7 Facebook commerce strategies for brands

[This post was originally written for Social Media Today. You can read the original article herewhich got published on June 16th]

Background: F-commerce is increasing generating buzz in the social media and social technology market. Growing upon the people’s social graph, Facebook is suddenly emerging not only as a place to connect and share interesting stuff with people but also as a tool for commerce for brands and customers. World’s biggest brands are selling on Facebook today. In fact, the top 3 brands on Facebook – Coca Cola, Starbucks and Disney, sell directly on Facebook. E-commerce leaders are predicting that within the next 5 years more sales will be happening on Facebook that Amazon.

Hence we thought it would be a good idea to research on some interesting F-commerce strategies and see what different things are being done by brands in F-Commerce (Hat tip tosocial commerce today for their excellent research on Facebook commerce, which was very valuable for writing this article).

Here are the top 7 F-commerce strategies brand owners should know:

• Facebook Stores:

Facebook stores (also known as F-Stores) are the typical stores on Facebook. The idea behind having such stores is to bring the store where the consumer is (i.e. on Facebook). Consumers can decide upon the product, make selections and transactions without leaving Facebook. Moreover, such stores get the viral advantages of Facebook like ‘likes’ and ‘Facebook shares’.

Many brands such as Tide, Gillette, Coca-Cola, 1-800-flowers, jcpenny and many more are selling on Facebook through Facebook stores

• Group Buying

Facebook might have jumped into the ‘group buying’ waters with Facebook deals, but some brands are already using group buying to pump up sales in their stores. Certain brands like W Hotels activate heavily discounted deals when a set number of people bid on it. Skoda, ran the ‘More you like… less you pay campaign’ on their Facebook store, which was an online auction where each ‘like’ reduced the cost of the car by 1 Euro until somebody bought it. Similarly Searsis using the same mechanism on its Facebook store where deals go live when they have received enough likes. This ensures each product on the store generates buzz from its fans

• Exclusive Offers

Since your fans and your Facebook store both are on your Facebook page, there are high chances that it will be your fans who will be shopping from your Facebook page. So why not use your store to reward them with exclusive offers to generate buzz along with sales.

Many brands are using this strategy to give exclusive offers on their Facebook stores. Pantene did this some time back when they were giving early access to their new products on their F-stores. Ketchup brand Heinz and Women shoes and Handbag brand Nine West are also using F-stores to give limited edition products to their fans

• Facebook connect for network recommendations

Some of the biggest e-commerce and retail brands seem to be using this for moving their customers ahead into the sales funnel. Such Facebook commerce applications leverage Facebook’s open graph to show valuable recommendations to potential customers and buyers.

For instance, Amazon’s ‘Your Amazon Facebook Page’ application recommends movies, music and other products based on the recommendations of your friends on Facebook. Tripadvisor’stravel map application shows you a map of all your friends and the places they have been across the globe, which is a simple but smart way of gaining travel recommendations. Similarly, Levis Friends Store displays jeans liked by other people and your friends.

• Shop and tell

You will find this as the emerging trend among onsite Facebook stores. With Shop and tell plugins brands can integrate referral features to their shopping carts so that whenever someone makes a purchase on the store, they can recommend the product to people in their network. In return they can avail rewards such as discounts, free shipping etc. Many companies like Flaunt it, Tip from me and Finz.it provide such type of plugins.

Another interesting shop and tell tool is Swipely which integrates with your card information to notify people in your network about your purchases. It also shows what is happening at the places you shop as a shopping feed.

Certain brands tweaked this model to generate recommendations and word of mouth. They are selling consumers content (books, papers, research reports, music) and products (beers, gifts) in exchange of a Tweet or a Facebook wall update about your brand. See pay with a tweet for more information.

• Facebook check in deals

Certain brands are making smart use of Facebook check –in deals for boosting up their sales. Facebook check- in deals allows users to find deals in their vicinity using their mobile phones and find offers. Such kind of campaigns helps brands since user check-ins, when they come up in activity feeds, act as a marketing channel for the brands. We see a great potential in Facebook check in deals for F-commerce since a lot of interesting stuff can be experimented in this space.

Brands like Gap used Facebook check ins to give free jeans to the first 10, 000 check ins and discounts to the rest of the customers who checked in. Mazda too used Facebook book check ins to give 20% off on Mazda Roadster customers who checked in.

