A clever way to use Facebook tags in marketing

The global retail giant, IKEA, recently debuted a guerrilla marketing campaign , designed by Forsman & Bodenfors, for the opening of a new Malmö, Sweden store that utilized Facebook's tagging feature. Here's how it worked.

• They created a profile for the new store''s manager, Gordon Gustavsson (aka "IKEA Gordon").
• Facebook members in the new store's geographic area were encouraged to request Gordon as a friend. As of today, he has 960 friends.
• During a two week period, pictures were added to Gustavsson's profile showing various floor showrooms.
• The first people to tag their names onto a product won it. One prize per person.

Pretty simple, right?

Here's how it worked virally: As each Facebook user tagged his or her name onto an item in the picture, that action was published to the individual's feed, creating a viral effect as the campaign was shared between friends and spread across thousands of different profile pages.

Here's a video that shows it in action.

One source reported:

The campaign has been highly rated as it was built upon a very simple technique which showed strong results in building consumer awareness while incurring minimal cost. The project has also been aided by  creating a large amount of PR written about the unique campaign.

There have been some questions raised about whether this type of marketing violates Facebook's terms of service, but I haven't seen any reports either way. It certainly wasn't meant to reach a vast audience, just a very specifically targeted one.

I think it was a very clever way to use that particular Facebook feature, especially for a local business.

Tagged as: Facebook, Forsman & Bodenfors, Gordon Gustavsson, guerrilla marketing, IKEA, local business, Malmö, marketing, photo tagging, photo tags, Public Relations, Sweden, tagging, tech tip, tech tips, tech tool, viral marketing