

Facebook marketing does not seem to be as effective as believed - mono
http://www.socialtimes.com/2011/01/kanye-west-and-jay-z-release-new-song-via-facebook/

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GBKS
This is generalized from one example of a fairly poorly executed marketing
campaign.

So I have to like a Facebook page to listen to a new Jay-Z/Kanye song? It's
just too obvious of an attempt to create a viral loop. If the page had a great
design or interactive concept, it would be different and might have worked.

"Ok Go" have done some very successful and creative campaigns to promote their
music and music videos. With the right concept and execution, Facebook
marketing can be very successful.

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nchlswu
Off the top, there are a couple of problems with the article. First, the
number of likes may be the easiest quantifiable measure to refer to, but by no
means does it reflect the effectiveness of a campaign Secondly, music isn't
the best subject for this "case study". Music is very fan driven and online
marketing for rap and hip-hop is largely dominated by blogs (like nahright,
illroots, smoking section). I would say rap spreads first through the blogs
and reaction is very often expressed through Twitter. While This facebook
"campaign" had significant visibility, I doubt it was their primary focus when
releasing this song. If the article referred to a household good campaign (for
example), I'd be more receptive to the conclusions.

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notahacker
The author is out by a factor of 100 with his attempt to quantify the
campaign's success (80k is a respectable 1% of 8million, not .01%)

Secondly, whilst the dark pattern requiring you to "like" the song to listen
to it _may_ have been in place, it certainly isn't now. ~1% of group members
actively choosing to "like" an individual song and sending out signals to all
their friends actually seems pretty good.

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pothibo
I think Facebook is a great place to get people to talk about you. But it's
not something that you can monetize easily. If you base your marketing
campaign solely on Facebook, you might find it not effective. However, I think
that facebook marketing is cheap enough that you can be seen by a lot of
people and get people to talk about you while putting most of your effort and
moneys on different medias.

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alexyim
I wonder what the author is using to judge whether this was a successful
campaign or not. Although his being off by two orders of magnitude certainly
doesn't help.

At the company I'm working for, we did a campaign for Keith Urban and it did
pretty well, better than our (and clients') expectations. We built an
application where for one week, we released 1 song a day. To get access to the
application, you had to Like it.. and to listen to the song, you had to Like
that too. He gained 60K additional fans from Likes (from a little over 1 mil
fans) over 10 days or so, and albums sold were 150% above forecasts.

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lftl
> In order to hear the song, one must “like” the page.

Or you could just click the link in the article and then press play? I'm
guessing the author is just completely misinformed here.

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tlack
this can be disabled in BandPage. i wonder why they left it open for all. good
catch.

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CulturalNgineer
The benefits of Facebook marketing for the song and artists is a good
question... lots of interesting answers here.

But how about Facebook's end? Doesn't seem to me they were going to get much
out of it either way?

SO how much revenue did Facebook receive on this event?

Not so sure I'd be buying a Facebook IPO... of course, being broke I won't
have to deal with the question.

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trustfundbaby
Why should I have to go to a facebook page and like it (when I 'm already a
fan of both their pages btw!), just to listen to a song that I can hear with
one click through to hiphopdx.com?

They botched the execution of releasing the song on facebook, that doesn't
mean marketing on facebook suddenly sucks.

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OasisG
Isn't that part of the point though, that you as a fan don't _really_
need/rely on Facebook?

The true failing of fb seems to be that in it's quest to be all things to all
marketers, it becomes nothing to anyone. In terms of marketing, it still makes
more sense to reach out through specialized channels where the focus and
function are clearly outlined.

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trustfundbaby
> Isn't that part of the point though, that you as a fan don't really
> need/rely on Facebook?

Not at all ... I love getting updates in my news stream from the pages that
I'm a fan of, and I'm sure clickthrough rates for those are ridiculous ... add
that to the fact that you can share any link that is sent to you through said
fan pages and you can see why marketers wet themselves about it.

My contention is with the fact that even though I'm a fan of BOTH Jay and
Kanye I have to go to a 3rd page to like it before I can hear one stupid song
... makes zero sense.

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loso
Facebook marketing had nothing to do with those numbers. There were thousands
of people waiting for the release of the song due to a tweet by Kanye earlier
in the week. When the song was released most of those people went to their
favorite music blog to hear it.

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felix0702
Participation is the key. Clicking like on someone or on a page does not make
this user a true fan. If a campaign does not create an event making people to
want to participate, social marketing will not work just like any other
traditional marketings.

