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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Uniball Facebook campaign criticism focuses on tactic without knowing strategy or results

While criticism of Uniball’s Facebook-focused campaign has attracted nearly universal agreement, somebody needs to play devil’s advocate.

The campaign to give away 10,000 pens, which ran during the Winter Olympics, featured promotions that displayed a link to the Uniball Facebook fan page. The perceived failure to link to the the company’s own website instead of its Facebook page led to vilification from several fronts, including Marketing Pilgrim, Edelman Digital’s Steve Rubel and, most recently, eConsultancy’s Patricio Robles.

The arguments against Uniball’s approach are focused on the decision to direct consumers from advertisements to the campaign’s Facebook home instead of its own site. “For starters, when marketers promote their social network hubs over their URLs they risk that more savvy consumers will see right through it,” Rubel wrote. “People could perceive it as a flat attempt to look cool and hip. Consumers already skeptical of advertising and this just adds to it.”

Robles argues that there are considerable benefits from using your own site. You own it, it’s available to everyone, SEO drives traffic to Facebook instead of your own site and “a great website is far more powerful than a Facebook page.”

I agree that far too many organizations are misusing their Facebook presence, failing to accommodate the expectations of people who become fans. However, it’s a mistake to assume that direct engagement with real employees is one of these expectations. Recent research published in the Harvard Business Review suggested that, for consumer companies, people become fans because they want to be notified of promotions, special offers and discounts. Those notifications cross fans’ news feeds, which is also where many Facebook denizens also get their news (according to recent research).

Which leads to my primary argument against the criticism leveled at the Uniball campaign. While there is merit in many of the points raised, not one of the critics indicated they were privy to Uniball’s strategy, nor did any of them suggest what that strategy may have been. Without knowing the business goal the campaign was designed to achieve, any assaults on the tactics employed to achieve that goal are, at best, speculative.

A strategy (as I have noted here frequently) begins with knowing the goal: How do you want to move the needle? If Uniball’s goal was to appear hip and with it, I’ll be the first to agree that the campaign was misguided. But let’s assume, just for argument’s sake, that Uniball’s marketers had a different goal.

What if research indicated that a particular demographic wasn’t buying Uniball’s pens? And what if that demographic aligned nicely with what the Forrester technographic ladder defines as “joiners,” those who engage in social networks like Facebook? Let’s also assume that Uniball’s marketers are smart enough to know they work for a consumer products company and are aware of the study that suggests fans of your Facebook page want that notification of special offers.

So Uniball drives that demographic—already on Facebook and attuned to visiting Fan pages (Uniball’s has over 10,000 fans—to their page, enticing people who haven’t been using Uniball pens to get their hands on one. And (again, just for the sake of argument) what if sales of Uniball pens to that demographic surges as a result?

Suddenly the campaign seems downright brilliant, doesn’t it?

Marketers are witnessing a steady decline in visits to destination websites and a steady increase in time spent on social sites. Ernst & Young earned praise and positive media coverage for a recruiting campaign that was centered on Facebook; the company said it made that decision because they wanted to reach college students and graduates “in their lair.” It’s also worth noting that one of the results of the Ernst & Young campaign was the driving of considerable traffic from the Facebook page to the Ernst & Young website. And while Uniball’s advertising may have directed the Facebook crowd to its fan page, its Facebook page includes links to the company’s product sites.

Do any of the critics of the campaign know how much traffic was driven from the Facebook page to the Uniball site by members of the targeted demographic as a result of the campaign?

I didn’t think so.

Not only am I disturbed by criticism from people who have no idea what results the campaign achieved, I find it distressing that critics are piling on the tactic without so much as a clue about the strategy that drove its implementation.

Comments
  • 1.Eventually, Shel, there is going to be a growing chorus of real live businesses, getting it done on the social web every day, who are going to be able to look back at some of the early dispensers of perceived social media wisdom and tell *them* "you're doing it wrong." Unless you know the desired end you can't criticize the means. Nice post!

    Tom Webster | March 2010

  • 2.shel - this is a brilliant post. it seems to me that marketers these days are in a no win proposition. pundits once belittled anyone who didn't "join the conversation" and are finding new ways to heap scorn on those who didn't join the conversation in the precise manner in which they have been directed. uniball is one example in which criticism is totally undeserved but i'd also add nestle as another brand which has been put at the mercy of the crowd through, essentially, no fault of its own.

    put some of these critics in a real client situation when their client is under attack and let them think about talking about getting the situation under control.

    just because you can pile on, doesn't mean you should.

    ed lee | March 2010 | toronto

  • 3.I agree with you completely, Shel. Just take a look at all the happy comments on Uniball's Facebook page. This is the right place for this kind of promotion. No one was fooled, and Uniball gets the excitement where they wanted it.

    Steve Levine | March 2010 | Austin, TX

  • 4.I love Uniball and followed this promotion closely (and got my free Jetstream, the world's best pen). There were a lot of complaints because in this world of instant gratification, people didn't get that 3-6 weeks means 3-6 weeks. Plus, I think the response was overwhelming. I learned about the promotion on Twitter and Facebook and ended up on a Uniball landing page. But I wouldn't go to the Uniball site unless I had a very specific need, e.g., refill info. But I see them in my feeds all the time. So, whether you're a long-time fan, someone who likes to write (me), or a social media maven, you found their promotion, which you might not have done any other way. The people who received the pens seemed happy, and now have coupons to get more. Hmmm. That's really a bad strategy?

    Diane | March 2010

  • 5.I agree whole-heartedly! Great post. I always tell clients and students that there are two key pieces of information they *must* know before developing strategies/tactics - the goal and the desired audience. Not having these pieces of information make it impossible to plan - and, as you very astutely point out - to criticize.

    Linda Pophal | March 2010 | Wisconsin

  • 6.Bravo! Well said Shel. Everyone is so quick to critique others (an intrinsic human trait I suppose). And I'll admit, I often read critiques or criticisms by known marketing folks like Steve Rubel and Patricio Robles, and take them at face value. But you raise an excellent point - what was Uniball's goal? They may have in fact successfully reached it.

    Beth | March 2010 | Phoenix

  • 7.Great post Shel!
    I couldn't agree more. If the demographics fit the need - why wouldn't a marketer utilize the medium??

    DM Patten | March 2010 | just outside of Boston

  • 8.You are so dead on here, Shel. I'll admit to being one of the talking heads that looks at crises, but I always look at them from the perspective of the stakeholders -- including customers, employees and shareholders. And there's a ton of times when I find myself at odds with my peers simply because they're not looking at the strategy or the goals. THANK YOU for saying it better than I could.

    KDPaine | March 2010 | Berlin NH

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