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Ikea recently did a nifty little social media trick with the photo-tagging on Facebook that’s been getting some generous online praise with chaps like Stewart Kirkpatrick, Mike Coulter, Chris Matyszczyk and Mashable giving it love, calling it brilliant and genius. Basically, people tagged their name onto a piece of furniture to win it. At the same time, the setup of Facebook would then inform all your friends that you had named a couch or a kitchen fork after yourself.
It’s being hailed as a big success. I don’t think so – especially when it ties into ROI. Watch the video and then I’ll explain why:
Quite simply, let’s look at the figures:
- 723 followers
- 280 photo comments
- 90 people tagging themselves in pictures – many in multiple spots
- The people tagged have, in total, about 9,500 people connected to them
- At least, what, $20,000 (or £10,000) in product costs
- Agency fees on top of product costs
- Staff time
(Mike Coulter points out that the YouTube video has had more than 66,000 visits at time of writing. Now that’s nice, but that’s more positive publicity and exposure for the agency behind it than the actual campaign when it was active.)
To me, that’s awful. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not slating the campaign – it’s a nice wee fun thing – but it’s hardly genius when you look at what came back. What has also been unanswered is: Did it drive traffic or sales to the store?
Now I’ve just had someone reach over my shoulder and go ‘wow, that’s nearly 10,000 people reached’ to which the reply is – there’s no guarantee that the posts saying ‘I’ve named a spork after me’ was seen by all of a person’s followers. Due to the high turnover nature of facebook postings, if you didn’t log in at a certain time you wouldn’t see it.
Ten thousand people seems like a big number but it’s a figure for a very poor selling newspaper (local or otherwise). The costs of the above could have got you a colour spread in Scotland’s Daily Record for example, front of book, reaching a minimum of 370,000 people.
The odds are that more people have been exposed to this via the marketing press like Mashable and Cnet than the actual campaign itself, which is great for the marketeers but does it do anything for Ikea?
Now ROI is still a nasty word for many people in social media circles, but when you’re playing with the grown-ups you need to play by the grown-up rules. Now it may well be that Ikea are happy with the above results and subsequent marketing chatter, so fair enough, but if you work in PR or marketing and someone points out to you that this is what they want, just make sure you get a clear indicator as to what defines success.
And if you want to copy this stunt? You can’t. Facebook just changed their terms of service.
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Whether your event is a music festival or public event, promoting your company, crisis communications, internal communications...
Whether your event is a music festival or public event, promoting your company, crisis communications, internal communications...
Whether your event is a music festival or public event, promoting your company, crisis communications, internal communications...
But it got worldwide publicity on high profile blogs like Mashable and Contently Managed
Shurely that’s gotta count for something beyond bottomline ROI?
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by cm_pr_tips: Blog:: Why Ikea’s social media stunt wasn’t a huge success http://bit.ly/5lNp3j…
Jim, it counts and it’s always going to be better than a negative story. But clients I’m speaking to want to know that if they are spending anything from £5,000 – £100,000 on social media campaigns what they are going to get back out of it. For some, increased chatter and brand awareness is enough. But for others, they want to see a financial return on their spend. They want to make a profit or sales increase. See my post to the side of this about what most people don’t tell you about social media.
This is what I said that it’s always handy to make sure the goals are defined at the start.
The initial campaign probably was a flop but the after effect we are seeing now will prove to be a massive hit. The Youtube video will break 1M pretty soon when this get picked up by other bloggers.
Definition of Ironic: Talking about its failure on your own blog while promoting Ikea brand awareness at the same time!
It’s even more ironic than that when you consider that the talking about failure then made it a success (in terms of eyeballs anyway).
Hi Craig
I am afraid I think you are wrong on this – when calculating the ROI you have to look at the wider branding benefit.
IKEA needs to be seen as cool and to me its anything but – however having read about this stunt on mashable and then retweeted with my own glowing comments they have moved up the cool scale with me and about 1m people via SM world wide. How much in turnover is every additional point on the cool scale for IKEA worth?
And finally newspaper advertising will be dead in 5 years (or less) people don’t want to be sold to anymore they want to be Engaged and IKEA are starting to engage with this sort of campaign. Every ROI analysis I have done for my clients has resulted in reducing or terminating their newspaper spend.
Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp
Intelligise – Be Brilliant
Gordon, I can see and appreciate where you are coming from. In fact I agree with most of it. Yes, it has more people going ‘cool’ but you ask the salient question: has it made anyone more likely to buy from Ikea? Has it increased turnover? As you say, it’s anything but cool to you, implying that you aren’t likely to go and buy something from there even now (and many others will feel the same).
And again, this strikes me as more of a PR success for the marketing company as that’s what’s generated all the buzz, not the actual campaign, so both are benefitting.
It was a cool idea, nicely done, but I don’t think the reality justifies the hype.
On newspapers: I think there’s more than five years of shelf-life left but they are still handy for certain demographics. And I think we might see newspaper ads start to get more creative and engaging, which is what they should be doing instead of moaning about the sky falling in.
what you haven’t taken into account is the fact that Facebook allows you to “un-tag” yourself on a picture so your calculations are off. I’ve followed this campaign since it started and the fact is that there are new tags all the time, some are removing their tags, and some people are still adding tags. So you can’t count the tags that are on the pictures right ths minute. So even though the contest is over people are still tagging. This also makes it very hard to calculate the overall exposure of the event within the borders of facebook… and I’m pretty sure IKEA has gained a lot of fans due to this event, in Malmo, in Sweden and now also the rest of the world (everyday people are applauding this campaign everywhere). They’ve connected with people in a new way and created fans. Fans will buy, Fans will buy more and Fans will buy more often…
I appreciate your comments, but can I ask why – when your IP address of 212.247.38.166 shows you to be posting from http://www.fb.se/ which is the website of Swedish creative company Forsman & Bodenfors AB who created this very Ikea Facebook campaign – why are you posting with a made-up name and a Hotmail account?
