Here’s an interesting and recent case study of a traditional brick and mortar company using social media as a new marketing medium in an innovative way.

In this case, some bright spark at an ad agency designed a way for Ikea to use their existing inventory and an existing feature in Facebook – photo tagging to start a viral campaign.

Aside from the idea, there’s really no additional advertising cost for this campaign aside from giving away one item from each their showroom photos.

I like this concept very much. I first learned about this from Jay Abraham where he talks about hidden assets and opportunities in your business. Its basically making money out of nothing (more accurately, out of assets you already own).

So here’s the campaign that they ran:

What do you think? Pretty neat huh?

Now, think of the smart they are. The campaign is over. Their cost is just giving out some furniture. Now they make the video above and post it on YouTube.

The result, they’ve got people like me talking about their innovation now. As of writing, the video above has had over 68,000 views in just a week.

This case study will be the example used by marketing specialists, professors, journalists..etc for a long time to come. Each time, it brings up the company brand name again and again.

So essentially, the campaign has taken on a life of its own and lives on to promote the Ikea brand, long after the actual work of running the campaign is over.

Conclusion: Genius!

Technorati Tags: photo tagging, facebook, ikea

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Tags: case study, facebook, ikea