Ben and Jerry’s contracted with Facebook to run a promotion in tandem with an ice cream giveaway at their physical stores. The ice cream chain made 250,000 virtual ice cream cones available to Facebook users from the company page. Fans quickly scooped them up so Ben and Jerry’s bought another 250,000 virtual cones, and by day’s end those were gone too Ben and Jerry’s Web site saw a marked increase in traffic and in participation in their free cone day. The viral ad campaign went exactly as planned and was a great success.
The all-purpose electronic retailer Best Buy has 4.6 million fans on Facebook and 200,000 followers on Twitter. Best Buy uses a dedicated team of Twitter responders, called the “Twelp Force,” to answer user questions and respond to complaints. Because Best Buy has so many social media followers who generate feedback on social networks and related sites, the company uses text mining to gather these data and convert then to useful information. Best Buy has a central analytical platform that can analyze any kind of unstructured data it supplies. The company uses that information to gauge the success of promotions, which products are hot and which are duds, and the impact of advertising campaigns.