• In store Facebook commerce

While some brands are trying to bring their stores to Facebook through Facebook stores, some others are doing the vice versa, that is, bringing Facebook to their on -ground retail stores. If your brand has offline retail stores targeting a lot of youth, then this strategy would definitely win you a lot of buzz and recommendation.

Coca Cola village is an interesting example of in store F-commerce, where there was a real life ‘like’ button that sent ‘likes’ to the users Facebook account by scanning their wristbands.DieselCam – an initiative by Diesel, had devices installed in trial rooms where people could take post their pics with Diesel Gear on their Facebook account.

Hope this research will help brand owners and social media research understand the wide scope of social commerce. It you know of any more strategies, please add to this list.

7 Facebook Commerce startegies for brands

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Facebook apps for marketing campaigns

[I wrote this post originally for Social Media Today and it got published on June 7th 2011. I am cross-posting the post. You can read the original post here]

Background: Some time back I had published a research about how brands are using Facebook apps for enhancing their CRM. In this post I would like to focus on the second value proposition that Facebook apps bring to brands – an amazing opportunity to run campaigns.

I have been increasingly seeing brands using Facebook apps to give a boost to their marketing. In fact if you see the list of Facebook preferred developer consultants, you will see some very interesting case studies of brands using Facebook apps. Therefore, in this post I would like to focus on why and how brands are using Facebook apps for their contests and campaigns

Just as a reminder, in this post I am only focusing and benchmarking Facebook apps that have been used as marketing centric campaigns. Apps which are powering commerce, driving sales, customer support and philanthropy are not a part of this research.

Why brands are using Facebook apps for campaigns: This is a million dollar question. Here are a few reasons why marketing and brand managers are getting so much attracted to Facebook apps:

• Getting campaign where the crowd is – this is the obvious reason. With more than 600 million active users on Facebook, a very large number of brands have realized that their target audience is active on Facebook. So why not use the good old strategy, take the show where the crowd is!
• I have x thousand facebook fans, what next! – You have a large set of fans on your Facebook page and your community manager is daily putting up interesting news content to keep them engaged. But then, the next question that comes up is – what next! What more can you do to keep your fans excited about your brand or to say, what is the next step of customer engagement? Here Facebook apps turn out to be an exciting way to engage your fans, give them something new and get meaningful conversations / creations out of them
• I want x thousand fans, how do I get them! – A lot of brands use Facebook ads to get fans for their page. But once a user lands on your page through your ad, how do you convince him that you are worth a ‘like’. Here Facebook apps come in handy, which help in providing relevant content, videos, information on the landing pages to grab user’s attention and help him decide. ( See Vans Facebook landing tab) Also many apps are have viral features to help them spread to your user’s network, resulting in more people getting in your engagement funnel
• Campaigns bring the attention, Facebook retains it: I was going through @gauravonomics’ slideshare channel where he talks about the active role a campaign plays for a community. Essentially, each Facebook campaign bring attention to the brand (in form of new fans), but even when the campaign dies out, your fans are still with you and you can launch more active programs to engage them. Compare this with a traditional media campaign, where each new campaign has to be started from scratch.
• Replicating an off Facebook social media campaign- Sometimes due to technical, design or functional constrains, brands prefer running social media campaigns using microsite or community platforms. Here building a facebook application helps you direct traffic to your campaign. For example, Pepsi built a Pepsi Refresh voting app to promote the Pepsi refresh campaign.

How brands are using Facebook for campaigns and contests

Although brands are being very creative in their campaigns and many digital agencies, creative agencies or consultants are helping them to come up with the best campaign to suit their needs, however most of the campaign focussed facebook applications can be divided into 8 broad categories:

Static content campaign for awareness: These are probably the most explored type of Facebook applications. These applications focus on awareness campaigns, providing rich media, videos, pictures to their fans in a shareable format. For e.g. Levi’s ‘Water talks about Levi’s efforts to save millions of litres of water. The application shows videos associated with the cause and helps people spread awareness about the Levi’s innovation. Hot Wheels hasa landing tab application that runs viral video campaigns for team hot wheels.

Sweepstakes, quizzes and polls: Sweepstakes, quizzes and polls form a low engagement – low virality campaign app model for marketers. However many brands use them since they trigger participation and have valuable buzz generation capabilities. For example, Southwest Airlines runs sweepstakes and polls on their Facebook app.

