IKEA’s Facebook Campaign Gets Praise
“Brilliant, innovative, smart yet simple, genius, outside the box, awesome, excellent, unconventional” are just some of the terms used in many blog postings and headlines to describe the new IKEA Facebook campaign, designed by Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors, to promote the opening of its new IKEA store in Mälmo.
IKEA’s showcase video, viewed 115,000 times on YouTube since November 18
Without breaking the bank on exorbitant budgets the agency managed to create a ripple effect of buzz and engagement, that would not spread just throughout Sweden, but throughout Europe and beyond.
The agency, which has a long-standing relationship with Ikea (dating back to 1996), used one of the most popular and basic functions on Facebook, tagging pictures, and used it to IKEA’s advantage to promote its showroom products. After creating a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson, the team then uploaded IKEA showrooms images to Mr. Gustavsson’s Facebook photo album over a two-week period.
Facebook friends of Gustavsson were then encouraged to tag items in the photos with their names, for a chance of winning that object for free.
As word about the campaign spread, the photos were tagged within seconds of being uploaded and requests came rolling in for more pictures. People used their Facebook profiles, newsfeeds and links, email and other forms of word of mouth to tell their friends and family.
The photo tagging promotional giveaway took off like wildfire making the Malmo Ikea store widely popular in just a few weeks. Throughout the world blogs have picked up the story, like Marketing Media in Russia, Ninja Marketing in Italy, La Voz de Galicia in Spain, TV Internety in the Czech Republic, Bright and Molblog in the Netherlands, Brand Republic & eConsultancy in the UK, Mashable, iMedia Connection and CNET in the USA.
“Instead of just looking at a banner with furniture, we got people them to personally promote IKEA” said Forsman & Bodenfors on their YouTube video.
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Follow Category?Facebook Marketing |
Follow Author?Paul van Veenendaal |
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Follow Tags?facebookgordon gustavssoikeaphoto |
This seems like an eye-opener to many CMO’s?
Cheers
December 1, 2009, 01:55
This is an interesting idea but I’m wondering if it’s technically a violation of Facebook’s terms of use. I thought that all contests/sweepstakes/etc. needed to be run on a separate platform or app that could run in Facebook such as Wildfire or similar. Maybe I’m not right about this but worth checking out further before you recommend this tactic to your clients.
Dobar primjer virusne kampanje na Facebooku (IKEA) http://tinyurl.com/yfhp8us
Definitely need to be careful with the terms and conditions when running any promotions on Facebook. The newly updated promotions guidelines should make it much easier for small to medium businesses to get involved in this kind of thing though.
I’m not likely to say what everybody else has already said, but I really do wish to touch upon your understanding of the topic. You’re really well-informed. I cant think just how much of this I merely wasnt conscious of. Thanks for bringing much more info to this topic for me. Im really grateful and truly impressed.
February 14, 2012, 10:11
Hi i want to run a tagging contest on my facebook fan page, is there any application (approved by facebook) i can use for this competition? or can i not use contest app for this particular contest?
The apps i have seen so far does not include tagging the picture uploaded on the app as a feature.