Subaru Bows Facebook Cause-Marketing Program

Subaru is launching a Facebook campaign that encourages people to choose a charity for the automaker to partner with in this fourth annual Subaru Share the Love event.

The automaker, which launched the program in 2007, said it has donated $15 million to charities, and plans to donate $20 million this year.

The program gives $250 for every new Subaru vehicle sold or leased from Nov. 19 through Jan. 3. What’s new is that the Facebook voting program allows Facebook fans of Subaru to vote for a “People’s Choice” charity, per the Cherry Hill, N.J. company.

Teach For America, The American Red Cross, The Children’s Miracle Network, and The Make-A-Wish Foundation are the four charities people can vote for.

Brian Johnson, national advertising manager for Subaru of America, Inc., said the program enables customers to “get directly involved with our partners and allows them to have a say in who Subaru partners with.”

The online voting, which started Thursday and runs through Sept. 15, is being hosted on the Subaru of America Facebook page. The charity that receives the most votes will be the fifth charity partner. For the first 200,000 votes, Subaru will donate 10 cents per vote to the charity receiving the vote.

While the automaker saw about a 9.3% drop in U.S. sales last month versus 2010, the company — which had a huge 2010 (when it posted record sales and a 21.8% increase versus 2009) — is still on a positive trend year-to-date. Subaru reported that year-to-date sales were up 2.56% through July. But that is still pretty far removed from the stellar 50% increase in sales since 2009, while the rest of the market overall had been in a slump.

One challenge for Subaru is Impreza, which has lagged its traditional strong suit of Forester and Outback. Expect a big push for the 2012 version of the car, which comes to market in November. The automaker said that it is holding the MSRP at the 2010 price of $17,495 for the base model.

 

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Facebook: We’re Committed to Deals

With Facebook Places shifting from mobile-only to a cross-device location-tagging feature, what exactly is the deal with the social giant’s Check-In Deals? Same as it ever was, the Palo Alto, CA-based firm said.

“We’re committed to deals,” Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, told ClickZ on Wednesday. “We’re committed to check-in deals.”

Facebook blogged a privacy announcement on Tuesday that mentioned changes to the way users mark their locations. Since then, some pundits have wrongly speculated that the social giant was quitting the location-based services game – including the shuttering of Check-In Deals.

That is not the case; though there is a tweak that should affect local businesses. Purely on the location level, whether on their mobile phones, tablets, laptops, or home computers, users of the social platform can inform their friends of their location by tagging where they are. For instance, they can tag a city, a park, a pizza parlor, or a Starbucks.

In the case of the latter, when users tag a Starbucks location while on their mobile phones, they can be served a check-in deal. Ta said, “You’ll then be able to click on the deal title and will then be taken to the claim flow.”

Aaron Shapiro, CEO of the digital agency Huge, spoke about how Facebook is looking to increase its footprint in the location-based space. “They’re removing location as a standalone service – something that was not getting much traction within Facebook anyway,” he said. “They’re replacing it with something that can be far more powerful – location services that are fully integrated into the core Facebook experience.”

Lawrence Mak, product marketing manager at Efficient Frontier, commented, “The in-stream check-in aims to make location tagging as ubiquitous as people tagging in photos and posts.”

Whether Facebook users will refer to tagging their location as a “check-in” remains to be seen. The social media giant seems to be leaving its options open when it comes to the terminology coined by Foursquare, stating in an email sent to ClickZ that “Check-in Deals will continue to be called Check-in Deals for the time being.”

David Berkowitz, VP of emerging media for 360i, lauded Facebook for diversifying the way it allows users to declare their whereabouts.

“Consider how many updates you see from your friends saying where they are and what they’re doing,” Berkowitz said. “Relatively few of those posts used check-ins, but there are constant location-based posts. Each weekend, my feed is full of people saying where they are, often posting pictures to capture the moment, and if it’s easy to tag a location within those posts, a significant share of users will likely do it.”

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