The rise of MySpace and Facebook and their head-of-the-tail brothers and sisters around the globe (e.g. Mixi, Bebo, others) as well as the splintering of niche networks from Eons to Gather to Habbo have left marketers eagerly exploring how to use them without spoiling the experience.
Bands and brands have become commonplace throughout MySpace. Many establish a presence yet many of those fall short of getting meaningfully involved in community.
Some brands start their own social networks like Barbie and Pontiac Firebird (Pontiac Underground done with Yahoo, of all people). With 3 million members in the first few months, Barbie Girls seems to demonstrate that brands can pull that off. But the trick may be to stay somewhat humble and focused and offer a social experience that is smaller and closer to the brand.
Today, Reuters features a story on Wal-Mart's use of Facebook to market in relation to back to school. Instead of "owning" the social network, they settle to play nice and try to get involved in a way that doesn't overpower the community. Here's the brief description:
"The world's largest retailer on Wednesday is launching the "Roommate Style Match" group on Facebook, a social networking site that has millions of college-age users, in the hopes of grabbing a larger chunk of back-to-school shopping dollars.
Facebook users who join the Wal-Mart group will be able to take a quiz to determine their decorating style and get a list of "recommended products" they can buy at Wal-Mart to mesh their style with their roommate's.
Students can also download a shopping list of dorm room items sold at Wal-Mart, link to Wal-Mart's Web site promoting "earth-friendly" products, or click on Soundcheck, Wal-Mart's Web site showing musical performances by singers like Bon Jovi and Mandy Moore."
Is that a good practice or a bad one? It seems that Wal-Mart is at least trying to play by the rules and be of-use to the 12 million-or-so college student members of Facebook.
A Man With Experience
The story made me think of what Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy (also PodTech) shared about his own use of Facebook. He created a group around "web strategy" and it quickly grew to 1000 people. Now he uses that group to push out information on his topic and even to float jobs and such.
I asked him what he thought of Wal-Mart's play here:
"Walmart's direction to join an existing community and harness the power of distributed widgets is a sound web strategy. Previously, Walmart created a MySpace-ish on their own domain, a ghost town that was closed after a short 10 weeks. Why didn't anyone show up to this MySpace-ish clone? Because MySpace already existed. Will it work? Success will depend limiting the advertising and marketing components, the value should focus on the user benefit. Here's good wishes to Walmart on Round 2 --Let go to gain more."
Remember when Wal-Mart tried to launch the MySpace-killer, the Hub? But today's approach is much different.
One thing I have to hand to Wal-Mart - they take a licking but they keep on ticking. They keep experiementing and haven't been disuaded by the mistakes made or bumps in the road. More brands should jump in. So long as you do it respectfully and with some humility.
Agreed - have to give Wal-Mart props for keeping at it and trying new approaches.
Jeremiah's quote is dead on, especially the part about focusing on the USER BENEFIT. Will college kids actually find the Roommate Style Match quiz useful, or will they see it as a gimmicky ploy? Personally, if my soon-to-be roommate forwarded me a room style quiz, I'd be thinking: 1) this guy's a tool, and 2) I need to find a new roommate. I'm sure others might find it useful though...especially since you can share the results of the quiz on your profile page.
For me, it's interesting to think about how Wal-Mart is planning to grow its Facebook group. As you know, entering communities respectfully is a delicate process. Beyond sponsored placements within the community (display ads, etc), linking to the group via Wal-Mart's corporate site and in-store promotions, what else is kosher? I can't imagine students will actively seek out Wal-Mart in Facebook..
That said, what's your take on corporations actively inviting people to join Facebook groups? It's a very fine line...my belief is that proactive invites and friending is something that marketers should avoid at all costs. A corporate presence can't be forced -- it needs to be something that the community seeks out. This all goes back to Jeremiah's point re: the user benefit. If the experience is exceptional, the group will grow organically.
It will be interesting to watch how Wal-Mart's group develops. They appear to be going about it correctly this time. Hopefully it will be a success.
Posted by: Andrew | August 10, 2007 at 05:50 PM
Thanks for the information, I did'nt know about this, it's so much info that's useful.
Posted by: M Johnson | January 24, 2008 at 08:33 PM