Farming Farmville

It can be said that it’s a growing social phenomenon when during a romantic interlude between couples, one person shouts ‘OMG! my strawberries are going to die” and runs to the computer. Yes! we’re talking about none other than the modern day equivalent of farming which has been designed to be completely in sync with the time compressed modern life – ‘Farmville’, the place where Strawberries grow in 4 hours and water melons grow in 4 days. This is the farm where you can grow both Tamarind trees and lime on the same soil and you have to adopt cows which wander in from no where.

Farmville is a social game which has been developed by its parent company Zynga. With 60 million players globally, It is projected to rake in $1 billion in 2011 and Google has poured $100 million into the company in an attempt to launch its own ‘Google Games’. It’s popularity can be gauged from the fact that anyone who has ever been on Facebook in Pakistan, 90% of your messages must have been the bombardments to come play the game, help build up the barn, accept a gift, adopt a cow, sheep or simply ‘just be a neighbour’. The gameplay of Facebook is deviously simple – plant something – wait for at least a day- get money – buy plants- wait for at least a day- get money- buy plants and so forth with some additions of buildings and other stuff. In return the player levels up and gets achievements for sticking to the game, which makes the game very addictive. The addiction starts off easy that one day you’re just planting a few plots of wheat and soon you’re hooked buying farms, expanding farms and harvesting 24/7.

Personally however I used to play Farmville but after the 5th time my crops withered due to an active social life, I said ‘Go Moo!’

f

 

The Year Twenty Ten: A Review

It’s that time again when we reflect upon the world and aim to do better with our resolutions. This has been an eventful year. I guess we were expecting it to be when Google announced with a bang in January that its corporate network had been attacked. With the follow up being the attack on the Iranian Nuclear Facilities through the Stuxnet worm, the Gulf leak that occurred from BP’s Oil Spill, Pakistan’s Floods to the finale this month with the US Cable Spill, 2010 will be remembered as the year of struggles and crisis. In the midst of so much flooding of stress, tension, five distinct trends stood out which could well summarize the year that was 2010 and possibly tell us a bit of what 2011 will hold.

The Rise of Leaks and The End of Privacy

it was a very busy year on the privacy front and nothing showcased the power of the social web than the way technology was used this year in multiple forms. From the news of Tony Hayward, CEO of BP’s Yacht trip during the worst of the Gulf oil spill to the recent US cable leaks which have had consequences for the political fiefdom in our country and have given rise to new meanings to the terms ‘Open government’, ‘Public Interest’ (do we really care about the hot Ukrainian blonde) and ‘Radical Transparency’. With Google also in the hot water over it roaming street view vehicles, to Facebook’s new Privacy settings which basically sold your profile to advertisers expect the Web community at large and the government to become even more concerned about what to do with all of our personal data in 2011.

Recession Proof: Mobile Rules 2010

Without a doubt, the explosion of the smartphone landscape this past year and the allure of earning income from the new data services and surrounding industries in Pakistan have made the mobile and telco industry a behemoth to contend with.

Apple’s iPhone 4 was launched  early this year followed up by the equally drool worthy iPad and the world has never been the same again. Angry Birds was the number one application in the Apple’s Pakistani App store whilst locally ‘Gully Cricket’ became the first locally developed mobile game to be made available from a local carrier.

2010 can also be said to be the year of the Android phone – Worldwide HTC dominated the market with their Android assault especially HTC Desire. However the new Motorola Droid (Milestone) is getting the best reviews since their old Razr went blunt and reports of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 are very positive whilst Android has also made its presence felt in Pakistan, being launched by a Chinese Telecom company along with equally economical internet packages on the mobile phone which is expected to double the number of internet surfers within a year or two.

All these trends are expected to accelerate well into 2011.

Social Networks Come of Age

It can be said that Social Networks came of age in this country when users on Facebook crossed the 3 Million mark this year (3,075,480 at the time of writing this article) and politicians in this country took to twittering their thoughts and whereabouts to anyone who cares to follow them.

Marketers know that tough times also spur innovation and thus they are experimenting with mediums such as social marketing. Social marketing promises lower costs and bigger returns. In fact, word-of-mouth campaigns encourage consumers to do the marketing on behalf of the brand themselves. There are many brands which are getting on the social media band-wagon amongst them hair care, cooking oils, personal care are the most famous categories. Telecom industries are using the media as a form of customer service centers.

