Kookmeyer Institute

I spend most of my time trying to drag clients into the online world but here’s a cool idea that goes the other way! Social Memories is an app that lets you publish a very nice hard copy book based on your Facebook activity. Could be a good present if you can somehow access your friends’ Facebook login details. (Would you want a book about a friend?)

Research company ExactTarget recently asked punters why they ‘like’ brands on Facebook. The key motivator turned out to be discounts, followed by social badging and freebies. I have a sneaky feeling the whole report has been done in Dutch. I don’t know any Dutch. But the bar graph is pretty easy to understand. And Lauren Bianchi’s translation of the commentary by (Dutch firm) SocialMediaConsultancy is definitely worth a quick read.

What’s the worst that could happen? Sounds like the brains behind this Facebook app for Dr Pepper might be Des Kaye admirers (see Little Britain Live if you don’t know what I mean). Sick of all the noise online, the drink’s agency has come up with a competition that lets them hijack people’s status updates. All you have to do is choose a level of updates you’re comfortable with, from mildly annoying to super embarrassing, then prepare to have a laugh at your own expense. Kind of reminds me of BK’s Whopper Sacrifice – a dig at those insecure souls who simply befriend people on Facebook to appear more popular.

Money doesn’t make an idea good. But it can lead to great execution which is often enough to capture many people’s imagination. Take a look at this interactive video for Stella using Facebook connect then consider how effective it would have been as a plain old HTML email. The answer: probably not half as much. I particularly like the way photos from people’s profiles are seamlessly integrated into the plot. That plus the reward of a free movie when you forward the promotion to four friends (a nice touch to leverage existing Stella content).

Hand on heart I can honestly say I’m not one for train wrecks – in fact I turn away when cringe TV comes on – but I can’t resist this lesson in how not to do Facebook, courtesy of Waiwera Water. Check out the response from the company when an unsuspecting (?) customer raises doubts about the quality of its bottled water. On top of this, many of the posts elsewhere seem little more than brand boasting, a tactic that hardly lends itself to genuine two-way dialogue with followers. Does anyone else feel there are way too many brands on Facebook and Twitter for no great reason, or am I the only one? (I’m thinking brands that represent low involvement purchases in particular.)

I love simple, cheap ideas that work their buns off, like this one for the opening of the new IKEA store in Malmö. The guys at Forsman & Bodenfors created a Facebook campaign that invited people to tag products for their chance to win. Now the stuff IKEA comes out with is hardly Charles Eames but Swedes love it and word about the new store – and interactive IKEA catalogue (extra brownie points F & B) – soon spread. I guess this is a more sophisticated, more engaging (and more sincere) version of those junk emails promising a reward if you forward it to 10 friends. I got one of these just the other day promising me a brand new Sony laptop. Yeah right.

Becks is giving away beer on Facebook. Nice. I wonder how many punters will be converted to the brand. Either way it looks like a good money spinner for bars – two of us spent $30 on finger food at La Zeppa. The only downer with the mobile vouchers is the fact most cash registers aren’t bluetooth enabled, so the poor old barman has to key the 16-digit code into the eftpos terminal every time.

That is the question for companies like Wal-Mart that create profiles only to abandon them soon after. If you’re in two minds about the next step for your brand, you might like to catch a recent post by Igor Beuker. It’s full of interesting titbits like the fact the H&M Hyves page now has 250,000 members, even though the company ignores it completely. There will always be exceptions to the norm like this one but, as Igor points out, you generally get out what you put in to online communities.

(Via ViralBlog)