NYT Claims To Have Figured Out Facebook As A Business ToolAt Least For One Night
This story was written by David Kaplan.
The NYT is declaring that it cracked the code on using Facebook as a promotional vehicle. The company says that a branding campaign this month aimed at building Facebook fans around election news netted the paper "4.3 times the value of our spend," according to a memo by president Scott Heekin-Canedy and posted on Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab site. It's unclear exactly what that means: Heekin-Canedy doesn't say what the baseline value of its ad spend was, and we called for clarification but didn't get an answer.
Heekin-Canedy claims the branding campaign boosted NYT's fans more than threefold within 24 hours from 49,000 to 164,000, helping the paper exceed its 2008 goal of 100,000 fans. The NYT Facebook campaign kicked off with a front-page ad on the social net that asked for members' comments on a video featuring Barack Obama. NYT says that 68.3 million people saw the ad and 34,000 comments were shared.
There is, of course, another possible explanation here: That the dramatic increase in Facebook fans was a complete anomaly, nothing more further evidence of the huge surge of interest in an historic election. Full memo is here (PDF).
By David Kaplan