Inside Facebook

Credits, free money and fear were used by different brands this week to attract more Likes, customers and promote brand loyalty. Dunkin Donuts, UNO and Publishers Clearing House lured users with free money while the German crime show Notruf Deutschland utilized a user’s profile to instill fear in them. Finally, Milyoni’s new Social Theater app lets users buy movies right on Facebook.

We’ve excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Be President of Dunkin’ Nation

Goal: Network Exposure, Page Growth, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: Dunkin’ Donuts is combining a promotion on its Page with check-in services from Facebook and Foursquare to give away prizes.

Method: Users may check in once an hour up to 10 times per day from one of the location services after registering on the Facebook Page in order to win. Participants who check in often enough may be crowned the “President of Dunkin’ Nation” and other users are eligible to win a daily sweepstakes of prizes including an LCD TV, gift cards, t-shirts, mugs and more.

Impact: The promotion begins today and runs until September 23.

Milyoni’s Social Theater Screening of “The Big Lebowski”

Goal: Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: A Facebook purchase of a movie from the Page that may be viewed an unlimited amount of times in a 48 hours period.

Method: Users simply visit the film’s Facebook Page, click on the Social Theater (beta) tab and then agree to purchase the film with Facebook Credits. Buyers have the chance to share their purchase to the stream and save five of their friends  $1 dollar off the rental price of $3, or 30 Credits.

Impact: Facebook says the Watch The Big Lebowski app has 296 MAU, which isn’t necessarily bad given that it’s a movie rental and it’s currently in beta. The app is part of Milyoni’s new Social Theater app.

Brands used everything from coupons to nostalgia to recruit Likes on their Facebook Pages this week. Pizza Hut gave out coupons, while Domino’s Pizza gave out free pizzas with a side of nostalgia, then there were sweepstakes for guitars, cars and vacations from Clearasil, Super8 and Cost Plus World Market.

We’ve excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Pizza Hut’s Get Your P’Zone

Goal: Page Growth, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: A coupon application on the Page allowing users to receive a discount on the company’s P’Zone product.

Method: Users who visited the Pizza Hut Page during the past week were able to use a branded application to make an order on the company’s website and then receive $5 off that order. The Page was Like-gated for users who wanted to receive the discount on the pizza and the company also offered customers the chance to receive coupons via email or text message.

Impact: The Page shows good growth last week during the offer, jumping about 130,000 Likes, according to AppData.

Domino’s Pizza Noid Shootout

Goal: Page Growth, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase, Engagement

Core Mechanic: An arcade-style game on the Page that promises free pizzas to the highest scores and then awards coupons, publishes feed stories and adds people to the company’s email lists when the game is over.

Method: The arcade game’s premise is that the company’s old mascot stole 10,080 free pizzas and is set to award those pizzas to the users with the highest scores. The game is basically just shooting pizzas, easy to play in other words, and when it’s over users who do not win are offered coupons for other free food. Then they are prompted to enter their email to receive those pizzas, being added to the company’s email list in the process, and publish a feed story announcing their win.

This campaign has another angle, however, since it incorporate Domino’s Pizza’s older mascot, Noid. The arcade-style game and old mascot trigger nostalgia, and users win free food just for taking the trip down memory lane, even if they don’t win the game. Plus, users can return to play multiple times, increasing engagement.

Impact: The Page grew by about 109,000 Likes in the past week according to PageData. That means probably more than 100,000 users Liked the Page as a result of the game, and the many news feed stories published by game reached even more users.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

UK Officials Meet With Facebook to Stem Riots – United Kingdom officials are set to meet with Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry regarding their corporate responsibility to not fuel riots, such as those recently plaguing London. One possible outcome: to suspend social networks when governments deem it an emergency.

NYPD Forms Social Media Tracking Unit – The New York Police Department has recently formed a unit specifically to track activity on Facebook and Twitter. Specifically information about parties, gang activity and other problems will be the focus. [Image via Facebook]

Facebook is Not Posting Phone Numbers – Facebook is responding to a viral warning that the company is “stealing” or posting users’ phone numbers for everyone to see. It says phone numbers of friends are kept private.

European Social Network Netlog Banned From Facebook – Netlog, a European social network with roughly 80 million user has been banned from the Facebook Platform after it tried to “access internal Facebook APIs and deliberately compromised intended limitations of our platform acebook has banned the European,” Facebook said.

Facebook, Ceglia, Continue to Duel – Last week Facebook announced that it had “smoking gun” evidence against would-be Facebook owner Paul Ceglia to prove that his lawsuit is frivolous. Then, it turns out, Ceglia is in Ireland and saying he’s being harassed by Facebook.

More Facebook Means More Narcissism – Facebook can lead to mental health issues for teens according to one psychology professor’s research. The American Psychological Association conference presentation included information that heavy Facebook users suffering anxiety and depression, and are more likely to be narcissistic.

Facebook Helps College Newspapers – Facebook has created a guide for college media on how to use Facebook in different ways in the newsroom. [Image via Facebook]

Our Eyes Perceive Facebook, Google+ Similarly – A study found that Google+ has a setup that allows users to perceive it almost identically to Facebook. The study from EyeTrackShop tracked the order of visual fixation for 54 users, finding high correlation between the two networks.

