Have you ever look for a girl on Facebook? Yes, so many of my friends (of course you haven’t done it). In this case a guy met a girl a night and fell in love… nothing strange. But this brazilian guy created a FB page and bought FB Ads to find this girl. And in 6 days he got to almost 90k fans. The story is simple. He was out with few friends and met a girl. Few hours and he’s already in love. But he LOST her phone number. What the hell? You are in love and lose her phone number? Or perhaps she gave you a wrong number. Come on!

And what about… that this is a campaign? A simple idea, a very good execution, and a good media plan based on FB Ads. The target are young brazilians loving romantic stories (have a look to the novelas full of these kind of stories) and brave people. Being in love in Brazil is a must have. In the country values love is the most important, before of everything else, and a story like this one can really open many hearts and involve so many people.

… let’s see what’s happening in the next few days, I’m really interested about this story

[UPDATE] The reveal of the campaing has been done: yesterday Tuesday July 18th 2012. It’s a viral campaign for Nokia and its 808 Pure View. Nice idea, but what about the campaign results? 100k fans, many people talking about that… but really disappointed. People love to interact with brands, but being mocked is not a good thing and this campaign has been perceived in a very negative way. Let’s see few comments:

• Perdeu seus clientes na balada isso sim. Hahaha >> You missed your customers in the party, this is it.
• Parabéns Nokia, pela péssima jogada de Marketing! >> Well done Nokia for the dreadful marketing ploy!
• ‎Perdi a oportunidade de respeitar o consumidor na balada >> I missed the opportunity to respect the customer at the party
• Nossa, enganaram muita gente direitinho. Deve ser errado, mas achei isso fantástico haha. Jamais imaginaria que seria da Nokia. >> Oh my God, they fooled many people. I may be wrong, but I think it’s awesome. I’d never thought about Nokia
• GENIAL >> Great

FB users’ feedback are not only bad, but mostly. What people did not like was to joke with their credulity, and many were not happy at all.

Personally I think that the idea was not so bad, but the agency could better work their strategy and the execution of the reveal. Simply changing the cover and releasing a video it’s not a good idea. You are interacting with real people, your customers are following the adventure of someone who’s in love, and not a sale man. Nokia should have kept playing and revealing the advertisment more smoothly. Nokia could get in touch with the guy to help him to meet again his love, delivering a fake iphone app, a sms campaign, or what ever. But not just push online the ad, and this is it, the campaign is over. Nokia: you certainly had the budget and the time to do it.

On one side, the issue here is that the agency certainly need results for the client (who actually do not have any idea about what’s social media marketing – I guess): likes and youtube views. But where is the conversion rate between the campaign and the final results which are sales? I say to my clients that social media is building a long term relationship with a community of stakeholders, customers in the biggest part. Did Nokia build a community? NOPE, at all. Is it a one shot campaign? YES. Or at least it appear to be. Would they build a real long term relationship with their customers? NOPE. It’s like using TV.

On the other side, we have to admit that TV, like this kind of “viral” campaigns, keep giving short term results which are the final objective of marketers (and more probably product managers) looking for a good result to make the change on their careers. Sad for the brand, but better for its employee (and the agency who made happy a client who may have a bigger budget next year).

Hopefully it will be good for the next campaigns. I was quite sure that thanks to social media we were over of this kind of things. Saying “speak about me, good and bad, but speak about me” should be over… and please be more patient with the reveal and get smoothly to your brand, more smoothly, more customer oriented. I know you can do it.

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About Davide Ballestra

Swiss Digital entrepreneur currently based in São Paulo.

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