Brand Campaigns Drive Most Social Media Following

Nice insight... Cheers Brian. Via eMarketer

OCTOBER 18, 2010
Three-quarters of Facebook fans have signed up with pages after invitations or ads from brands

Research on social media users who follow brands has shown marketers the importance of offering deals and discounts on Facebook fan pages as well as the nature of brand following as a form of self-expression, through which advocates can show support for a company they love. But what triggers Facebook users to “like” a brand is typically some form of outreach.

Most commonly, that outreach comes from the brand itself. Three-quarters of Facebook users worldwide who had “liked” a brand told DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research in September 2010 that they had been spurred to do so by an invitation or advertising from the brand they followed. More than half had also followed a brand based on an invitation from a friend. Many of those invitations are likely a secondary form of brand outreach as well, as marketers encourage current followers to become brand advocates on their behalf.

Only about half of all Facebook brand fans ended up following brands after their own research, making action by marketers critical in building up a following on social sites even though most users already know and like the brands they become fans of.

The effort brands must put into amassing fans doesn’t stop there, of course. While the top reason former fans gave for unsubscribing from Facebook pages was waning interest in the brand, complaints about the information offered on fan pages were also a major factor. Posting too often or posting uninteresting information, taken together, turned off nearly half of respondents.

“Unsubscribers, at 36%, are something to watch out for. And though the majority of fans now unsubscribe by deleting a brand from their friends list, brands, when trying to measure the value of their community, are going to need to be more mindful of those who just hide the brand's message in their newsfeed," said Catherine Lautier, director of business intelligence at DDB, in a statement.

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Check out today’s other article, “Online Video Big Draw on Health Sites for Marketers and Consumers.”

Jay-Z: Decoded Campaign

Great project from Droga for Jay-Z. Via creativity

Niche focused, technology restricted (Silverlight required) and expecting a lot of effort from participants… all strategically sound based on a clear understanding of the audience and the subject matter.

Provides a really good example how we can integrate digital technology with the offline environment to influence and motivate real people to do real things in the real world. Which in this case are then tied back to further interactions in the online experience, then back offline, then online, etc ,etc … fantastic. Just wish i liked Jay-Z then i'd be into it!

Jay-Z spreads himself all over the map.

Droga5 New York goes all out in its launch of Jay-Z's upcoming memoir Decoded with a massive multiplatform campaign that takes every page of the book and brings it back to its birthplace, literally. The book, published out of Random House imprint Spiegel and Grau, is set to release on November 16. Until then, the campaign will recreate each book page on a traditional outdoor, or not so conventional space—think billboard, the lining of a suit, or bottom of a pool—all of it relevant to where the contents of each page originally took place.

"We've made canvases out of some pretty extraordinary places," says Droga5 Creative Chairman David Droga. "We've turned everything into outdoor—350 pages are outdoor and another 100 and 150 are things that money can't buy." The latter will involve some familiar other big names, which at press time Droga could not disclose. "A lot of other big global brands and icons have stepped up to turn themselves into canvases," he says.

"We're trying to do something that's consistent with the Jay-Z brand," Droga explains. "He does all these incredibly bold things in the music industry. He wants to do the same thing to the publishing industry. What's bolder than putting every single page of your book out in the real world, so if someone wanted to read it or discover it, they don't have to buy the book? He's so confident that the story's compelling, the reader will get so caught up in looking at this that they'll want to buy the book."

But fans need not be as jet-setting as Jay-Z to see each execution. A partnership with Bing maps gives the audience a chance to search for each page online via a scavenger hunt, which will provide daily clues to each of the various page locations. "I'd seen that Bing maps presentation from TED, which was extraordinary, and thought, Imagine if we could lay that over the top and suddenly you've got something that's global," says Droga. "You could be sitting in Arkansas and you could walk in the streets of Brooklyn." The agency had been in talks over the last year and a half with Bing to do a nontraditional promotion and finally found an opportunity when the book project came up.

The thrill of the search and book pages aren't the game's only rewards, however. The First players to find a page get a hard copy of the book with that page signed by the artist himself, and all will get thrown into a draw for the grand prize, a ticket to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in concert on New Year's in Vegas.