What’s the price of a Facebook Fan? It’s 5 dollars

Recently Babies R Us ran a Facebook campaign that caught my attention. There were a number of campaign elements that were executed well and the result was a positive network effect. There were also areas that could have been capitalized upon to drive further value.

The premise of the campaign was driven by the promise of a $5 digital e-card for becoming a Facebook fan. The catch was it was a 1 day campaign.

7 things I liked about the experience:

1) A one day promotion provides a sense of urgency to take action with a truly valuable and tangible benefit.

2) Simple, audience specific image with a very clear call to action. Sometimes simple is better.

3) Ability to immediately blast all friends increases potential viral distribution. This increases by additional adoption as visibility into friends recent activity amplify the impact and potential drive to action.

4) Low barrier to initiate the action as all that was required was to click “Become a fan” which leads directly to a very brief profiling exercise with clear rules & terms and does not present form or information overload.

5) I really liked the SMS opt-in being handled within the profile experience as mobile is a natural extension beyond a Facebook driven channel interaction.

6) Delivery of the e-card occurred within 2 days with the added benefit of use online & in-store highly increasing my probability of actually using it.

7) Network proliferation (at least through my wifes/target network) was immediate and visible as a significantly high percentage of her network participated in the campaign.

7 Areas of focus that could have further enhanced results beyond the standard campaign:

1) Further amplify & drive awareness prior to and after the event. Drive 5-10 day interaction strategy through multiple social channels to further hype the event. This includes targeting key niche (e.g. Ovusoft, Playground Dad) communities and driving influencer build-up to the event to further amplify the promotion.

2) This also accounts for influencial “mommy” bloggers and “super” dads. One key point is that Blog actually stands for B. Better L. Listing. O. On G. Google. As within product category segments 30-60% of top search results are blog driven. Outreach to same group to write about the campaign and the positive impact and build anticipation for a possible future event.

3) Capitalize immediately on the opportunity to cross promote to the target market segment. Specifically on the “Thank You” page would have been a great opportunity to drive through to a branded interaction or to a select group of targeted products.

4) Immediate recognition of SMS opt-in by sending a confirmation message offering additional incentive for accepting the opt-in.

5) Take this as an opportunity to leverage a proximity based service with devices in store locations to continue to amplify cost savings by leveraging the existing opt-in.

6) As with any strategy where profiling occurs the ability to now directly tie these individuals into an actionable marketing queue is invaluable. Capitalizing on more than just capturing the data is one of the keys to truly driving the value from social channels.

7) The follow-up e-mail was very thorough with categories, calls to action to both Babies R Us and Toys R Us. The format was pure HTML. There needs to be a plain text option as well to cover all bases.

Conclusions & Measurement:

Overall I liked the premise and execution of the campaign. I will be interested in measuring the Key performance indicators (KPI’s) if they become available such as the delta between number of friends prior and after the promotion, retention of new “fans”, number of profile opt-ins, number of mobile opt-ins, etc.

*Credit for discovery of the promotion goes to my wife. Thanks Cherlyn!!!