Social Media: A Success

Well, they may not be the first, but they have done it. Yes, IKEA and their Swedish agency F and B, are showing us that those Swedes have brilliant ideas other than delicious red fish.

While many brands have forged over the border into new media - social media - IKEA just used the medium with amazing success - during this fall of 2009. I have been leaning towards video clips and twitter thinking that they should be the favored social media children, but Facebook just caught me off guard.

Forsman and Bodenfors invented this priceless campaign, to engage customers and make them aware of the store's opening in Malmo, with simple steps and HUGE visibility:

1. Created a traditional facebook account for IKEA's store manager Gordon Gustavsson
2. Posted 12 pictures of showrooms (from IKEA of course) in his photo album
   
3. Used the concept of TAGGING PHOTOS - the most popular function on Facebook. (Think about it, you can tag photos that aren't even yours... that's how much people love it.) In fact, knowing this, they allowed 12 weeks to pass where others could tag themselves in the storeroom pictures.
4. Here's the engagement: The first person to tag themselves as each IKEA product was rewarded that product in return for their participation

(WATCH THE VIDEO ABOUT IT ALL POSTED HERE)

Why is this so genius? Why did it receive any recognition?

Well, FandB did what any good ad man does... they used what was innately already provided. A. People like participation - especially for a prize (People quickly started writing IKEA and engaging with the brand asking for them to post more showrooms and lengthen the tagging contest). AND B. When someone conducts activity on Facebook, an alert is shown on that person's wall and their friend's homepages.

Therefore, each time that someone tagged themselves in Gordon's photos, they not exposed themselves to IKEA products, they also exposed IKEA to their friends and their 'facebook friends' (we all have them, but would never invite them to dinner).

This simplistic act of brand engagement makes so much sense it's almost ingenious. I am not only personally inspired to find clever campaigns within this framework, I am excited to see what my peers find out too.