We live in a time where old media is struggling to innovate to use new technology to monetise their products, mostly using the old billboard advertising style to flash banner ads on web pages. It is expensive and has a horribly low click rate and is generally annoying for users (and very easy to block to avoid entirely), and while Google's text ads are much less irritating they're essentially the same 50 year-old marketing. Facebook and Twitter are hugely successful technologies for social networking and are largely untapped by any useful commercial interest.

Well, trust Ikea to be new and innovative. Check out this fascinating integration of advertising and social networking,

It's an Ikea campaign in Sweden, launched because that particular branch had very little money, using the Facebook picture tagging tool. They posted a picture of an Ikea showroom, and the first user to tag themselves on a piece of furniture got that for free. It was only launched in Malmo, Sweden (so I'm not sure why the comments in the video are in English) but generated thousands of followers and promoted Ikea. It's an innovative idea, and I'm sure something like this could be replicated with order products on other networking sites too.

That's clever, but the big question remains: did it generate sales at their Malmö store? Sure, they got a lot of people to look at their ads, and they gave away a lot of free stuff, but the ultimate test is whether or not it brought in cash.

And since I'm still unable to edit my own posts cough, I'll have to make a new post.

The point of your post seems not to be the ad itself, but the use of existing infrastructures to advertise. Like billboards 50 years ago, Facebook and Twitter are becoming the new "highways" for advertisements. I think it's great that companies can promote their products in new places, but I fear it will soon go the way of eBay.

I used to shop eBay all the time. The auctions were great for finding rare, unusual, or used items. Lately, though, it's become less about auctions and interesting items, but about lame online stores that only use "buy it now" or have reserves one dollar below the buy it now. I rarely shop eBay anymore. People looking to sell their wares are no longer peddling the "great find" that made eBay popular, but have changed it into something cold and corporate.

It's very likely that these new methods of advertising might do well at first, but I don't look forward to seeing Facebook adn Twitter become inundated with corporations and false profiles created to make a buck (Twitter is almost there already).

We pretty much strictly are using facebook and twitter as marketing tools. It's nice with sites like twitterfeed, that take an RSS feed and post updates on twitter and facebook at certain times. We must have 50 feeds going. It has been bringing in lots of traffic.

What do you advertise?

I'm disappointed that facebook is becoming contaminated by advertising, personally.

My partner and I built kidsmealdeals.com

Hey z@n, that's pretty slick. Did the Kid's Meal Deal concept originate with you guys, or were you contracted to do the page?

Except it already is, and has been for a long time, by the gratuitous banner ads down the side. My argument is not that we need more advertising, I find all advertising pretty offensive, but if there is to be an advertisement economy on the internet then this Ikea facebook campaign is much better than banner ads.

I trust word-of-mouth endorsements from people I know much more than anything else, and this allows for you to share recommendations with friends. This isn't like those "tell 10 friends and you'll win!" things, there's no direct incentive to share, and if you're not already interested in Ikea products, you won't be interested in winning their furniture. However, this allows Ikea to promote their products and share it with social networking sites, like I probably would anyway if I'd read a good book or seen a good movie.

This gives relevant advertising from people you know, not an annoying and loud banner ad on a page desperately screaming for your attention.

There's banner ads on Facebook?

Silly Adblock, making me think it was clean!

What banner ads down the side?

Theres a tiny "sponsors" box below everything on the right hand side and its still just a still image usually trying to sell me SKY. :/

I don't take credit in it's origination, but yes we had the initial idea

wut

I miss the banners that till me I'm the 1,000,000th site visitor. I want to feel unique again.

They took down the video.

Hell, a lot of companies are just creating Facebook fan pages - it's free, you're talking to people who actually want to hear your message, and when they go buy a product or go to an event or whatnot, they're likely to bring a friend.

Similar for twitter - it's just a great way to stay in the forefront of your customers' minds, and these people are actually opting to follow you.

(that being said, I have no idea what the video was about because it was taken down)