Facebook gives blue ribbons to top guinea-pig marketers

June 11, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

As someone who did 4-H as a kid, I can appreciate Facebook’s new “blue ribbon” award program for marketers. Awards spur healthy competition and winners become models for rivals.

Facebook’s still young-and-growing site is trying to make money in part from a suite of services targeting brands and their marketing agencies, including sponsored groups and events, analytics tools, and other services. It wants more marketers to use it to reach its 200 million-some monthly active users.

The new program awards companies that use public profile pages and other site features to promote social activity around the brand within Facebook. The first batch of winners include Starbucks, H&M, and Vitaminwater. In Vitaminwater’s page, for example, it regularly publishes videos, questions and other content to generate conversations with fans of the company’s watery product. It has more than 386,000 fans to date, and scores of likes and comments on every post. Here’s why Facebook said it won an award:

Campaign: The Great Debate
Description: Who’s better? LeBron or Kobe? Vitaminwater is asking Facebook users to weigh in on the question, “Where do Kobe and LeBron rank among the greatest of all time?”. Users who Become a Fan of Vitaminwater have access to discussions, polls, activities and exclusive content around these two players (and Vitaminwater partners). Over 21k votes have been cast and thousands of comments been made. With this unique and fun campaign Vitaminwater has grown its fan base and made real connections with users throughout the country.

It doesn’t appear that you need to pay Facebook for advertising services in order to be a contestant, but presumably all of the winners are paying customers. And getting more paying customers is ultimately the point here.

[4-H photo via OregonLive.com]

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • It would be interesting to see how well this type of marketing pays off for the marketers. I have never understood it, but if the numbers say that brand-building works so be it.

    I prefer to buy stuff on the basis of whether or not it's a good product, not whether or not I participated in a little contest. But I guess this type of stuff works to attract/retain a certain type of customer.
  • Oo Its great. Facebook also contributing in social cause. Its really awesome thing. Keep it up. Thanks for update