Affiliations and applications

Weeks ago I wrote on this blog that, as some news reports indicated, certain companies were using Facebook as a place to recruit new employees and to (passively) promote their products. With the help of a couple of weeks worth of Google News alerts for 'Facebook', I've learned about a few more ways that organizations are working creatively on Facebook.

Companies' activities on Facebook range from the fuzzy to the focused, from soft branding to serious promotion. The West Midlands Police Department in the United Kingdom is posting information on how to stay safe at night, advice on crime prevention, and photo albums of police dogs on their Facebook group page (Timesonline, Oct. 16th), in an effort to reach out to young people. Over 300 people have joined the group within a few weeks of its creation.

As I heard from my MCIS colleague David Spira (aka the Geek Whisperer), a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary formed a Facebook product page for "ADHD Moms" - - as an online forum for for mothers of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The page offers monthly essays with practical active, downloadable podcasts, article downloads of success stories, and a poll. The ADHD Moms Facebook page has over 5,500 fans.

Facebook applications are a fertile territory for businesses to seek new brand awareness and new customers. According to an article on MarketingProfs.com (Nov. 4th: sorry, premium membership access only), Travel Channel's "Kidnap!" application has become a case study in subtle & successful promotion on Facebook. Launched this past August, "Kidnap!" lets Facebook users 'kidnap' their friends who then must answer trivia questions about the hideout's location to escape. Users receive a virtual passport with links to pages on Travel Channel's website, which describe travel highlights of the locations mentioned in the game. The article reports that the Travel Channel application has over 2.4 million users, is one of the top 30 Facebook applications, and directs about 60,000 clicks to the Travel Channel website each day.

On the other hand, sometimes a company's Facebook application can create negative buzz. A posting on CNET News takes Pizza Hut to task for its Facebook application, which (the author contends) is basically a retread of the pizza ordering capability available on Pizza Hut's website. The author criticizes Pizza Hut further because, once a pizza is ordered through the application, a notice is sent to all the requester's friends: "X has logged on to order from Pizza Hut!"

An encouraging postscript to the CNET rant about Pizza Hut - in a footnote to the original posting, the author reports that (within about 24 hours!) Pizza Hut contacted him and promised to retool the application so it would be less intrusive. I give Pizza Hut a lot of points for their openness to criticism and their promptness in responding.