Google+ Set to Surpass Twitter – A study from the UK found that Google+ is set to become the second-largest social network after Facebook.

Other Announcements:

Vitrue, Clear Channel Radio Partner – Vitrue and Clear Channel Radio have announced a partnership in which all of the company’s 850 radio stations will implement Vitrue’s SRM platform.

Buckaroo Unveils Social Media Promotions – Buckaroo has announced a new way that businesses can combine social deals with email marketing, Facebook and Twitter. The technology is designed for small businesses.

Career Notify Leverages Facebook in Job Hunt – Career Notify is a recruitment and head hunting service that sends email notifications to Facebook friends and contacts whenever anyone gets a new job, promotion, or resigns.

Among the tactics used by the brands on our featured Facebook campaign roundup this week, a restaurant asked its reward club members to help grow the Page, Bissell (a maker of vacuum cleaners) wanted to help pet lovers help pets across the country, a bank offered tennis lovers a crack at playing with a pro and TNT promoted its basketball coverage by offering all types of updates on its new Page.

We’ve excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of dozens of other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Buca di Beppo’s Social Media Day Challenge

Goal: Page Growth, Product Purchase, Engagement, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: Buca di Beppo, an Italian restaurant chain, prompted its rewards club members to help the chain grow the Facebook Page for Social Media Day.

Method: The promotion asked users to help grow the Page past 100,000 Likes in honor of Social Media Day and utilized email marketing, as well as Twitter and Facebook. The reward for rewards club members once the Page reached 100,000 Likes (from 66,000) was a $10 reward certificate.

Impact: The campaign generated 100,000 Likes in seven hours, with 14,000 likes in the first hour. Currently the Page comes in just under 131,000 likes. This campaign highlights what we frequently see on our campaigns posts, that people love free stuff, in this case a $10 coupon. The campaign was successful because it created a value exchange between rewards customers, who then asked their friends to Like the Page, converting them into brand evangelists.

Like Bissell, Love Pets Challenge

Goal: Engagement, Page Growth, Brand Loyalty, Charity, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: By Liking the Bissell Page, users can prompt the company to donate $0.50 to the Petfinder.com Foundation to help rescue dogs and cats.

Method: After a user Likes the Page, the app calculates the total amount of money donated to pets by Liking the Page. Users have to enter their name, email and zip code to complete their donation, however.

Impact: Thus far the total donated on the Page, with 47,500 Likes, is $21,555.50, which translates into a lot of Likes on the Page. What’s more, when Bissell asks users for their email address, a box is automatically checked for the company’s email list. So, overall the promotion was pretty successful, paints Bissell as a charitable company and boosts its email distribution list, too.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of dozens of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Relevvant is the developer of the Facebook Page tab application TextualAds, which allows Page admins to collect phone numbers from fans and publish targeted SMS updates to them. And the company has made an interesting move today, partnering with Constant Contact to bring its app to the Facebook Pages of the email marketing giant’s 500,000-plus clients.

The partnership should help Constant Contact keep its service offering relevant as more marketing occurs on Facebook.

Constant Contact has already made several acquisitions in the last year to further this same goal. In February it bought social CRM startup Bantam Live, which offered a dashboard for managing messaging and workflow activity surrounding contacts on Facebook and Twitter in real time. In May 2010 it acquired NutshellMail, whose system for aggregating social media updates into emailed digests it used to offer a social media tracking system for clients.

Now, Constant Contact customers will have access to TextualAds. Facebook Page admins enter the app which provides a WYIWYG editor for designing an SMS alerts signup tab application to be hosted on their Page. Phone numbers collected from the tab can sent text messages informing the fans about discounts, contests, events, or other news. TextualAds permits admins to target specific subsets of their audience based on location and profile characteristics.

Admins can view dashboards of metrics on subscribers and SMS campaigns, and can receive a special keyword and shortcode that allows fans to signup for SMS updates via text message. They can also receive the code for a TextualAds widget for display elsewhere on the web. The partnership will permit easy importing and exporting of user contact information between TextualAds and Constant Contact.

Email marketing companies are becoming a consolidating force in the Facebook ecosystem as they spend the cash they earned during the boom years prior to the emergence of social networks to buy Facebook-related services relevant to their core businesses. In January, Experian purchased Facebook Ads API developer Techlightenment in January, and FanBridge acquired musician and brand promotion app developer DamnTheRadio.

Small developers building utility apps for marketing and communication, social advertising technologies, and page management are in a strong position to take advantage of the service gaps of well-established but slower moving companies from the pre-social era. They can either provide necessary complements to clients of these old service suites, become acquisition targets like the companies listed above, or strike lucrative partnerships that open doors to huge volumes of clients as Relevvant has done here.

Photo and video contests were popular on our roundup of featured Facebook campaigns this week. Virgin America, PetSmart and Tourism New Zealand each used a variation on that theme. Meanwhile, film director Peter Jackson used his official Facebook Page to promote a film not due out until next year, Warner Music is set to create a virtual world for one of its featured artists and a Tblisi, Georgia-based bank is using Facebook to engage its customers when they’re out of the store.

