There is a lot of chat about Clients (and agencies) jumping on the Social media bandwagon - in our experience this usually results in a brief involving "Do facebook" or "Tell me what I can do with Twitter?" now there is nothing wrong with this as long as they are willing to back track and clearly explain the rationale - that way we can ensure that the outcome matches the objective or intention - we find the POST approach as outlined by Forrester works best ie People / Objective / Strategy and Technology (in that order). So it was good to see a campaign that IKEA ran recently to promote new store opening in Malmo. In short using nothing but Facebook’s built-in and readily available tagging features, IKEA was able to gain hundreds of new ‘friends’ and fans, and virally spread the IKEA catalog offerings to thousands of Facebook profiles. They did this by creating a Facebook profile for store manager Gordon Gustavsson. Over the next 2 weeks, 12 pictures of IKEA showrooms were uploaded to his profile. Facebook friends of Gustavsson could ‘tag’ the items in the photos with their name and literally win the product. the activity became highly viral and as word spread through profiles, newsfeeds and Gustavsson’s page, mor ad more people became friends with him.

Although this did not achieve huge number of views and he did not gain vast numbers of friends plus apparently according to http://www.contently-managed.com/blog/2009/11/26/why-ikeas-social-media-stunt-wasnt-a-huge-success/ it did not acheive a positive ROI but it did follow the rules - it took into account the fact that people were on FB, it enegaged and interacted with them and it used the right technology.

Just looking forward to the opening in Putney now !