In 2011, expect social media to get even more popular, more mobile, and more inclusive as even the lowly Chinese phone starts supporting the different networks natively. It will also toughen the job of IT departments as people feed their social media needs through the mobile medium.

Pakistan IT Industry Becomes a Source Of Pride For The Nation

The Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) is an international awards program which provides networking and product benchmarking opportunities to ICT innovators and entrepreneurs from 16 countries in the region including Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka among others. Out of 16 APICTA categories, the P@SHA (Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT & ITES) delegation picked up 7 Merit Awards (the APICTA Silver equivalent).  These included Merit Awards in Security Applications, E-Inclusion and E-Community, Financial Applications, Communications, E-Government and E-Health categories. It was our best performance ever.

The Rise of Online Movies & TV watching

Perhaps it’s a by-product of the ever declining broadband internet prices in the country and the ever faster speeds (10 mbps launched on 10/10/10) because of which online movies and episodes of the latest Indian or English sitcoms have become the trend to watch whilst free online. Indian movies are the most watched feature on internet with 3 Idiots being the top-most watched movie this year online. This trend is expected to continue even further this year.

The upcoming year appears poised to build on the strength of trends already in place: greater mobility, greener technologies, mobile technologies, more powerful hardware and web-enabled products and applications that focus on collaboration and interoperability. The marching advent of technology and telecom is shaking up the old and ensuring that Pakistan is coming of age in one of the fastest of the new growth industries. With that we bid farewell to 2010 and bring in 2011 with prayers for the prosperity of this great nation for one and for all.

 

A Newbies Guide To Social Media In Pakistan

A Newbies Guide To Social Media In Pakistan

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Social Media scene is active and thriving in Pakistan. From allowing parents to stalk their children and their off-spring’s friends and of course their friends online on sites like Facebook to toppling over might corporate behemoths through the power of the blogs, the power of the people has been clearly been manifested through this medium and also highlighted the fact that we have no lives of our own. However because it is still a relatively new concept, and something that we feel everyone should know about we’ve compiled a glossary of what the whole ‘social’ thing is about in our country.

Social Media Expert: Approximately every third person that you meet online. Such social experts can be usually found twittering & Facebooking away about their lives, their cat, their dog, their cat and dog, their tooth brush and their otherwise inane life. Usually don’t have a clue about social media but can talk great lengths about this great software that will put a link to your site on 21,000 forums and 10,000 blogs with just a click and also offers ‘SMS marketing’ services to complement your social campaign.

Blog: Usually millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. Mostly used for self-obsession, self-promotion and Narcissism. Generally underscore a hunger for fame which usually ensures that people line up to trade punches on various Blagger meetups.

Social media bore: 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the people using social media.

Blagger: Person who writes a Blog.

Lassi: The favorite drink of the blaggers everywhere.

Farmville: The contemporary manner of getting back to nature.

Internet Celebrity: Usually an angry young man with no clue to technology but with a large Internet following. Has been known to talk about his mom calling him a lot of things such as lazy, fat and unclean.

Avatar: What you look like in a virtual world such as a ten foot tall dragon riding blue cat with breasts.

Green Revolution: Adding Green Flags To Your Display Pic.

Small Talk: What you do when Twitter is down.

Quotterer: Someone who spends most part of the day tweeting ‘inspiring’ quotes to his followers such as ‘The Answer My Friend Is Twittering In The Wind’, ‘“Ask not what social media can do for you, ask what you can do for social media” or “Just Tweet It”.

Social Media Agency: Has no clue why it’s offering services such as page management, advertising & spamming 400,000 email addresses but promises the lowest rates to do so.

Display Pic: Ranges from the people who think we’re so interested in them we need to see their childhood photos to the nothing-is-more-natural-than-me-just-kinda-laughing-not-noticing-you’re-taking-a-picture-of-me kind of photos.

Parents: AKA Stalkers. Have been known to tell the opposite gender friends to stay away from their ‘ladla’ via walled posts available to your peers and the public. Also have been known to post your childhood pictures on their accounts and tag you in the process.

Stalkers: We just like watching every little thing you do…. Always.  

Sheep: The new weapon of choice to throw at friends, peers and in the corporate boardroom.

Compatibility: Me & You Is Friends, You Smile, I Smile, You Hurt, I Crack Myself Up Laughing

Poke: A tool used by the young, male population of the country to hit on (probably fake) profiles of the females whom they will never have the nerve to go up to in real life.

