Can Automotive Marketers Keep Up With Facebook?

By Garrick Schmitt

Facebook is growing at warp speed. Not only are the company’s user statistics staggering — 250-plus million users, 10 million videos and one billion photos are uploaded per month — but the service itself is evolving so rapidly that brand marketers can’t keep up.

For many of us, it’s too easy to get distracted by the industry speculation: What will happen now that Facebook has overtaken MySpace in the U.S.? Will Twitter take share from Facebook? Are Google and Facebook on a collision course? It’s like the digerati’s version of “Hot or Not?”

But what often gets overlooked is just how quickly the Facebook platform changes, forcing users and marketers to scramble to catch-up.

Facebook’s vanity URL land grab is an excellent example of just how fast the company moves. On June 13 Facebook users and brand marketers (who hadn’t submitted the proper info in advance) needed to log-in on Friday night 9:01 PST to secure their own Facebook vanity URLs. These URLs ensure that automakers like Honda, Hyundai and Volkswagen have a dedicated place to direct consumers.

Honda’s vanity Facebook URL, facebook.com/honda, takes you to a brand fan page that invites you to join the Honda social experiment by indicating that you either are a fan of the automaker or know someone who is. Early participants may also be chosen to appear in a national TV spot that will air in early October.

Honda’s Facebook page, which features a social-experiment application, tries to demonstrate the universal appeal of the automotive brand by getting people who know someone with a Honda to connect to others.

Hyundai’s vanity URL brings you to the Share Your America landing page. You can upload a photo, add it to a map of the U.S. and explore the images and comments that others have posted in various locations across the country.

The VW vanity URL directs you to the Meet the Volkswagens app, which digs through your profile data, including date of birth, gender and education, to match you with a pair of Volkswagens that are right for you.

Not all automakers are using their Facebook vanity URL page for social experiments, posting road-trip pix or mining social profile data to make product recommendations. The Ford vanity URL goes to the wall of a standard fan page; the same is true for the Chevrolet, Dodge, Jeep and Pontiac vanity URLs. A number of the top 10 automotive brands have not even registered their vanity URL — searches for facebook.com/Toyota, facebook.com/Nissan and facebook.com/Kia did not turn up anything.

Adapting to a change like the Vanity URL program can have a significant impact on the overall success of a brand on Facebook. Among non-automotive brands, both Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret saw big spikes in fans in June after the change. Starbucks notched a 27 percent gain and added 656,102 fans, while Victoria’s Secret saw a 58.5 percent spike with the addition of 524,999 fans according to Inside Facebook.

Clearly there is more to all of this than just throwing sheep. To help brand marketers make sense of advertising in the Facebook era, Razorfish recently co-hosted the Facebook Marketing Breakfast Series with Inside Facebook in San Francisco.

The attendees reflected the ever-widening Facebook marketing ecosystem. On one end of the spectrum there were Fortune 500 brand marketers looking for clues on how to best adapt their campaigns to the social sphere and Facebook in particular. On the other end of the spectrum were grassroots nonprofit organizations and individuals who were looking to tap Facebook’s tools and ad programs to build their businesses.

The speakers were equally diverse and included Trista Handisides (brand market solutions, Facebook), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), Michael Brito (Intel), Betsy Burkett (Mattel), Karl Long (Nokia), Keith Rabois (Slide) and myself, among others. Everyone shared their perspective on where Facebook and the social graph were headed and how brands could successfully participate. We also discussed, rather candidly, where brands have struggled with Facebook.

There was a good degree of enthusiasm about Facebook’s relatively new Engagement Ads, which enable users to interact with advertising on the home page either by attending an event, sending someone a gift, participating in a poll or watching a video, all from the ad unit itself. This type of socially driven advertising felt much closer to a viable model than anything marketers had seen yet.

Of course there were also complaints. Frustration with Facebook’s search ranked high, as brand marketers felt that the indexing lagged significantly. There were some more minor issues around the quality of tools and reports. And, of course, there was confusion about the diversity of Facebook’s offerings and what was right for each marketer.

Owyang put the event in the right context, noting that power is shifting to communities over brands and that Facebook plays a critical role in the evolution of the social web. Given that, most of the speakers seemed to agree that simply running display ads on Facebook wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, brand marketers need to run broader social programs that enable conversations with consumers — which can include anything from Facebook fan pages to tie-ins with offline events.

But many participants at the event seemed mostly concerned about keeping up. It’s clear that Facebook needs to innovate in real-time to win the hearts and minds of consumers — and fend off Google, Twitter and the like. But Facebook also needs to find a way to slow-down a bit for more brand marketers to get on board.

Don’t expect that rate of change to lessen anytime soon, however. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told Robert Scoble that the future of Facebook won’t even be a website.

A version of this article originally appeared as Can Marketers Keep Up With Facebook? and was published in Advertising Age on June 29, 2009. It has been updated and rewritten in parts to make it more relevant to the Headlightblog.com audience.

Related links:

• Facebook Crosses 250 Million User Mark, Adds 100 Million New Users in 6 Months, Inside Facebook, 07.15.09
• Facebook Marketing Breakfast Series
• Can Marketers Keep Up With Facebook?, Advertising Age, 06.29.09
• Facebook.com/Chevrolet
• Facebook.com/Dodge
• Facebook.com/Ford
• Facebook.com/Honda
• Facebook.com/Hyundai
• Facebook.com/Jeep
• Facebook.com/Pontiac
• Facebook.com/VW

Image credits:
Facebook user growth image appears courtesy of Inside Facebook; Honda vanity URL page image courtesy of Facebook.com.

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