As I’ve been researching the Facebook engagement metrics, my colleague Alan Majer reminded me about Facebook Lexicon – a cool application that allows you to track “count occurrences of words and phrases on Walls over time.” As I’ve played around with it today, I stumbled onto neat, simple story about how Starbucks has put together a wikinomics-enabled marketing success story.
Over 300,000 people have viewed the “If you vote, Starbucks buys you a coffee” video on YouTube. While a lot of people have given credit to Starbucks for coming up with a good marketing idea, they didn’t actually come up with it – BillMac did. And who is BillMac you might ask? Well, he is the person who posted the idea on MyStarbucksIdea on October 7th, 2008. I know this because mguiste, who works for Starbucks, wrote about it on Starbuck’s Idea in Action blog – while noting that a “similar theme was echoed by JavaOcha, Geraldo, rsj211, epiphanygalore, and a few others.” The idea rocketed to into the top-10 based on community votes, and Starbucks decided to go ahead and do it. They kicked off the initiative with a 60-second spot on Saturday Night Live, and the video was uploaded to YouTube on November 1st.
So how successful was the campaign? Well, let’s go back to Facebook Lexicon for an indicator. The picture below shows how many times “Starbucks” appeared on people’s walls over the last year. As you can see, there has been a steady and consistent decline throughout 2008, until all of the sudden there is a MASSIVE spike. On November 1st.
Pretty interesting example of a company starting to piece it all together- though it would have been really interesting to see what would have happened if they’d skipped on the SNL broadcast altogether. It would probably have also been good if the campaign wasn’t illegal 
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