Apps for viral campaigns: These are again low engagement campaigns designed to spread a message, virtual product by fans. Coca Cola gifts app allows user to gift their friends virtual coke products

Photo / video contest: It is from here that the apps start becoming more engaging, and the scope to have a remarkable campaign increases. These applications ask users to submit photos / videos around a certain theme and ask other users to vote for their favourite photo / video. The campaigns become viral since the participants start spreading it to get more votes / attention. Sony in its video contest on Facebook asked users to create trailers for the promotion of the movie ‘the priest’ and submit it as a contest entry to the Facebook app. Nike’s Free Arena contest asks users to submit videos of their sporty moves and stunts and get community to vote for the best video. Similarly Levi’s ran a video contest for their Facebook community to find the next ‘face and voice’ of their women’s wear brand.

Ideation contests: Ideation Facebook contest apps focus on asking the community ideas around a certain theme, lifestyle, passion or cause and ask the rest of the community to curate (rate, vote, comment, share) the ideas. The result is a user generated and community selected best idea which can result in a improved product, a new innovation, business idea, customer feedback, market research etc. For example Kohl ran an ideation campaign some time back where participants were encouraged to nominate and vote for the school they felt was most deserving of funds, and submit their ideas about how the funds could best be used by the school.

Loyalty campaigns: It is fascinating to see brands using Facebook apps for loyalty campaigns. Certain brands are leveraging Facebook apps to power up their loyalty cards. Starbucks card app allows users to manage their card through Facebook, edit profiles, reload, see transactions and get points for loyalty. Users can even reload their friends’ cards. (reference)

Other brands like Jetblue are leveraging apps integrated with Facebook places to power their loyalty and this brings a very interesting value proposition for the brands since Facebook platform provides them the social graph of users (friends, activity, profile), Facebook places provides the ability to check –in and gain loyalty points and the Facebook application integrates the two. The result is a powerful brand app that users can use to check-in when they reach official jetblue terminals, receive loyalty points, see friends’ activities for Jetblue and see leaderboard for the most loyal customers.

Social Games for engagement: Social Games are again are great way to build a campaign application. They are engaging, they attract high user activity, they are viral and can generate a lot of buzz. Certain brands like Travel Channel build their own social games like Kidnapp! to engage their audience (The game challenges users to kidnap their friends to their favorite international hideout city. To escape from the hideout city and begin kidnapping their friends, kidnapped players must answer a trivia question related to that city.) Certain other brands are using existing Facebook games for their campaigns. For example, Bing some time back advertised on Farmville to acquire a large number of Facebook fans. Similarly, Dreamworks used Cityville to promote their Kung-Fu Panda 2 movie where users could build drive-in movie theatres in their city, get collection items etc.

Referral campaigns: I have not seen many brands using Facebook apps for referral campaign. But Appirio Facebook application allows users to make effective referrals to their friends. Once somebody signs up for the app, he / she can see who other people in their network would like the product too based on their interests and likes and other information on Facebook. The app makes appropriate suggestion to users to make effective referrals to other in their network. See the case study for Mark. for more information.

Facebook apps can be a very effective tool for referral campaign since a social network works best in making referrals.

Hope this article would help marketing managers and brand managers understand how they can use Facebook apps for their campaigns. Would love to know more use cases from you. You can find a summary of this research below:

How brands are using facebook apps for marketing campaigns

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World's top brands social media adoption

[This post was originally written for pluggd.in and posted on June 7th. You can read the originalpost here]

I was going through the BrandZ report on the world’s top brands for the year 2011. It was great to see that some of the top brands in the world are also the ones which are heavily adopting social media for their marketing.

I found following noteworthy things from the rankings:

• 4 out of world’s top 5 brands are technology brands and among the top 100, 18 brands belong to technology sector
• Many online brands emerge in the list like Google (2), Amazon (14), Facebook (35), Ebay (82) and Baidu (29)
• 11 out of top 50 brands are using online communities as a growing and sustainable social media tool for marketing

The last point was most interesting to me. If you see the overall social media adoption among the top 50 brand, you will see that most of these brands are moving beyond the traditional channels like Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to blogs, social applications, content thought leadership, viral campaigns, consumer generated campaigns and eventually models like sustainable online communities to engage their audiences, energize their loyal fans and facilitate word of mouth.

Hence in this post, I will like to talk about how 11 of the world’s biggest brands have adopted to sustainable social media solutions such as online communities to engage their customers, partners and employees.

