ChasNote

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat reports on Dell’s “Green” Graffiti contest, among other campaigns that illustrate marketers are finding brand-building value inside of social networks.

“[Dell] is working with ad company called Federated Media and a Facebook application that lets you draw artwork and feature it on user profiles, called Graffiti. Dell backed a contest for top drawings around its theme of environmental ‘ReGeneration,’ where contestants created visual answers to the question ‘what does green mean to you’ within the Graffiti application. The contest, which ran over two weeks in January, generated more than 1 million votes on more than 7300 Graffiti entries. Check out the top 150 here (as well as the ones pictured, above and below) — you’ll be impressed.

“This campaign was a success because Dell both promoted something people cared about and reached out to them through a medium they cared about. The Graffiti application has more than 8.6 million total members and 253,830 daily active users (as of today). Because Graffiti is a Facebook application, users also learned about the contest through Facebook’s news feeds and user profiles. Federated Media (which, in full disclosure, runs ads on sites like VentureBeat), also featured ads about the contest on sites popular with Graffiti users, including sites like Boing Boing and Make. These ads pointed users back to the Graffiti application.

“Even though this was one of the early efforts by a brand advertiser to reach social network users, Federated Media and Graffiti made money from Dell, Federated Media’s publisher, Chas Edwards, tells me…. Dell, meanwhile, accomplished what it set out to do, which was to reach hundreds of thousands of users and have them engage with its brand in a positive way. Whether Dell actually sells more computers as a result of the campaign is still open to question. This was a brand-building exercise, not a direct-response campaign, and so the idea is that Dell will be able to sell more computers in the future.”