IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign
While Facebook declares it is cash positive, IKEA shows how to make money by using Facebook's existing features in order to spread the word for a store opening in Malmo, Sweden.
The Swedish town of Malmo is a wonderful place.
Some feel it is wonderful because it is the spiritual home of a band that was once cool, the Cardigans.
But now all committed social networkers will think Malmo is wonderful because of its IKEA. You see, the Swedish purveyor of fast-food furniture decided to open a new store in Malmo and didn't really have a lot of money to let people know about it.
So it engaged a rather outre advertising agency called Forsman and Bodenfors to create a rather special launch campaign.
The agency created a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. Over a two-week period, it uploaded images from of IKEA showrooms to his Facebook photo album.
Then it put out word that the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it.
Facebook being what it is, word got out and needy, enthusiastic Swedes begged for more pictures so that they could tag themselves to a new sofa, a new bed, or a new vase into which they could stick their plastic flowers or their dead grandparents' ashes.
Before Facebook could take credit for its own wonderful ingenuity in creating the world's most needed Web site, thousands of Swedes were spreading pictures of IKEA showrooms all around the personal galaxy known as their profile pages.
Please look at the video I have embedded, as this idea is, as the best always are, simple and inspired. Which, some would say, also perfectly describes the clever, affordable, if sometimes maddening-to-put-together little things made by IKEA.