I'm a big fan of the digital agency Deep Focus and what they have done for their clients and their employees over the years. Everyone that I know who works or has worked their is top notch.
That said, I was a little disappointed to hear that they provided an incentive to the gamers of FarmVille that earned them Farm Cash if they become a Facebook Fan of Microsoft's Bing.
The incentive worked, according to an article in Adweek they earned 425,000 new fans in one day. That's very impressive but what is the value of the fan that was bought? Sure the cash was only virtual money but don't you want true advocates in a Facebook community? I don't want to have to pay my loyal fans every time I want to engage the community. I want fans that want to be fans of a brand or a branded movement for the sure pleasure of being involved with a bigger community of people.
Tipping Point Labs performed an excellent study on calculating the long term effect of buying Facebook Fans by studying TGI Friday's you bought fans with a real life free Hamburger coupon. TGI Friday's rested on volume alone and created a community of jaded fans who are only interested in the next coupon.
It will be interesting to watch what Bing does with all these new 'fans'.
It certainly was clever - kudos to Deep Focus for realizing that there are more Farmville players than Twitter accounts and that they care about the game on Facebook.
But you nailed the question - what's the difference in value between an earned fan and a purchased one? How long do they stay fans? Do they hide your status updates? Do they ever return to your page? Do they ever buy your product or recommend it to a friend?
I wonder if Bing will do more for those players to improve the gameplay in Farmville (MS should just buy it), or if this was a one-time interaction on that level.
Posted by: Bud Caddell | 03/06/2010 at 12:11 PM
I loved the Farmville target audience of the ad, just feel uncomfortable with the Facebook destination and the desired action of the consumer.
Perhaps if they had to use the product to earn the Farm Cash vs. join a fan community? Something similar to the Converse Spelling Bee search campaign with contextual farm-like words would have been more interesting to me as a strategist.
The Farmville target audience was genius.
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