Friday, October 19, 2007

Using Facebook for Marketing

For those of us integrating Facebook marketing campaigns into many of our overall PR strategies, Social Media Optimization provides two interesting reports analyzing why Target’s Facebook Campaign was a success and Wal-Mart’s attempt with social media was not.

From my perspective, the interesting discussion to have with clients is their willingness to risk negative public sentiment. You can’t have a successful social media campaign if you fear open public dialogue. Unlike traditional PR, where a media release can control the message - at least until the journalist gets a hold of it - social media relies on unrestricted and uncensored conversation. This is why people trust it for better or worse.

It truly puts to test the PR saying “all PR is good PR”. Before clients embark on this strategy they must do some sole searching and see if this makes sense for them, and if it does, how would they respond to negative comments?

3 comments:

dgftest said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
dgftest said...

interesting... I wonder whether www.StumbleUpon.com will also evolve into a similarly useful venue for marketing campaigns - rather than just some on-ramp to find eBay merchandise based on the user's search habits... [StumbleUpon was recently purchased by eBay, as recently commented in NYTimes business section, details at the Technosurfer blog
]

Wendy Kauffman said...

I wonder if anyone is taking advantage of this for marketing purposes? Thanks for the informaton.