Just in time for the weekend, I added the Love Bunnies application on Facebook - NO, it doesn’t have anything to do with Playboy! - and found out instantly, just how dirty-minded my colleagues really are… (@ Nils: thanx for naming your bunny Fiana!)
When I read Regina Lynn’s blog announcing Love Bunnies – “the world’s first personalised Facebook sex toy!” yesterday, I have to admit I was intrigued – for work reasons of course. After all, it is a great example for innovative, sophisticated social media marketing.
LoveHoney.co.uk is a British online shop for “Sexy and Secure Adult Shopping” that made use of the social network Facebook to launch their latest product: The Love Bunny. But what exactly is a Love Bunny? To the point: it is a toy for adults made out of silicon – does that ring any bells? Facebook users can add the Love Bunnies application, adopt one of these cute little (rubber)rabbits, name it and start flirting with other Bunnies in a candy cotton world. Furthermore, if you have fallen deeply in love with your Bunny, you can order your very own silicon-Bunny (including a unique birth certificate) and get it delivered to your doorstep.
LoveHoney tells you how it’s done:
How to get a personalised Love Bunny Facebook sex toy
1 Log in to your Facebook account
2 Install the free Love Bunnies Facebook Application
3 Create and name your own Facebook Love Bunny - flirt with other Bunnies and have fun
4 Follow the link on Facebook to buy your unique personalised Love Bunny vibrator for real!
The Love Bunnies Facebook Application
Choose a colour for your Love Bunny, give your Bunny a name and you’re ready to play! You can move your Love Bunny around the Facebook Bunny World Warren, change your Bunny’s mood to show how you’re feeling, and send flirty messages to other Love Bunnies. At any time you can click to buy your Love Bunny vibrator for real.
Buy Your Personalised Love Bunny Vibrator
Your unique Love Bunny is delivered direct to your door in a presentation rabbit hutch box, complete with its unique Bunny birth certificate.
But, it doesn’t stop there. Marketers at LoveHoney seem to know how to work the web 2.0 world – the onlineshop has its own YouTube channel, where new products are presented and introduced in a rather “charming” way, among them, of course, the Love Bunnies:
After “playing” Love Bunnies with a few colleagues, I can tell you that it is worth it to add this application and have a little fun with your friends. We definitely do! Going from 1st to 2nd and 3rd bunny base with one of my colleagues, caused quite a stir at the office today with all the winking, rubbing, undressing and licking… And now, after pushing each others buttons, we are on our Bunnymoon! We’ll both be back soon, maybe with a surprise or two from our trip…
Concluding, LoveHoney has found a way to advertise a hard to solicit product through innovative social media marketing. Evidently, people talk about it! Let’s hope that other marketers get with the program and throw more of such campaigns at us in the future.
At the moment ethority is working on a study about the US presidential elections 2008. Our database for this study is a compilation of user opinions found in social media such as forums, weblogs and newssites.
These user opinions concern the two candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in general, as well as their image, climate protection, immigration policy and campaign topics such as education, trade, health, foreign and security policy. Since this is an international matter, we will account for English speaking as well as German and Spanish speaking internet users. Our crawler technology searches for all relevant user postings, verifies and categorizes them automatically.
The Financial Times Germany (FTD) will be presenting this study exclusively for the German market in August. Moreover, to accompany this study, we interviewed Stefan Prystawik (Republicans Abroad) and Shari Temple (Democrats Abroad) and produced a podcast focusing on campaign strategies 2.0 in the USA. The podcasts will soon be available on our Website.
Another highly interesting project we are working on at the moment, is a CEO reputation index of the Fortune 500. In collaboration with manager magazin, ethority already conducted a similar study focusing on the “German” Fortune 500.
Now, we are looking for a partner outside of Germany who is interested in presenting a social media study. Of course, we are open to further suggestions and appreciate new ideas. You can contact me directly at Fiana.de.Guzman(at)ethority.de
In June, Manager Magazin presented ethority’s reputation index. Next to “image” data, it also displays the overall buzz the CEOs’ names generated. The analysis of over 60,000 contributions in forums and blogs yielded the following ranking:
Furthermore, we conducted a topic oriented analysis of those blog postings. The following graph shows what topics bloggers addressed in combination with the different CEOs:
The findings of this study clearly show that the “commanders” of German corporations are discussed intensely in consumer generated media. Therefore, the question for corporate communication should no longer be if those channels should be integrated but rather how soon the monitoring of social media can be started. Whether you choose to listen to it or not – the buzz concerning companies and their leaders will not stop. And to bury your head in the sand is certainly not the right strategy to achieve new goals. Weblogs, forums, twitter and social networks with their online conversations have long surpassed the state of being marginal phenomena. Today and in the future, public is created and happening online. Therefore, being aware of such channels and monitoring them can only be the first step in this context. Corporate communication departments and PR agencies have to go even further: only the ones that “listen” to discussions in social media and actively communicate online will be able to participate in building the image of their company in this rapidly growing part of society.
