Vitamin Water on Facebook: A Slam Dunk for Facebook Marketing

Last week Mashable published an insightful article entitled “Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant?” Provocative title aside, the bottom line from Adam Ostrow’s article is this (quoting directly): “Although there are a few risks of building a [marketing] campaign that directs users to a social media site versus your own property, the benefits are likely to far outweigh them if you can successfully get people engaged.”

As a case in point, Adam examined Vitamin Water’s multichannel advertising campaign featuring LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Visit a homepage like ESPN.com’s, and more than likely you’ll see four big banner ads touting that the “Black Mamba [Kobe] gets his vitamins” and that “King James [also] gets his vitamins”:

The interesting thing, though, is not this messaging. Rather, it’s the call-to-action URL posted across these ads. It’s not www.vitaminwater.com. It’s not an address for some corporate microsite. Rather, you’re asked to click through to facebook.com/vitaminwater. That is, you’re asked to go directly to the brand’s Facebook Page.

Recently, Coca-Cola (the parent company of Glacéau, the maker of Vitamin Water) did the exact same thing through a major television ad. At the end of a Vitamin Water TV commercial, the closing frame shows facebook.com/vitaminwater. So, the question is: Why point people to Facebook?

You might think that corporate microsites are the best way for brands to convert visitors into identified enthusiasts. On such a site, the key conversion flow might look like this:

Visit Website >> Get Hooked by Engaging Multimedia or Compelling Offer >> Sign Up for Company Email List

However, such a flow can already be built right into Facebook. For example, it’s easy enough to create a Facebook Page experience where visitors land initially on a video gallery with an email sign-up form. This doesn’t answer our question, though, of why companies like Coca-Cola are increasingly choosing (and promoting) Facebook Pages over traditional microsite options.

In our view, this trend is related to something we’ll call enthusiast activation, which conceptually speaking is a variant of the larger idea of social network virality.

Let’s look at the above conversion funnel again, and in particular the last step of that funnel. As I said before, on a corporate microsite you could ostensibly get your visitors to sign up for your email list. But in a way, this last step in the funnel would represent the terminus of your short-term relationship with a given customer. He or she signs up, and he or she is done. There’s no automatic alerting of this person’s friends. And more often than not, there’s no further promotion of your brand on the part of the sign-up.

Compare this to two of the “social-graph funnels” that a Facebook Page provides:

- Person Visits Page >> Becomes a Fan >> This fact and your brand are exposed to additional potential enthusiasts via this person’s Facebook profile.
- Person Visits Page >> Opts to comment on your brand’s latest status update >> This comment and your brand are exposed on the News Feeds of this person’s friends.

There’s a reason why the social graph is often depicted as a web with hundreds of connected nodes (where each node is a person or a shared relationship characteristic): compared to other social phenomena, actions on social networks are almost never staccato, one-to-one deals: if you do something on Facebook, you’re more often than not opening a wide door to your friends to follow suit.

For Vitamin Water, then, the decision to do marketing on Facebook was at once visionary and straightforward. Its marketing team had the vision and the execution mindset to realize: Fish where the fish are. Spread your message in an environment where sharing is already the internal and celebrated norm. And wage your brand marketing campaign where you have the most potential for enthusiast activation — i.e., where the act of becoming a fan itself is enough to kickstart substantial sharing and joining across countless networks of friends.