Anti-litter group’s Facebook bins to clean up
August 21, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
Keep Australia Beautiful marketing director Lara Shannon at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. The group is creating a database of bins to register on Facebook Places. Picture: Nic Gibson.
Source: The Australian
WHEN Keep Australia Beautiful decided it needed a new way to promote itself, the organisation was told its social media strategy should include a “chuck-in” option.
The environmental group was keen to incorporate geo-marketing into its strategy to take advantage of the booming number of consumers who use location-based software on smartphones.
To do so, it is registering tens of thousands of rubbish bins as “places” on Facebook so online users can “check-in” — or in this case “chuck-in” — when they chuck away their rubbish. Facebook Places is a section of the social media site that allows members to use their mobile phones to register their location.
“We’ve been trying to crack how we should use social media and when Clemenger BBDO came to us with the Facebook concept we realised this was an opportunity we really haven’t leveraged properly before,” said Lara Shannon, marketing director of Keep Australia Beautiful.
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The “Keep Australia Beautiful; Chuck in, to a bin” campaign will help the nine million Australian Facebook users locate their nearest bin.
The environmental group is working with councils to create a database of tens of thousands of individual bins that will be registered on Facebook Places. In June Coca-Cola in Israel became the first marketer to use Facebook Places in such a way when it uploaded the locations of more than 10,000 recycling bins to the site.
James Theophane, digital creative director of Clemenger BBDO, said geo-marketing in this circumstance was effective because it targeted people “who have a conscience and don’t want to litter, they just want to know where the bin is”.
Mr Theophane said location-based campaigns were reaching a critical mass in Australia because of the growth of mobile hardware and also because of 3G and wi-fi.
“These factors are pushing people to use their mobile devices as an integral part of their day-to-day lives and this allows geo-location marketing to become important as we are seeing huge growth in online mobile traffic,” he said.
Facebook last week announced it would allow businesses to offer discounts to customers who check-in using the social networking site.
Such discounts, which are common in the US and Europe, are already being offered by brands such as Wagamama, Commonwealth Bank, Westfield and 7-Eleven.
Digital planning director at MC Saatchi, Dan Pankraz, said this trend could only continue in the current retail environment. “When brands are fighting with e-commerce sites these discounts are an opportunity for Aussie retailers to recognise and reward consumer shopping through the mobile phone,” he said.
Geo-marketing campaigns can also target highly lucrative markets — such as teenagers and mothers — that are attractive to advertisers.”You’ll get the youth demographic, i.e. students who are sometimes strapped for cash and looking a discount, but you’ll also get mothers who are digitally savvy and are looking for deals and opportunities to engage with brands,” Mr Pankraz said.
