Anyone who has ever bought someone thing at IKEA will testify you are buying anything but convenience. A chest of drawers that last you a season or two? Sure. An easy and straight forward instalation process? Hell no.
I remember many a time when my dad thought all his DIY wisdom put him in a better position than to carefully follow the provided instructions. His resulting tirades are responsible for half of my active vocabulary.
It turns out the DIY approach can also be applied to social media. Instead of building an expensive platform or create their own iPhone app IKEA decided to tap into a very simple tool on Facebook – the ability to tag people. Tagging is an important part of the Facebook community – it helps with the sharing and dissemination of information, in particular photo’s and video’s.
With the opening of the new Malmo store IKEA’s agency Forsmand & Bodenfors manage to tap into this simple system. They set up a Facebook Profile for the local store manager, Gordon Gustavsson, and uploaded various pictures of the showrooms in the new store. The first person to tag an item in that store room with their name would win it as a prize. The IKEA fans website gives you a great impression of how this message started to spread among the Facebook community.
The video explaning the campaign so far has generated over 115,000 views, which is even more free publicity on top of the viral spread of the campaign on Facebook.
I believe this is an absolutely awesome campaign for various reasons. The most obvious reason would be the ROI this campaign must have generated.
Setting up a Facebook profile: free
Using the Facebook tagging feature for viral spread: free
Picking up a huge amount of free publicity and Facebook fans: priceless
Whilst that is a slightly simplistic view, obviously a good campaign would include active engagement from the brand and the prizes would have cost money as well, in the grand scheme of things these costs would have been negligable.
Secondly, it’s a recipe easily copied in other markets. No, they will not get this type of press each time they launch this campaign in another country, or even city – however, stepping outside the bubble for a second, this will be new to most people in other markets and could therefor be just as effective in creating interest and engagement with the local community.
But more importantly it shows you one of the most important things about social media – it is not about the tools, it is about the behaviour. Twitter and Facebook are smoking hot right now, but so was MySpace last year. Or Friendster before that. Sites and tools come and go, but the way they change behaviour and the way people communicate is here to stay.
So don’t get stuck in focusing on tools and sites, don’t think in Twitter, Facebook, etc, but look at how these tools change the way people communicate. This is what IKEA did and they are now, rightfully so, reaping the rewards.
Btw, does this seem like another case of a brand that got stung turning into the golden boy? Would love to hear your thoughts as always!
