team behind popular rap artist Lil'Wayne saw the massive PR-potential in hi-jacking that record - and so they did with ease.
Oreo's post got a 114,000 likes and held the record for a few hours - after getting beaten by Lil'Wayne's massive 588,000 likes on one post. It wasn't about the fan base (Oreo had 15m against Lil'Waynes 20m) - it was more about the feeling of connectivity between the page and the average user.
This highlights the problem most commercial facebook-pages have been struggling with recently. Agencies have filled the pages with campaign tabs & applications, while often neglecting the content posted to the users newsfeeds via page wall.
The Product Development team of Facebook has already come to rescue by redesigning the layout of Facebook Pages. The New Page Layout is very similar with users profile pages and Facebook Pages can now also interact with each other and with other users.
Possible reasons why Facebook did this:
- The Agencies were beginning to have too big shares on the marketing budgets spent on Facebook. Buying sophisticated tabs & viral applications were preferred over just spending on Facebook Advertising.
- Encouraging brands to focus on the relevancy of the content they are feeding to their fan-base. Now that almost every brand already has an active presence on Facebook, the service has to aim to maintain the balance between commercial and non-commercial content. - Facebook wants brands to focus on Sponsored Stories advertising. Making brands more engaged with the actual content they produce and publish will also make them more eager to use Sponsored Stories advertising to promote that content.
- Facebook has a long term aim on pushing LinkedIn & Twitter out of the radar The New Page layout might encourage people to create separate 'Professional Profiles' on Facebook. With the customizeability of Facebook Pages it might present a real challenge to the biggest professional social networking site LinkedIn. And by making it possible for a Facebook Page to interact with a regular user, Facebook Pages could also replace Twitter, especially in the markets where Twitter is not very well established yet.
What this means to the Community Managers of Commercial Facebook Pages:
-You will need a constant flow of images. The image panel on top of your page will reveal if you haven't posted any relevant images recently. - Have a strategy on whether you want to interact as a brand or as people behind the brand.The New Pages make it possible to show the personal profiles of the people administrating the page. If you don't have a real reason on presenting the admins, I strongly suggest not using this function on brand pages - rather focus on developing a brand tone of voice and guidelines on interaction. - Check if there's other pages related to your brand that you should feature or interact with. This applies especially to brands that use celebrities in their marketing and also to big brands that have plenty of sub-brand-pages on facebook.
If a really influential person like Lil'Wayne and a walking OREO cookie both asked you to 'Like' something - who would you listen to? Commercial Facebook Pages need to transform from just being campaign sites on FB platform into forming real conversation with their core followers.
Facebook hasn't achieved it's position as number 1 social networking site by being conservative. They seem to have a very strategic approach to fine tuning their service in order to increase advertising revenue without making too big sacrifices on the user experience.
For example during fall 2010 the market for Facebook Pages advertising was really starting to become saturated - big marketers already had established communities and most of them were growing organically via users' new page discoveries through each other's profiles and newsfeeds.
No more new page discovery on default user profile view
Not surprisingly Facebook introduced the new profile which makes discovering new pages a tiny bit more difficult by removing the "Likes" box from users' main profile pages. 'Likes' was moved to the info page (which probably gets like 1% of the total traffic on average user profile) - and even that wasn't enough. Pages shown were divided into two categories - people, sports, and music pages are on top and have big icons that promote organic community growth. Other pages don't get icons, but are presented in a list.
How users experienced this? - The New Profile made the world a bit more open place once again, encouraging people to share more.
- Sharing your favorite artists, athletes and sports teams is highlighted
How commercial facebook page managers experienced this? - Even if a page previously had steady organic growth in the amount of followers, it usually slowed down rather quickly after the new profile was introduced.
- Just when the general management got used to seeing constant growth in the page statistics (+x%) - even great page content no longer guarantees that. Facebook is presuming that this will eventually lead to increased spending on facebook advertising.
And just when the demand on advertising especially for facebook's biggest clients started to increase again, Facebook launches it's latest big move - Sponsored Stories. Basically Sponsored Stories can turn newsfeed stories into advertising.
Once again Facebook is aiming to get more advertising revenue by simultaneously enhancing the user experience this time by increasing the relevance of the ads seen by users. Are these truly social ads going to revolutionize advertising on Facebook, or will the function stay limited to premium advertisers and eventually fade away - only time will tell.
In my opinion the most impressive thing about Facebook as a company is how it can connect product development with it's long term revenue-generation strategy. Not many media services have managed to simultaneously increase advertising revenue and improve the user experience.
