How Does Your Garden Grow?

My college-age son says that social networking is like a party: it’s over when the adults show up. But if he was horrified when I tried to “friend” him, he’ll be equally appalled at the latest news. 1-800-Flowers.com has launched a Facebook store. I personally think it’s thrilling (yes, I know, I must lead a dull life). Thrilling marketing that is. It’s the first time an actual shop has been set up on any social networking site. The choice of platform also has great symmetry. What do you give friends and family? Flowers, of course.

1-800-Flowers.com was the first marketer to use a toll free number in their brand name and now they are first with a store on Facebook, too. They were also the first merchant on AOL. They already launched applications on Blackberry and iPhone so this next step makes sense. Other companies launch products on Facebook, of course. Just this week, Fisher-Price announced that they developed a Facebook app to introduce their new product, Elmo Tickle Hands. But no actual purchasing takes place, their marketing campaign is a gifting mechanism designed to go viral. There are about 300,000 companies with fan pages on Facebook so you can bet others will follow this lead from 1-800-Flowers.com. (By the way, be sure to use the hyphens when you search Facebook or you might net zero results.)

Last week, Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group released a report announcing that companies with the highest level of social media activity increased revenue by 18 percent in the last 12 months, while companies that were the least active saw a 6 percent drop in sales. Email marketing links to a company’s Facebook and Twitter pages have increased, with Twitter slightly outpacing Facebook. Time will tell if Twitter eclipses Facebook but for now, one thing is sure. Social media marketing is expanding. Any company not utilizing it today is not tending to their business. Nurture your brand through fan pages and tweets and watch your business grow.

Scoop

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.