Facebook marketing.
by Franz
We just finished a Facebook application for a consumer brand, a fun little ditty to promote a new product launch. We’re partnering with RockYou to buy sign-ups, which works great. For a fixed rate, we know we get someone adding the application. In my eyes, this obliterates pay-per-impression or even pay-per-click advertising. It’s pay-per-action at its best (and it’s very affordable).
I love this approach. A great example is Flake-o-matic. We built FlakeOmatic.com as a standalone website for our winter greeting card. It’s a fun little flash app where you can cut up a triangle which then unfolds to a snowflake. It generates a static image of the flake which it will then email to a friend. Very 1990’s e-Greeting card in vibe. We launched it, sent it to several hundred clients and friends and went to have a beer. We watched the traffic go from a few hundred to 50’s to a few dozen per day over the next week. As with anything on the web, build it and they don’t necessarily come.
We then decided to repurpose the thing into a Facebook app. Since we made something that was designed to be sent to a friend, the idea of putting it on Facebook where people collect stuff to identify themselves made a lot of sense. We turned it into a Facebook app over a weekend, spent a thousand dollars promoting it through RockYou and the thing blew up. We saw hundreds of people a day adding the app. Since making a snowflake was irrelevant unless you sent it to someone, we saw double the signup rates we were paying for and more quickly. I hate jibber jabber (well I love the game) but if something were to ever be made to go ‘viral’, this type of thing was it.
The reason I rant is because I have come from a disappointed call from our client where I had to explain to them they couldn’t rip email addresses out of Facebook. “We need to build our eNewsletter, how does this even help us?!?” Gee, I dunno - people are spending hours customizing a page that represents themselves to their friends, and they want to put your logo on it. This has no value to you compared to the glory of being able to send them some junk mail at the end of the month? You would rather send someone coupons than have them tattoo your logo on their forehead? Hrm.