@fan Thanks for the comments. As the team behind the event you will know more about it than me. I’ve never heard of anyone untagging themselves and I can’t see why they would add themselves after the competition has closed but each to their own.
Also – and I’m sure you made Ikea aware that “it would be hard to calculate the overall exposure of the event on Facebook” – I agree with you that you have made more fans for Ikea – some with the actual event that you ran, even more with the after-event publicity (which also benefits you) and yes, fans are more likely to buy (though furniture’s a tricky one I would argue – what looks best in your house is more likely to win over than brand loyalty).
In the long run both you guys and Ikea come out looking good – no-one is denying that – I was just wonder if the spend had been justified by the figures that were publicly available. That was all. In the UK – and the US – a lot of companies are wanting to see a financial Return On Investment in their social media spend and not just eyeballs/fans. Of course that takes a longer term approach (though I can think of at least one way you could have directly measured financial ROI on this project).
Noise. Noise. Noise.
This is reasonably quirky, clever idea hitched to some unbelievably irritating music and rescued by nothing more and nothing less thatn the marketing clout of Ikea.
Virtually anything the Swedish MDF-meisters do can get, ahem, ‘online traction’ through whatever social media channel is currently currying favour.
Sadly, nobody really knows how to measure the value, worth, reach or impact of this.
But hey – shouldn’t we all be celebrating that the traditional media channels are dying, so that we can all watch a never-ending cycle of gimmicky, low res YouTube videos?
And what about social media being the great leveller?
If some furniture store in the back of beyond Bradford had done this, would it be enjoying the same online buzz?
Who cares! I’m off to an ugly blue and yellow monstrosity on the outskirts of Edinburgh to snap up badly veneered, homogenouse furniture and matching domestic knick-knacks.
PLEAS NOTE: This is my IP address and I am who I say I am. Trust me. I used to be a journalist.
I’m surprised to see that a “professional” blogger with interesting thoughts would go to the extent of publishing my ip adress on a public blog. If you think it is important to expose the people behind each post, you should remove the possibility to post as a guest and provide the ip-adress to each post. Which is absolutely fine by me.
I actually don’t believe I need to explain myself at all, but I’ll try to make you understand why i responded to this post and why I used my personal hotmail account.
First off, I used my hotmail account because I wanted to join the discussion as private person not as a f&b employee. These are my personal thoughts not those that necessarily reflect those of my employee.
Second, I really thought you guys had an interesting discussion going on here, and I just wanted to add my thoughts and a few of the reflections that I have had during the last couple of weeks. Sorry for joining the discussion I appologize. It will not happen again. And if you have never heard of un-tagging on facebook I suggest you take a better look at facebook… Once again I appologize.
good luck with your blog!
[...] PRESS** Check out this post. Maybe not this Facebook initiative wasn’t the roaring success it was made out to be?? I still [...]
Dear Fan, thanks for the reply – and for the compliment of saying that I had interesting thoughts.
Firstly, I don’t normally feel the need to reveal IP addresses, but – as I am sure you are aware – there is a large concern over people going onto sites anonymously or under fake names and posting positive ‘reviews’ or sticking up for someone in a very positive fashion. What made me wonder about your posting was the fact that a) it was a Hotmail account (often used by people wanting to keep their ID hidden), b) you didn’t provide a name and c) your email address didn’t have a name in it – all of which made me go ‘hmmm’ and out of curiosity have a look at your IP address, which then showed it was someone posting from Forsman & Bodenfors AB IP address.
Now if you had come on and said ‘I work for Forsman & Bodenfors AB but wish to to keep my name private’ or ‘these are my private opinions, not that of my employer’ then that would have been fine – but the lack of disclosure makes many people suspicious. The history of the web is littered with examples of people trying to boost or promote items involving themselves or clients but trying to make it look like third-party approval by being anonymous.
(having said that, if you were posting on a personal basis from your work machine during office hours, make sure you aren’t in breach of your company’s HR policy)
And trust me, as someone who has had bollockings for his private opinions while at work, I would have fully understood wanting to stay anonymous. It was the way you did it that was so suspicious.
The points you made in your posting were fair, relevant and interesting – and best of all, helped us learn (I learned about untagging for example).
I’d also love it if someone from Forsman & Bodenfors AB wanted to come on here and talk about the campaign as it has certainly been brought to the attention of a lot of people now.
And you are more than welcome here any time. I’d even invite you to be a guest blogger if you wanted…
I guess the youtube video was removed because there is now a big whole in my blogpost. Look:
http://www.jamescrawford.org.uk/cracking-social-media-campaign-from-ikea/uncategorized
(note the title changed – but the url didn’t – from when I first posted to when I read this blog..)
Ignore last comment. Video is back up and on now
It’s away again. Apparently it’s been pulled for “legal reasons”.
new link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TYy_3786bo
Ta!
[...] The recent Ikea event confirmed this for me that it was on the rise. It also happened for a Scottish whisky. We’re now in an era where an apology at the start of a campaign can be planned or implemented as part of the PR and communications plan. [...]
[...] Whether or not the campaign encouraged people to go to the Malmö store – it definitely worked to personalise IKEA in the eyes of customers. In the long term, this is an important goal to have achieved. [...]