A Good Example Of Social Networking Strategy - BMW

In order to do social networking effectively, marketers should rely on the tools of social networking to facilitate member to member communications rather than deploy interactive marketing experience. That means marketers should spend time and resources to reach communities in social network.

Also, marketers should develop community-centered content and activities, implement it, and measure success based on objectives and key success factors.

According to a report from “Forrester Research” in 2008, BMW 1 Series passed the Social networking criteria which meets the needs of the community out of 16 studying brands.

For example:

BMW’s Graffiti contest invites Facebook users to color in outlines of 1-Series cars.

Advantages:

1. Ad units on Graffiti pages within Facebook as well as websites outside of Facebook (eg, Boing Boing) are performing better because the campaign invites participation.
   
   
2. It enlists a core group of active social networking participants (more than 9000 submissions in the first 7 days) into a fun. (Participants spend hours personalizing images of BMWs that they then share with friends in many cases.)
   






3. It takes advantage of the friend-to-friend news feed mechanism at Facebook to spread word of the campaign beyond the paid media program.
   
   
   

The concept and the images themselves are capturing the attention of bloggers, columnists and Twitterers, such as Facebook’s Dave Morin. Ben Barren’s headline captures it best: “i found a blog post about a twitter about bmw’s facebook campaign.” UPDATE 4/7: Stuart Elliott at NT Times dedicates a column to the campaign.

This is a good example to show the power of SOCIAL NETWORKING.

Sources:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/07/18/forrester-report-best-and-worst-of-social-network-marketing-2008/

http://chasnote.com/2008/04/04/bmw-graffiti-contest-gives-bloggers-twitterers-something-to-talk-about/