Starting this week, Starbucks and Unilever are offering free pints of ice cream on Facebook. Users who visit http://apps.facebook.com/starbucksicecream can win a coupon redeemable for one of four new flavors. Each hour, 800 pints will be given away with a total of 280,000 pints distributed for the duration of the two week promotion.
I could just see how that pitch meeting went – ice cream + summer + friends = Facebook! The premier social media site lists their users at over 200 million so it’s an unbeatable way to reach a lot of people with little effort. I admire companies that are maximizing social media in this way. It shows that they are not only aware of the importance of it; they are finding ways to utilize it to stay relevant. At the end of last year, Dell reported that they’d already made $1 million in revenue via sales alerts on Twitter. At the time, Twitter was a very new medium of micro-blogging but Dell was prescient in determining its value. Many others have since followed suit but oddly, some marketers are still taking a wait-and-see attitude towards advertising on social media. Some don’t even have a presence on Twitter while others have embraced it and its potential wholeheartedly. Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge tweets as BestBuyCMO.
Each new medium had its detractors. Try to imagine the heyday of radio, television, and the internet when skeptics thought each would be a passing fad. People said the same of Facebook but five years after it was created, it boasts users that are equal to 2/3 of the U.S. population. You know what they say about revenge…it’s sweet.