We’ve excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of dozens of other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Virgin America’s Flight for Chicago

Goal: Page Growth, Engagement, Network Exposure, Charity, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: A photo and video contest that users can enter to both win free airfare and donate money to cancer research.

Method: The One Trick Pony-designed promotion is Like-gated and allows users to participate either by voting or uploading photos and videos in line with the Flight for Chicago Challenge. As part of Virgin America’s upcoming new daily flights to Chicago O’Hare International Airport from Los Angeles and San Francisco, the airline is trying to get customers involved in the “fight” to bring more affordable airfare to the Chicago area.

Users may share media that promote “rising above the ordinary” or showing they are not “featherweight flyers” to receive a two-for-one offer on the chicago flights, but Virgin America will also donate $5 per entry to Stand Up To Cancer, a cancer research organization. The winner will fly on one of the inaugural flights between Chicago and the new destinations and there are 10 additional winners. The promotion lasts until May 11.

Impact: There are about 100 entries so far, not bad since the promotion just opened up last week. The Virgin America Page has about 92,000 Likes so far. This particular promotion is a great combination of entering to win a prize, but also being able to make a charity donation, and is an example other campaigns could emulate.

PetSmart’s Just Doggin’ Around Photo Contest and Sweepstakes

Goal: Engagement, Network Exposure, Page Growth, Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: The Just Doggin’ Around Photo Contest and Sweepstakes allows users to submit photos of their dogs, use their networks to get friends to vote for their photo, and have a chance to win prizes.

Method: The contest is Like-gated, so users first must Like the PetSmart Page, then submit photos of their dogs caught “doggin’ around”, with a brief description to enter the contest. Entrants may win a daily drawing, one of 9 runner-up prizes or the grand prize. The runner-up prizes include gift cards, pet apparel or a dog makeover, the grand prize is a four day, three night trip to Miami, Florida where your dog can stay at a per spa, plus a cash prize and more merchandise. Daily winners win $50 gift cards to PetSmart.

Perhaps one of the best things about this campaign is that the branding is wound through and through the contest. Not only with the prizes, the Like-gating of the promotion, but also the promotion directs users back to PetSmart services, such as providing grooming tips for your dogs (PetSmart provides this service. When a user participates in the promotion a feed story with a thumbnail is published to the stream.

Impact: The Votigo-powered promotion ran from March 28 through April 24, the Page’s total Likes recently numbered 245,6500 and entries total about 10,100. Multiply that 10,100 by the network exposure every time someone voted or uploaded a photo and PetSmart likely received a lot of exposure for their money on this particular promotion.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of dozens of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Facebook stepped up its marketing efforts recently for its new group-buying feature Deals. Users have seen home page ads asking them to invite their friends to subscribe to news feed and email notifications about Deals. Meanwhile, Page admins have received location-customized emails from Facebook explaining that Deals could help them acquire more customers in their city. Facebook needs to build large subscriber and provider-bases to prime the service for an explosive formal launch.

On March 15th, Facebook soft-launched Deals, showing news feed stories asking users to sign up to hear about local pre-paid group experiences they could have with friends. The service, which lets users purchase packages such as a luxury winery tour for $50, uses the same name previously reserved for Facebook’s location-based Places checkin rewards system, now call Checkin Deals.

By serving updates directly to the news feed, Facebook Deals has an advantage over Groupon, LivingSocial, and other daily deals providers who spend millions on Facebook ads in order to collect email sign ups and alert users to new offers. But Facebook is late to join the race and needs to build a subscriber-base from zero. In contrast, Groupon said it expected to have over 25 million subscribers by the end of 2010, and some sources say it has as many as 40 million worldwide.

Luckily, Facebook has a captive audience of over 500 million users to draw from, as well as control over the communication channels that reach them. Facebook can serve ads encouraging sign-ups, like the one shown above, in unused premium ad inventory on its home page. It can also manipulate its news feed algorithm EdgeRank to give stories about friends signing up for Deals high visibility in the feed in order to drive more subscriptions — something it appears to already be doing.

Meanwhile, Facebook needs to register as many local business as possible in the five launch cities so it can pick and choose which Deals to serve. If it can launch the service with highly compelling, valuable social Deals that users are eager to buy and share with friends, user signups and merchants will come flooding in and the service will be a success. However, if first the Deals are insignificant discounts on boring experiences, users and business alike could write off the service.

The marketing emails Facebook sent out include localized information. For instance, since I’m an admin of Pages registered in San Francisco, the email I received stated “Try Deals and get more customers faster than ever. In San Francisco alone, you could reach 3,500,000 people on Facebook.” It also touted the service’s lack of upfront costs, its ability to build loyalty, and that Facebook will assist with marketing efforts.

Facebook is preemptively addressing the chicken-and-egg problem of whether subscribers or providers come first by aggressively recruiting both. There’s no official launch date for Deals, so Facebook can hold off until it has the critical mass necessary to seriously challenged the established players in the group buying market.