Who dares wins, on Facebook

As of late, I’ve been writing about ways people can do business networking via social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. I’ve also written about how companies can leverage on these networks to do branding, promotion and marketing.

For illustration purposes, I used my own experience as examples (i.e. how I do business networking and how I incorporated social media into theedgemalaysia.com website). This week, I can tell you about how one company in Malaysia use Facebook to great effect in promoting brand awareness.

The company involved is SAS. If the first thought that comes to mind is Scandinavian Airlines, then you can appreciate the challenges facing Jeanisha Wan, the marketing manager at this business intelligence software and predictive analytics company.

Business intelligence involves traditional querying and reporting while predictive analytics help companies make proactive, forward-looking decisions. This is so they can go beyond asking “what happened?” to “what next?”

SAS is the market leader globally and locally (34% market share in Malaysia, according to IDC last year) for this sector. It has 52 offices around the world. Its clients in Malaysia include most of the local banks, big retailers like Parkson and Tesco, government ministries (Finance and MOSTI), various hospitals and the local leading telco, Maxis.

Yet, few people have heard of SAS (the software company, not the airline). So, the company last year decided to run some online ads on the websites of The Star and New Straits Times.

Just as a personal experiment, Wan posted on her Facebook status message a teaser for the ad which contained a picture of a rabbit. “Jeanisha wonders if anyone can see the bunny at thestar.com.my” was the simple message she posted.

“The results were amazing,” she says. “We found that people were curious enough to want to know whether they could see the mysterious bunny on The Star and NST homepages. Via Google Analytics, we were able to trace that the person went from the link on Facebook to the bunny advert on the respective newspapers sites, then to SAS’s homepage!”

That was when Wan first got a glimpse of the power of tapping onto her own social network. She then decided to take this a step further and tap on the social network of her colleagues as well.

She came up with an unorthodox marketing and branding campaign that involved no advertising at all. “We launched an online quiz on human aspects of analytics and asked all the staff to post teasers on their Facebook statuses,” she said.

Participation was of course voluntary but to incentivize them to do so, a prize was set aside for the staff who got the highest number of friends to take the quiz. All in about half the 100 or so staff members took part in this program.

The number of click-throughs generated by the Facebook initiative was slightly over 1000. Given that the paid ads in The Star and NST generated about 1800 and 1900 respectively, the free Facebook campaign is a big success.

“What’s great is that the staff was all excited about being involved in helping to promote the company’s brand in a fun and unusual way,” Wan says. “And we even got one of our clients involved as they donated the prize.”

Objectives
1. External branding to “man on the street”
2. Raise mindshare of SAS as a brand name
3. Top of mind recall: Equate SAS with business analytics

Benefits of this approach
1. Low-cost campaign
2. Garner participation from staff and even client
3. Able to target staff’s peers outside the company

Methodology
1. Post online quiz on SAS website
2. Get staff to promote quiz on their Facebook (or Twitter, which she has just started using)
3. Track click-throughs to measure effectiveness

The marketing experiment generated so much buzz that it caught the attention of the HQ and a case study based on it will be presented as a “best practice” in this year’s SAS Global Online Marketing Summit in Heidelberg, Germany in June.

This is what the company’s global online marketing manager wrote to Wan “... this is by far the best ‘best practice’ among all offices this year. And experience shows that the summit is only the beginning, the most successful and repeatable best practices will usually also be featured at other marketing manager meetings – thus providing you with even more visibility than you already have.”

When looking at Wan’s unorthodox marketing experiment I can’t help but think of the motto of another SAS (Britain’s Special Air Service) “Who Dares Wins”.

Oon Yeoh invites you to read his New Media blog, join him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter, view his Flickr photos and watch his YouTube videos through www.oonyeoh.com.