Tagged: See parents

Movie Quizzes: The favorite past time during business meetings.

Status Updates: Attention seeking painfully unfunny, unoriginal update on various sites by wannabe philosophers and psychologists. Usually ignored by most people.

Relationship: “It’s Complicated”.

Four Square: A personal advertising tool to make the jobs of robbers, kidnappers & thieves easier.

Band: Angry young angst ridden teens with guitars & drums trying to get a ‘following’ on Facebook by putting up videos of themselves with weird expressions.

YouTube: A site which our politicians try to “Shut Up” often, but usually fail to.

Friends: All of the 10000000000000 people who’ve I’ve added on Facebook.

Comments: LOL

Social Media Addict: The person who actually understood all these terms. Also used for people whose friends lists (see above) are loaded with people you’ve never met, never actually spoken to, and whose name may or may not be real, but somehow feel a close kinship to.

These are some of the ones i could come up with. Join in and let’s add to this list together.

 

Digital Marketing Workshop At Karachi Mariott Hotel, 17th March 2010

It’s finally here. I’ve decided to take the plunge.

I’m offering a comprehensive one-day workshop on Digital marketing for the people involved in marketing & branding. The workshop, which will feature proven techniques for engaging customers at every step of the purchase funnel will be held on March 17th from 9 AM – 5PM and will be hosted at the Mariott Hotel in Karachi, Pakistan. It’s the perfect solution for ongoing training and continuous professional development requirements for all levels of staff, from trainees to senior execs and heavyweights.

Course description

This workshop will provide a fast track understanding of Pakistan’s digital landscape and the elements involved in developing strategies as well as the high level considerations when implementing digital campaigns.

The workshop will look at trends in Pakistan’s digital landscape, what the impact of these trends are on consumers and their media consumption, industry best practices and standards as well as new and innovative uses of the technology in advertising. The workshop also addresses the issues and challenges facing agencies and marketers in adapting their organization to the new digital landscape.

The discussion group format will enable participants to be exposed to the latest in digital marketing as well share experiences and exploring common areas of concern or confusion in the adoption of digital tools.

Why This Workshop

The ad inventory that has been sold for the last 50 years no longer works and marketers have started to figure that out. With declining returns on traditional media campaigns, marketers are increasingly looking for ways to get more out of their budgets in a media landscape that fragments more every year. Digital offers possibilities to do that.

In this workshop you will learn why:

1. Digital Is Not About ‘The Internet’

2. Digital Marketing Is Not About ‘Online Banners’, ‘SEO’, ‘Social Media’, ‘SMS Marketing,’ and so forth

3. Digital Is About Behaviors, Not Technology

4. Digital Marketing Is About Stories & Values, Not Channels Per Se…

5. Why Every Screen, Interface or Object Is An Opportunity For Dialogue, Interaction, Response & Collaboration.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this course participants will:

• Have a sound understanding of the general principles of digital marketing.
• Be conversant with relevant technologies, devices and opportunities for digital communications campaigns.
• Have increased confidence and inspiration for the development of strategic and creative digital communication campaigns
• Understand how to integrate digital into the overall marketing mix.

The e-brochure is posted below:

For registration please contact Mr. Arsalaan Haleem at arsalaan@corporatetrainings.biz. The course fee is Rs. 8500 ($100) only.

For the first time, instead of focusing on just one set of digital tools, this workshop will show the participants how they can engage their customers using the multitude of tools that digital offers at the different stages of the customer’s purchase cycle, whilst at the same time keep tabs on the bottom line.The workshop will also focus on how to integrate the digital experience into traditional marketing campaigns.

Here’s a Peek into what’s going to be presented at the conference:

For comments or questions, do let me know. Looking forward to meeting you there.

 

Enterprise 2.0 – Fostering Innovation

Enterprise Social Computing is the next generation of online collaborative technologies and practices that people use within the enterprise to share knowledge, expertise, experiences and insight with each other. (Definition: IT @ Intel)

Over the last few years, as open APIs, social networking platforms, cloud computing, open identity services, sensor-driven databases (such as with GPS and OpenStreetMap), or even people (example: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) have created open ecosystems in which anyone can participate, including business, both to contribute and to consume, the Web has become the ultimate ‘people platform’ and one that is incredibly agile too, combined with economies of scale that are very hard to match. However it has thrown up its own challenges, unpredictabilities and risks which must be dealt with both routinely and successfully.

