Foursquare and billboards: checkin for dogfood.

This is an interesting example of how you can leverage a location based service like foursquare to make your billboard ads more engaging: every time you check in at the billboard location, a dispenser – part of the „interactive“ billboard – releases some GranataPet dogfood.

Of course, you could have chosen SMS or Bluetooth as a way to interact with the billboard. But in that case, there wouldn’t have been any connection with the social network of the target audience. Using foursquare, the dog owners could inform not only their foursquare friends, but also their facebook friends and their twitter followers of the new way to access GranataPet dogfood…

(thanks)

Measuring brands fan engagement on facebook.

You think „Fans“ on facebook, i.e. people liking your brand’s facebook page, are a useful currency for measuring success on the social web? Well, think again.

(First: the social web is more than just facebook.)

The number of fans is not a very relevant social web KPI, if they’re not active at least some of the time. Inactive fans might have shown some interest when „liking“ the facebook page. However, a large amount of inactive fans shows, that after an initial „liking“, engagement by the brand wasn’t very successful.

Hence, there is list of „top engaged facebook pages“ on facebook compiled by FanGager.

The idea: forget about the ranking of brand pages on facebook by „fans“, instead rank them by „active fans“. Nice approach, but when comparing success on facebook, I think the percentage of active fans is a much more valuable figure to measure engagement.

Popular brands will always have a larger fanbase and hence  are more likely to have a larger base of active fans, too. But brands with fewer fans but a higher percentage of active fans seem to doing a much better job on facebook. (Alternatively: they are much more engaging brands to start with.)

The full list can be viewed here. Here is a screenshot of the top listed pages:

Fangager Screenshot