Area Of Technology Article One :)

Link to the Article:
http://mashable.com/2009/11/25/facebook-marketing-ikeas-genius-use-of-photo-tagging/


So firstly, what is Facebook?!
Facebook is a social networking site that almost everybody has, even my old pair have one for keeping in contact with friends! It started up in a dorm room in Harvard Uni (very smart ;)) and over the past 5 years has gained over 300 million members. It's sort of taking over the world! Most people go on it everyday to talk to friends, find out about social events, 'farm' their crops on farmville, and pretty much just friendly stalk people and photographs!

Now, back to the article!
Basically the article is about how IKEA used Facebook to promote their new store opening up in Malmo, Sweden and to advertise their products.


Waiiiit, what IKEA?!
Only messing! We all know IKEA is the best international home products retailer to come to Ireland (take that Lidl) and sells flat-packed funiture around the world!

So anyway...
The article tells us how IKEA used the wonderful features of Facebook to advertise their new store in the most modern of ways! Basically what they did was they set up a Facebook account for the Store Manager of the new Malmo store. Over a two week period he upload photographs of items IKEA where selling, and picture of their showrooms.

So after they set up the page, they started a competition, and sure what person can say no to a competition?! The first person to tag their name on an item of furniture in a photograph on the page, won that item of furniture! Very nice. So people being competitive and if like me, in love with free stuff, started tagging away at all photos in hope of winning the free stuff!

A handy Facebook feature is that whenever you tag a photo of yourself or somebody else it shows up on the Live Feed page where all of your friends can see it. So by tagging yourself, your friends all see the photo, and of course want to win free stuff too. So then your friends tag themselfs in the photo, and the their friends see it and tag themselfs and it becomes one big tagging competition and millions of people end up seeing the photos and tagging themselfs...

IKEA=WIN.
While people are having fun tagging and winning, the real winners were IKEA, 'coz for every tag they get on a photo it's another possible customer for them and more people seeing that their is a new store, and all the products. Facebook meant free advertising for IKEA!

Here's the video provided by the article that shows how the campaign worked: