Vitamin Water & Facebook - a lesson to be learnt

This week Vitamin Water announced the winner of their facebook contest to develop a new flavour (see the techcrunch article here for all the details).

The new flavour, "connect", has a facebook inspired name & carries facebook branding on the bottle. Whilst it is interesting & unusual (at least so far) to see a physical product tied up with facebook that's not what I want to focus on in this post.

My first reaction on reading the techcrunch article was to open up facebook & search for the vitamin water page to see what was going on with the brand. (I'm more of a strong coffee kind of girl personally). I used the search button in the top right hand corner of my facebook home page & this is the first result that was returned. On first glance it looks like an official page, but it was set up by a US high school pupil.

The official page is http://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater which doesn't appear anywhere in the search results. As Vitamin Water are spending lots money to promote their facebook page by running the URL in their TV ads etc. this seems like a big oversight.

Facebook fan page - should your business have one?

As the big players of the equine industry begin to dip their toes in web 2.0 - should your company consider doing the same?

A very simple step to take is to set up a fan page at www.facebook.com You can see an example of an equine company doing this here http://www.facebook.com/pages/Derby-House/18595243548?ref=s (I will avoid discussing the KP topic today!).

A great article with some more do's & dont's about facebook fan pages can be found here http://www.smallwebbusiness.com/smallwebbusiness-90-20081105DontAbandonYourFacebookFanPage.html

Let me know how you get on & don't forget to include a link to your new page!