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.
03/23/10 | 8 Comments | Uniball Facebook campaign criticism focuses on tactic without knowing strategy or results