Word of Mouth, At Scale & With Precision

Sponsored Stories

What's the power of Sponsored Stories? It's the trusted source – your friends, your social graph.

Take, for example, the following scenario:

• John visits Starbucks and checks in on his mobile phone saying "Getting my morning coffee!"
• John's check-in story gets shared to his Facebook profile
• Starbucks can then "sponsor" this story and turn it into an advertisement that gets served up to John's friends in the Facebook NewsFeed, sidebar and more
• The sponsored story impression appears to John's friends as a powerful organic endorsement
• Since John is a trusted connection and his name and photo show up in the ad, his friends are much more likely to engage with the ad and be influenced by it

Even in its early stages, the data indicates that Sponsored Stories deliver a spectacular increase in effectiveness and engagement. The ad product that takes full advantage of the Facebook's inherent strength – the social graph – to offer a format that is absolutely unique and unavailable in traditional search and display.

For brands, the one major constraint to utilizing Sponsored Stories is that consumer expression determines the available inventory to serve these high performing personal endorsements. Marketers are taking notice of this transformative shift. Joe Tripodi, CMO of Coca Cola, recently wrote "impressions only tell advertisers the raw size of the audience. By definition, impressions are passive. They give us no real sense of engagement, and consumer engagement with our brands is ultimately what we're striving to achieve. Awareness is fine, but advocacy will take your business to the next level." It has never been more important that your brand is part of the conversation.

Custom Actions

With the Open Graph, Facebook has also provided advertisers a way to configure custom verb actions and nouns, and build very compelling campaigns. Imagine:

• John signed up for Fantasy Football at Yahoo.com
• John drank a glass of ONEHOPE Zinfandel
• John is planning to watch Batman Rises this weekend
• John bought a Green Frappucino at Starbucks

Campaigns

Although the potential for this new form of advertising is limitless, it can be a very daunting task for marketers to execute:

• How do you drive consumer engagement and build an inventory of user actions?
• How do you harness and direct the conversation to reflect the story you want?
• How do you setup custom actions and plug them into Facebook's advertising platform?
• How do you cost-effectively target and optimize ad placements?

At Booshaka, our mission is to simplify word of mouth marketing for brands and businesses. Our team of experts and technologists understands the challenges utilizing these new advertising products, and has been hard at work building solutions. Contact us today so that we can help you achieve your goals on the social web.