EyeSee

I presented at the OCRI, Zone5ive event today and I focused on must have social media tools to engage your customers.  As I was preparing for this presentation I needed to figure out a starting point as customer engagement is as vague as being “green”. So I took a look at the websites of companies that typically attended these events to find a starting point.

To explain where I came from I used the analogy of social media being the invitation to the house party and the house being the company website. I went further to stress that if the house either did not exist nor was structurally strong then the party would fail.

So my starting point was reinforcing the house and creating the invitations.

Details are in the following presentation.

My goal was to let the people in the room leave with information that they could use to implement these basic social media tools into their websites and social media marketing mix.

The room was fairly silent with not a lot of questions however I did notice a fair bit of note taking. I guess it’s a very different dynamic from the interactive workshops that I am used to giving.

So if you were at the presentation today and have had time to digest this do you have any further questions? If you do, then drop me a line via this post and we can take it from there. Remember there is not such thing as a stupid question. Also there are other people out there that have the same questions in mind.

Early Jan. 2009 brought a very interesting Facebook application called the Whopper Sacrifice. This application took the world by storm and there was a lot discussion in social media as well as traditional media. What made it so controversial was the uniqueness of the campaign.

The case study was presented at Facebook Camp in Toronto earlier this year, see notes from this session.

If you never heard of this or saw this application here are further details.

Refresh Partners have also given further details on this in terms of the PR and some stats.

Was this campaign successful? That’s up for debate. The goal was for 25k coupons to be given to customers in the U.S.A. They got as far as 23k. That’s close enough and why stop there and not go all the way to 25k?

There were a number of interesting reasons for this. The one aspect of the application was that it violated the Facebook terms of service. There appears to have been discussions between Facebook, Burger King and the other parties involved in the campaign. The application was terminated by Burger King as there was no further desire to invest in changing the application.

So we will never know how this application would have done in the long term however in the short term it generated a lot of publicity for Burger King and set the bar high for creative Facebook Applications.

Whopper Sacrifice site was launched to give a free Burger King Whopper coupon. Check out the YouTube video explains it best. There is no API to delete friends and is anti Facebook and defriend as it goes against growing the social graph. The campaign was based on deleting friends for a burger.

Whopper Sacrifice could be added to your profile with witty phrases like you were sacrificed for a Whopper. Launched on Monday Jan. 5th. The media outlets picked up on this application a couple of days later.60000 installs in 10 days!!! There was no advertising budget!!!

The campaign was shut down and the users tapered off.  The PR on it was incredible like the National Post, New York Times, eWeek, msnbc, washingtonpost etc.

Two hills in the analytics one at launch and then at shutdown. Lexicon is great for tracking trends on facebook. 233,906 friendships ended for a free whooper.

This was were targeted at the U.S only and it generated a lot of hate mail globally.

comments “I got my whopper coupon baby, long live the king” Lots of groups were formed from this.

Twitter was incredible.

Keys to a successful social campaign

• Free stuff is a great motivator
• witty text copy is hugely important
• Specific to the target demographic
• Old fashioned PR still works bestfor original concepts
• Focus on original concepts
• push social concepts
• not the same concepts as on micro sites

Burger King loved it and were ok with disabling the application within 10days.

The application was not complicated, the complexity was how to do this within facebook. Trick the user to delete their friends was complicated and a lot of testing.

This application was developed by Refresh Partners.