NEW YORK – People spend 35% of their time with Facebook looking at the profiles (pictures, mostly) of people they know. They also spend another 35% chunk looking at the profiles of people they don’t know.
That means 70% of the time “were stalking other people,” Harvard Business School associate professor Mikolaj Piskorski told delegates yesterday at the CTAM New York conference at the Times Square Marriott Marquis.
And with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, brands want to try and get as close to those people as possible. But it’s not easy. Facebook sells all kinds of ad placements that we often see off to the right hand side of our pages, “but it doesn’t really work” because so few people engage with those ads.
“Do you want to look at a photo of 12 friends having fun or a 30% discount off Avis?” he asked. These ads, he noted “are meeting, on average, with poor response.”
Perhaps a business Facebook page is the way to go? Actually, it’s not something professor Piskorski recommends. “People know you can’t really be friends with a company,” so it doesn’t work. Users will sometimes swoop into brand pages, complain, and never return, leaving that brand’s page looking like most folks are having negative experiences. Best Buy, he noted, recently closed its Facebook page.
Too many companies are using social media as another broadcast platform, just telling people what the brands are doing, rather than engaging with them. “You must evolve from a digital strategy to a social strategy, he said. “It’s not like television, radio or billboards.”
So, the professor has coined a new acronym: WWZD, or What Would Zynga Do? Zynga is the company behind games such as Farmville and Cityville. For example, 250 million people play Cityville – with 20 million a day logging on to build and run their virtual cities, noted the professor.
Users can ask their Facebook friends who are also Cityville players for help in building their cities and in return, help their friends build. Or they can draw their non-playing friends into the game. To build, users need resources which can be purchased using real money (Zynga’s annual revenue is in the $750 million range, said Piskorski) or earned by, say, selling the vegetables you grew in your gardens at your city market.
The users of this ongoing, long-term game are committed and engaged in the platform. So much so, that Netflix, to cite an example, offers virtual Citycash if users sign up for Netflix.
And when you sign up to play a Zynga game through Facebook, you allow it to learn about your profile and about your friends’ profiles, a step Netflix also learns when Cityville users sign up for Netflix with Facebook to claim that Citycash, building the online video company’s customer knowledge.
So Zynga, using the Facebook platform, leverages the games to get data from people while users also allow automatic postings from the games to their profiles, which gives the game added legitimacy among their groups of friends. So, people are connecting to Cityville and to their friends using the game and if they are getting enough satisfaction from it and return continually to build their cities, they are then telling everyone they know on Facebook how they are doing in the game – and even soliciting help in the game. Basically, a circle of really engaged consumers talking to each other and playing with each other, facilitated by a brand.
All brands must learn to be this social, insists the professor, who cited American Express as a recent social convert, with the new deals it is offering to clients linked through Facebook. For example, Amex, via Facebook, is offering a $5 discount at Whole Foods when customers use their card to buy $20 or more there. The discount is applied right to the Amex bill (no coupon required) and when you agree to accept the deal, it is posted as a status update, advising your friends of the discount you got – and that they could get.
It’s a win for Amex, consumers and the retailers who take part.
“People really like to help out their friends with discounts,” said Piskorski. “They give you something,” and in return “you promise to advertise it to your friends.” In short, people like discounts, then use the brand and then tell their friends about it and where to go to get it. It’s the kind of word of mouth every business wants.
Piskorski added that there are wide open opportunities for cable companies and television channels to engage with their customers and viewers but only if such a strategy is put “at the centre of the company,” and not just a slice of the marketing and communications “to-do” list.
“It requires a mandate from the CEO to make it a centrepiece,” he said.
Greg O’Brien is in New York this week covering CTAM in NYC.