IBM (rank 3):

IBM, in its continued efforts to build a smarter planet, has powered ‘A Smarter Planet’community. They believe that a planet is built smarter at an industry level and wants to facilitate related conversations on various topics like banking, energy, retail, traffic etc.  Apart from that IBM powers developer forums and support communities to help users learn from one another

Microsoft (rank 5): Microsoft is another brand that really understands the power of online communities. They have built many communities and networks to individually cater segments of their target audience. For e.g. Microsoft Developer network is targeted towards developers,Microsoft partner network is targeted to provide tools and resources to Microsoft customers and partners to get more out of Microsoft products, Microsoft Dynamics Community is targeted for professional using Microsoft dynamics products and solution and Windows community provides users forum to hold discussions about various windows products

Coca Cola (rank 6) – Although the beverage major does not have a separate community site to engage fans, this is one brand that has made maximum use of its Facebook page. Legend has it that this page was originally created by 2 Coca Cola fans Dusty Sorg and Micheal J and is managed by them and not the Coca Cola Company.

However, with more than 27 million people present on the fan page and high volume of fan activity, news, promotions, and campaigns running; Coca Cola is doing a great job engaging its fans. They even have a social media policy on their Facebook page to help manage sanity in the community. They keep on launching social media campaigns to engage their audience and use the Facebook page to promote the campaigns. So you can see Expedition 206 app to promote the Expedition 206 campaign. Also coca cola has launched a community campaign – live positively to mobilize fans to lend a helping hand to the global community.

GE (rank 10) – GE’s Ecomagination Challenge is the benchmark example of how business can become social enough to crowd source innovation. Ecomagination is a fabulous user generated innovation contest that leverages the collective wisdom of crowd to come up with the best ideas on how to improve our energy future. The contest operates in phases (phase 1 was about building energy efficient grid and phase 2 is focussed at building energy efficient homes), where users give ideas and other vote for the ideas they support. GE plans to invest $200 million to winning idea to bring the concept into shape.

 Walmart (rank 15): I really love the Walmart’s advocacy program for Eleven Moms. Eleven Moms is a mommy community lead by twenty (and not eleven) moms across USA. The moms are popular bloggers who talk about topics like parenting, value for money and this helps Walmart engage with a big set of their target audience. To engage their other sets of audience, Walmart powers discussion boards around parenting, health, lifestyle etc.

HP (rank 18) – HP leverages a lot on support community to help reduce support center costs, empower their consumers and partners to solve each other’s problems and generate consumer insight on support related issues. You can check out their support community on Facebook, HP support forum, HP Enterprise business community and support forum for their software solutions

SAP (rank 19) – I truly love the way SAP has built a community (SAP community network) of SAP professional to learn, teach and network with other SAP customers, partners and employees. Users can learn from each other through blogs, wiki, discussion, collaborate on projects and crowd source innovation on ideas for better SAP products

Loius Vuitton (rank 26) – The luxury brand runs an digital social magazine called nownessshowcasing stories of contemporary culture, global lifestyle, music, art, travel, sport and fashion. Some of the world’s foremost designers and creative thinkers in luxury industry participate in this community.

BMW (rank 30) – BMW’s Mini has built a one if the most interesting online communities I have seen, called ‘creative use of space’. While most of the brands build their communities around a lifestyle, passion or cause, BMW has built an urban community around a value – making creative use of space. This community is about taking part in events, competitions and projects about making creative use of space. Basically, it is a hub of creative people and designers to connect around event and information. This is how the community explains its purpose:

“When Sir Alec Issigonis invented the MINI he thought of a car that maximizes use of minimum space. Keeping issues like declining energy resources in mind, he created a functional and exciting car that is the ultimate creative use of space.

As urban dwellers we too are constantly thinking of new ways to explore or re-imagine the spaces around us to be more functional, beautiful, and available. MINI Space (the online community) puts up an inspiring framework for you to make creative use of space.”

Pampers (rank 34) – Pampers is one brand that really understand the concept of a social business and this is reflected by the fact that their website – www.pampers.com is actually a community around parenting! Thousands of parents engage around helping and learning about taking care of their children across various stages of development. I think this is a great way to engage your target audience (parents) by providing them an online space that they will repeatedly visit to learn more about parenting. Pampers gets a platform to run promotions, listen what they are saying and engage with their audience

American Express (rank 40): American Express has built an online community for small businesses called Open Forum. Undoubtedly, this is a smart move since companies like AMEX have a large focus towards targeting small businesses and engaging them on their network is perhaps the best way to do that. The community provides tools and information to small businesses to connect with others and learn about managing their business better.