To perform well in this changing business environment organizations have adopted a more positive mindset towards Enterprise 2.0 technologies, since many enable the empowerment of the employees, making the organization nimbler and more innovative in a very challenging world. These also serve to protect the heart and soul of the enterprise- it’s knowledge.

Some of the reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is taking off are:

Protection of Intellectual Property

Employees in all enterprises are already using open ‘insecure’ social media tools. Knowledge workers use these tools for many reasons including how they fit their lifestyles, are universally accessible, easy to use and most of all are highly empowering. However for enterprises, these lead to increased concerns about ‘intellectual property’ and other information assets. This is because many of these sites have policies that effectively require users to give up their right to privacy. Also some of the sites can lay claim ownership of all content posted on the site in perpetuity (IP nightmare), including the right to share the information with third parties meaning if employees use an external blogging or microblogging site to communicate, their posts may be read by anyone, anywhere and the sites can also lay claim to the information shared which may be confidential in nature.

Thus there is a need to define balanced security measures and controls, update use policies and ensure all employees know how to use these technologies appropriately. Additionally, if enterprises do not take up such initiatives e.g. Intel IT which provided its own social computing platform, the use of fragmented internal tools and insecure external tools will continue to grow.

Beyond IP security however enterprises have learnt that there are other reasons to give employees access to Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Spur Innovation

Rick Hutley, VP Internet Business Solutions at Cisco said “There’s a huge opportunity to leverage skills and expertise you already have in your company, but the problem is finding it”. The great promise of Enterprise 2.0 is to uncover and tap into the hidden talent of an organization. Social computing if done right can address many challenges, such as helping employees to find relevant information and expertise morequickly, increasing interactive collaboration across the enterprise, breaking down silos, spurring radical innovation and capturing the tacit knowledge of existing employees.

Amongst other things, social computing enables:

– Improvement of sharing, discovery and aggregation of information

– Finding experts fast

– Expanding network & enhance career development

– Aiding real-time collaboration

– Sharing innovative ideas

– Building communities

Attract, Develop & Retain Gen-Y As Employees

Enterprises have also realized that the ‘google generation’ comes with a different mind-set than that pervaded during the time of baby boomers and such Enterprise 2.0 tools can help attract and retain employees. It’s a known fact that in traditional organizations employees may work closely with people worldwide, but in many cases wouldn’t recognize team members if they passed them in the hall.

From closed command and control structures which garnered fear of making mistakes to this new world we are now transitioning to a work-place which is more consensus driven,

informal and requires more mentoring and exploration of options. The new workers are more accustomed to working across divisions than the previous generation which was stuck in its silos leading to massive behavioral shifts in the work-place. Thus it is via using tools such as these which can help engage the Gen Y worker, connect employees together, thereby making an enterprise even as massive as Intel feel “small” and help tackle feelings of isolation. These tools can also help mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce, help employees work more effectively over time & distance and improve speeds of finding relevant information & people.

Implementation Of Enterprise 2.0

One of the approaches towards the implementation of such can be read at IT@Intel’s, which has Intel’s own Case Study on ‘Developing An Enterprise Social Computing Strategy’. However, for those who just want to experiment with these technologies, they can set on the 2.0 path with something as simple as an internal company wide blog which can be used for a variety of purposes.

In the Future

Social computing’s new collaborative technologies will provide effective channels for communication, collaboration, teamwork, networking, and innovation and in the post internet world, this is increasingly how companies will unleash innovation within their processes and secure the best and the brightest talent.

Enterprise Social Computing is the next generation of online collaborative technologies and

practices that people use within the enterprise to share knowledge,

expertise, experiences and insight with each other. (Definition: IT @ Intel) In my previous post we took a look at why enterprises adopted a positive mindset towards Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

These enterprises are facing massive pressure to adopt these new technologies because of many reasons.

The primary reason is the protection of intellecutual property. Employees in all enterprises are already using open ‘insecure’ social media tools. Knowledge workers use these tools for many reasons including how they fit their lifestyles, are universally accessible, easy to use and most of all are highly empowering. However for enterprises, these lead to increased concerns about ‘intellectual property’ and other information assets. This is because many of these sites have privacy policies that effectively require users to give up their right to privacy. Also some of the sites can lay claim ownership of all content posted on the site in perpetuity (IP nightmare), including the right to share the information with third parties meaning if employees use an external blogging or microblogging site to communicate, their posts may be read by anyone, anywhere.

