By Justin Smith

More brands are engaging with Facebook’s 150 million users through Facebook advertising solutions and the Facebook Platform, patterns of best practices are emerging for brands in different verticals.  Last week, Inside Facebook spoke with Dave Eisenberg, VP of Marketing at Bonobos, about the ways the specialty pants retailer is reaching new customers on Facebook.

Today, we turn our attention to the restaurant industry and Papa John’s Pizza. Inside Facebook recently sat down with Bob Ford, Papa John’s Director of Online Marketing, about the ways the pizza restaurant chain is reaching customers on Facebook.

Thanks for your time Bob. Why did Papa John’s decide to get involved on Facebook?

We’ve obviously been tracking social networks for a number of years now, but we’ve been looking for opportunity that is right for our brand, and Facebook’s engagement ads made sense to me and to Papa John’s. Facebook has actually initially reached out to us three years ago, but this is the first one we felt like we were ready to try.

Before we built our Facebook Page, there were other Papa John’s Facebook Pages out there.  They had a limited number of fans, but when you looked and saw something that was put up by someone who was literally just a fan, it became intriguing to us. So we dedicated the time to put together our Facebook Page, working closely with Facebook to design it in a way that the audience is looking for.

Who was your campaign targeted at and how did it work?

Facebook is very different today in terms of who their audience is even compared to just a couple years ago. We were really looking for a way to feature some of our new features like mobile ordering, and the 15-24 audience is a great fit for that.

We did two projects with Facebook.  First, in November of last year, we did our engagement ad where we drove people to become a fan of our Facebook Page. Fans were notified on three different dates via an Update from the Papa John’s Page, and were then directed to the Papa John’s site to receive their promotional code for the pizza.

We added 125,000 fans within a day, that number has grown to over 200,000 today.  We’re very pleased with how many fans we’ve gained, and we’re examining ways we can promote it more. We look at our Facebook page almost as an extension of our website, and we have more campaigns coming up soon in the next 6 moths.

See the full article

Facbookconnect.com

From Mobile Open By Shaun Zelber, Wednesday 17 December 2008 :: General :: #148 :: rss

itsmy.com just released what is probably the largest ever survey in the area of mobile social networks. More than 15,000 users took part from the US, UK, Spain, and Italy. Looking at consumer usage patterns, preferences, and statistics, this report really shows how deeply involved some consumers are with mobile social networks.

The worldwide survey was conducted on the mobile internet amongst 15,000 active itsmy.com users between September and November 2008. The age range was between 16 and 52 years. All had current mobile phone types and were from more than 30 different mobile operators.

Although you would expect this sort of sample would consist of people that are interested in mobile social networks, what I found interesting was that it shows how deep this involvement can be.

For example, here is a question about means of communicating with friends and family, and it’s clear that the mobile is the overwhelming choice for communications.

And this isn’t simply a question of people using mobile to access their PC based social network. In fact, across all 4 countries roughly 60% to 70% said that the PC and mobile “have completely different stuff on them.”

Read More  http://www.mobilopen.org/index.php/2008/12/17/148-survey-reveals-intense-dedication-to-mobile-social-networks

Contact ApolloBravo for the latest Mobile + Social Maketing Strategy.

Nokia is running this 2D bar code promotion at CES, Good example of using SMS to deliver a scanable 2D bar code. Drives booth traffic and demonstrates the capabilities of smart phone technology. Text Nokia to 99134 and click on the link.

Contact ApolloBravo for a demo of how barcodes are generated on mobile websites and linked to SMS promotions. www.apollobravo.com