Hope this research help you understand the power of online communities for marketing and brand building. It is great to see some of the world’s biggest brand making serious efforts to engage with their world. Find the presentation below that summarizes the research.

World’s top brands and their social media adoption

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Marketing with online cricket communities

With IPL being the big news everyday for the past two months, it is great to see how various IPL teams are leveraging the concept of online communities to promote their teams and the game itself. I see almost all of the IPL teams having websites which have community elements where fans can engage around their passion for game and support their teams.

How are these online communities engaging fans?

When I started working in the field of social media, one of the first projects I was exposed to, was an online cricket community of a major IPL team. It was fascinating to see social media as an outstanding tool to connect these fans, get them engaged around this event (IPL) and side-by-side create a huge task force of your team fans and enthusiasts. It made me realize that no other tool or medium can help a team energize its fans, know them better and create a community that will take the burden on promoting the team on its own head!

If you see the overall engagement level on such communities, you will realize that they are doing pretty well. For example Delhi Daredevils has more than 32,000 Facebook fans (I could not find the exact number of members), Rajasthan Royals has more than 4000 discussion threads on its forum and Royal Challenger Bangalore’s online community has generated more than 600,000 support votes for the team from fans.

Hence I thought it might be a good idea to look into how these teams are engaging its fans. Some of these are benchmark practices to be followed by marketing managers for leading their social media marketing initiatives:

• Promoting passion and not product: One of the key things you will notice is that these communities are selling a passion (i.e. cricket) to its users more than a product (the team or tickets). This is important to create consumer activity since people will connect to each other around a passion (or a lifestyle or cause) more than a product.
• Content to create conversations: One can see that the content teams of such communities are actively feeding new content to the users in forms of news, media (photos & videos) and blogs. This is important to increase fan activity and provide triggers to fan engagement. See below how Deccan Chargers andRajasthan Royals are promoting team and cricket related content on their blogs

• Conversations to generate connect: These communities have built forums and discussion boards to its users to facilitate conversation around news, interesting happenings, developments, upcoming matches. When it comes to cricket, tools like forums are an excellent way to get users to connect around interesting topics. Some teams like King’s XI Punjab and Royal Challengers Bangalore also allow users to create blog posts and articles
• Tactical programs and online campaigns to rejuvenate interest: Your online community is like a social event of which you are the host. You will have to keep on doing interesting programs after short periods of time to rejuvenate the interest. The good thing is that these communities’ managers understand this well and bring periodic contests to pump up the interest of fans. For e.g. for the 2011 season of IPL, you can see Delhi Daredevils running a bunch of microcontest on itscontest page, Chennai Super Kings is  managing the Super Blog Contest, Mumbai Indian is running a Chief Fan Contest to recognize the most active community participants and know your Mumbai Indians contest. RCB in the past has run the xyz contest to where they chose a photographer, a fan and a blogger to accompany the team
• Online- offline integration in form of events and meetups: I strongly believe that for a community to succeed, things cannot just remain virtual. You need very strong offline integration with online activity. Online communities like RCB understand this well and facilitate offline meetups and events for fans.
• Bringing celebs to the fans: Such communities bridge the barriers between the celeb team players and the fans by bringing news, interview, exclusive write-ups to the fans

How are such communities promoting the game and the brand?

Needless to say, such communities are an immense asset to the game of cricket. It is adding an additional online layer to the excitement that thrives in cricket stadiums, beer bars, car radios and in front of television sets in homes. But the interesting thing to note is the way it is helping out in revenue generation and brand building initiatives of the teams’ parent brand.

Leaving aside the obvious eyeballs grabbing and focussed banner and branding opportunities that such communities bring (for e.g. see the bottom of the Kolkata Knight Rider website), such communities are helping brand sell merchandize, tickets and premium memberships too. But the most important asset such communities are bringing to the brand is that they are providing a round the year platform to engage the audience rather than the IPL event which generates buzz for at most a quarter. For e.g Royal Challenger brand would get a 12 month buzz, attention and user activity from its online community as compared to a season long buzz and attention generated by offline campaigns.

Hope this post would help marketing managers understand a particular use case of online communities and the value they bring to the brand.

[As a matter of fact, Kuliza helps brands build online communities to connect customers, partners and employees and run social media campaigns. For more information, see ouronline community offering or learn about our featured work for txtWeb]