Thus there is a need to define balanced security measures and controls, update use policies and ensure all employees know how to use these technologies appropriately. Additionally, if enterprises such as the initiative taken by Intel IT will not provide a social computing platform, use of fragmented internal tools and insecure external tools will continue to grow.

Beyond IP security however there are other reasons to give employees access to Enterprise 2.0 tools. The great promise of Enterprise 2.0 is to uncover and tap into the hidden talent of an organization. Rick Hutley, VP Internet Business Solutions at Cisco said “There’s a huge opportunity to leverage skills and expertise you already have in your company, but the problem is finding it”.

Social computing if done right can address many challenges, such as helping employees to find relevant information and expertise more quickly; increasing interactive collaboration across the enterprise, breaking down silos; spurring radical innovation; and capturing the tacit knowledge of existing employees.

Amongst other things, social computing enables:

– Improvement of sharing, discovery and aggregation of information

– Finding experts fast

– Expanding network & enhance career development

– Aiding real-time collaboration

– Sharing innovative ideas

– Building community

Enterprises have also realized that the ‘google generation’ comes with a different mind-set than that pervaded during the time of baby boomers and such Enterprise 2.0 tools can help attract and retain employees. It’s a known fact that in traditional organizations employees may work closely with people worldwide, but in many cases wouldn’t recognize team members if they passed them in the hall.

From closed command and control structures which garnered fear of making mistakes to this new world which is more consensus driven, informal and require more mentoring and exploration of options. The new workers are more accustomed to working across divisions than the previous generation which was stuck in its silo leading to massive behavorial shifts. These tools help engage the Gen Y worker, connect & engage employees to make an enterprise even as massive as Intel’s own feel “small” and help tackle feelings of isolation. These also help Mitigate impact of a maturing workforce. These also help the employees work more effectively over time & distance and Improve speed of finding relevant information & people.

One of the approaches towards the implementation of such a tool can be read at http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-3603. However, the more traditional enterprises can set on the path with an internal company wide blog. Social computing’s new collaborative technologies will provide effective channels for communication, collaboration, teamwork, networking, and innovation and in the post internet world, this is increasingly how companies will unleash innovation within their processes and secure the best and the brightest talent in the world.

Check out the presentation below for more information on Intel’s version of social computing:

more about “Enterprise 2.0 – Social Computing II“, posted with vodpod

 

Marketing 2.0 – Leveraging Facebook For Brand Building

Facing Up To Facebok

Published Dawn, Aurora Magazine, Jun-Jul, 2009 Issue.

Facebook

Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman first discovered walls. Thus it can be said that the phenomenon of social media and social networks is not new. Even in Pakistan, the most popular applications that were ever installed on PCs were framed around communication and sharing – bulletin boards, mIRC, instant messaging through software like MSN Messenger, AOL or ICQ, chat-rooms, etc were very popular in the last decade.

In recent times, however technology has enabled the twin modes of communication and sharing on an unprecedented scale on what are called social networking sites examples of which include MySpace, Zedge, LinkedIn, Orkut and Facebook. These are changing the human fabric of the Internet in Pakistan with over 1.83 m users on Orkut and over 500,000 users on Facebook alone.

Pakistani marketers are eager to tap into these platforms. They have realized that it’s critical for them to reach the tech-savvy youth demographic that thrives on these sites. On Facebook e.g. out of the total 574,740 (Figure: May, 2009) people from Pakistan, 436,680 are between the age of 18-30. Thus social networks do have the potential to pay off big for marketers if they learn how to use it properly.

There has been ample growth in advertising on these sites and the figures speak for themselves. Eyeblaster Pakistan, a leading internet marketing company reports Adex on Facebook in 2008 was USD 150,000 out of the total USD 1.6 million (some sources cite USD 3.0 m) spent on online advertising and increasing every year.

Facebook Apps

However if we take advertising on Facebook (the most advertised site) as a case study, it has continuously produced less than stellar results for advertisers. Facebook is a social network site that brings friends together according to interests, existing connections, networks and groups. Yet while the targeting on the site is phenomenal, Facebook users are more engaged by the content within the site rather than the advertisements. It can even be said that Facebook is a little too engaging. The metrics tell the story. With historically high CPMs (current avg. CPM on Facebook for Pakistan is $0.95) and historically low click-thru, Facebook is facing a challenge to produce effective campaigns for the marketers. The graph below highlights the problem with objectives set around CTR.

