It’s a rare moment when I see something being done online and instantly want to try it out for one of our clients. This however, is a great example of integrating Facebook with your offline marketing activity in a completely new way that I would love to try! It comes from Coca Cola in India Israel. At their amusement park in India Israel, an annual event called Coca Cola Village, they issued customers with an RFID (radio frequency identification) bracelet that contained their Facebook details. Check out what they did with it in the video below :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUv0GU5rfHg&feature=player_embedded
Each of the people with the bracelets were invited to swipe their bands at certain places to give a ‘Like’ to that particular product or activity. And they were also able to upload their own pictures to their Facebook profiles, where they were automatically tagged. Over 650 teenagers used the RFID bracelets over 3 days and over 35,000 ‘Likes’ were made. Pretty impressive, especially when you consider how many friends those people would have reached through their individual newsfeeds.
This is the kind of thing that really gets me excited. Seeing social technology being used in a completely new way, but importantly integrating with ‘real world’ activity. There’s nothing better for a brand than having hundreds of people running around actually ‘Liking’ all your content and sharing it with your friends. And because it’s something completely new for the user, they go around swiping everything in sight!
http://www.simplyzesty.com/wp-conten...10/08/RFID.jpg
You can certainly see the future in this sort of technology, particularly coupled with the announcement of Facebook Places. We’re already used to getting our phones out and checking in to places. But imagine that you don’t even have to do that. You could soon just walk into somewhere, swipe it as you go in and people know where you are. And say you’re in a shop, you could go and swipe everything you like, keeping a record of what you like and passing on recommendations to friends. It might seem a bit far fetched at the moment, but this technology is already out and about in the real world, but hasn’t quite hit the mainstream yet. It’s a big leap in the ‘internet of things‘ , where everyday objects are interconnected.
As new as the technology is, it does obviously open a few privacy concerns (as all new services do!). Lose the tag and it’s all to easy for someone to impersonate you online. I expect that as adoption of RFID increases though, the security measures will develop too.
Since Facebook made their changes with the Like button and social graph earlier this year, we’ve seen more and more examples of Facebook being integrated not only with our online lives, but with many different areas of marketing and advertising. We’re not talking about putting a Facebook logo in the corner of a TV ad, but making it a real, integrated part of your activity. Many internet companies are battling for TV space at the moment, as they try and fully connect TV with our online behaviour.
A recent report into social TV shows how Facebook and Twitter are making moves in the way of ‘socially targeted TV advertising’. Given that these social networks can monitor reaction to TV shows in real time, it gets pretty exciting.
I’ll certainly be keeping my eyes peeled for more examples of Facebook in the wild and I think the opportunities are endless. This is an inspiring case study to marketers and technology enthusiasts. Well done Coca Cola!
