They’re not as big as Folger’s or Maxwell House, but Eight O’Clock Coffee has always had an intensely loyal following. Now, the company is using its Facebook page to encourage its fans to spread the word about its product.
According to Promo Magazine, the company has been active on Facebook for a little bit over a year, and has managed to collect over 29,000 fans on its Facebook page. (Yes, yes, I know that technically we “like” companies on Facebook now, but “likers” just doesn’t work for me.) Their latest advertising campaign, “Taste What People are Talking About,” encourages word-of-mouth from Facebook fans and others by allowing people to upload their pictures to the “bean board” on Eight O’Clock Coffee’s web site, along with a sentence or two about why they love Eight O’Clock Bean coffee. In addition to a little bit of internet fame, everyone who participates get a chance to win a free bag of coffee.
Eight O’Clock Coffee also reached out to people in real life, offering free coffee to commuters in Grand Central Station and entering them to win an iPad if they agreed to call a friend and tell them about the coffee.
Promo Magazine interviewed the company’s senior brand manager, Alisa Jacoby, about the promotion and specifically about the company’s use of Facebook:
Promo: What value does Facebook bring to Eight O’Clock Coffee?
Jacoby: The value is leveraging our fans as brand ambassadors to spread the word about our brand. They are really our best advertisement. Word of mouth is a very important piece of marketing a consumer brand and social media really helps us do that. We’ve been grappling with Facebook and I think we took this further by including our fans in our advertising.
Encouraging people to talk about your product is awesome, but your promotions should encourage people to talk about your company on Facebook or Twitter as well as on your own web site. You want the great things they say about your brand to show up where their friends will see them and be influenced. Eight O’ Clock Bean used testimonials from its Facebook fans to seed the Bean Board with content, and the Bean Board has a link to the Facebook fan page, but other than that there’s no connection between the two. There’s no “like” button on the Bean Board, and nothing on the Facebook page encouraging fans to participate in the promotion, either.
Facebook’s rules for promotions may have something to do with that, though looking at the rules it seems like they could at least publicize the promotion on Facebook since it’s being hosted off-site. Using existing Facebook fans in the advertising is great, but wouldn’t it be even better to also encourage new Facebook fans to share the love?
It also seems like they’re missing an opportunity to encourage word-of-mouth by not allowing people to share the coupons on their web page via email and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Still, all of that aside, Eight O’clock Coffee’s campaign is commendable for encouraging word of mouth from its Facebook fan base. Too many companies focus almost exclusively on obtaining Facebook fans, but have no idea what to do with them once they have them.
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