EyeBlaster Data of Various Campaigns runs on FB & Zedge

Description	Facebook.com	Zedge.net
Standard Banner – Average CTR Range	0.10 % to 0.12%	0.4% to 0.75%
Rich Banner – Average CTR Range	0.53% to 2.67%	0.95% to 4%
Average Dwell Time	0.41 Seconds	0.44 seconds
User Engagement (Brand interaction Rate)	10% – 40%	30% – 75%

Source: Eyeblaster, Pakistan

However this same graph might be viewed differently if the objectives of the campaigns were to be changed to ‘User engagement’ or ‘Brand awareness’ instead of how many leads were generated through CTR. e.g. in terms of branding efficiency, you’re getting your name, logo and ad in front of thousands of people for pennies per thousand. If such were the objectives, then the efficacy of campaign will boil down to the advertised content – what do you advertise that works and what sort of rate do you get? However even then it’s not as simple. The world average of User Dwell Time on FB is around 20 minutes a day (Figures: Jan 2009) with global 50% daily logins (both numbers for Pakistan are not available). The peak amount of time spent on the site tapers off at 190 minutes. That means that a ridiculous number of impressions are being spent on the same user and that will understandably will generate low click-through rates.

Another thing marketers need to realize about social networks like Facebook is that unlike say Google, users on Facebook don’t want to leave the site. With Google the goal is to redirect the user to another site as quickly as possible. Facebook’s goal is to hold the users attention as long as they can.

Tip: When creating ad campaigns on Facebook, consider linking it to your Facebook company page instead of an off page website.  This way the user remains within Facebook and can continue utilizing the full functionality.

Facebook advertising also will never be truly effective for the users who have even a tiny bit of knowledge about PCs. For example any display banner can simply be blocked automatically with the Firefox Browser’s adblock feature.

Facebook Pages

Thus keeping the above in mind, advertisers need to approach the Facebook medium differently. There’s a lot of focus on advertising, banner ads and the amount of traffic but to really connect to your customer it’s important to look beyond traditional forms of web adverting to see the real potential… that Facebook is a great place for relevant traffic, without the need to pay for ads! There are millions of groups associated with all kinds of subjects in the Facebook empire, so whatever niche you specialize in there is usually a collection of individuals talking about it somewhere in that world. The challenge is leveraging the connectivity of the sites and using them to form communities around products, media or services. This approach will also ensure that you are actually connected with your users.

It would be wise for marketers to take a page out of the history of MySpace, another very popular Social Network. MySpace when launched was effectively ignored by the press and digerati. They gained traction with the musicians who were just starting to get that social network sites were valuable. Based in Los Angeles, they had an upper hand. They managed to attract club promoters and others catering to 20-something urban hipsters who were looking for a tool for coolhunting. Slowly, a symbiotic relationship emerged on MySpace as bands and fans became mutually dependent on one another. Against this backdrop, the youth phenomena emerged.

What companies can learn from this case is that social networks have the power beyond ad revenue to act as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for them. As in much of media, creativity is the key here. If you can find the type of ad that Facebook users will click, that’s one thing, but if you can build something they’ll click, engage with (or buy) and help you spread, you’ve got something far more exciting

FB Users

and effective. One campaign that used this technique very successfully was the Burger King “Whopper Sacrifice” application, which recently also earned a Grand CLIO in Interactive. BK developed a Facebook app that once installed promised to give the user a coupon for a free hamburger if they were to delete 10 people from their friend’s list to prove how they preferred the Whopper over their friends. The “sacrifices” showed up in the activity feed. So it said, for example, “Caroline sacrificed Josh for a free Whopper.” Facebook ended up disabling the WHOPPER Sacrifice, after the love of the user for the WHOPPER Sandwich proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.

All things said it also has to be remembered that not all products can be successfully marketed on Facebook. A new company or a brand that’s not a household name will have a tough time jumping into the mix, but so will established companies that don’t necessarily have public opinion on their side. It’s tough to get the conversation started when no one’s primed to talk about it and this is the challenge on Social Networks that brands must muster. They must remember that it’s not the marketers who are powerful on these sites, it’s the people and people empowered by technology won’t always go along.

Media isn’t neatly boxed into little rectangles called newspapers, TV or magazines anymore. People now connect to other people and draw power from crowds, especially IN crowds. If you want to be part of the Social Networks marketing process, than you have to be part of the conversations – that’s when real marketing takes place.