VitaminWater Skip-Passes Website, Calls NCAA Hoops Viewers to its Facebook Page in TV Spots

By Kyle Austin

While it was a good weekend for the top seeds at the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, it was also good weekend for the #2 provider of sports-drinks. Coca-Cola Co. (Coke), who owns 22% of the sports-drink market with Powerade, used the tip-off of “March Madness” to market a non sports-drink to sports-loving hoops fans.

Utilizing the 7th year of an 11 year corporate sponsorship agreement with the NCAA, Coke is leveraging the Men’s NCAA tournament to push VitaminWater to the masses. Coke had previously marketed its Dasani water as the official sideline drink of the NCAA championships, until it announced last October that VitaminWater would be the official sponsor of NCAA Championships moving forward. In turn, VitaminWater is everywhere at the tournament, and I mean everywhere.

Fanster reports that:

“While student-athletes and coaches are provided with VitaminWater cups at press conferences and during timeouts, even members of the media must drink all beverages — aside from coffee — out of a VitaminWater cup.”

However, the most interesting aspect of Coke’s VitaminWater campaign for the tournament is happening away from the action on the floor. The company is using TV spots which end with a call to action to their new Facebook page, skipping their Website all-together. The TV spots, which are available on their Facebook page and on YouTube with alternative endings (embedded above without the call to action), end with a simple call to their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/vitaminwater.

One particularly funny one (assuming you’re not a Kentucky fan) includes former Duke star Christian Laettner reliving “the shot” during daily activities – including a turnaround jumper with a VitaminWater bottle into a trash can, in front of fictional neighbor and former Kentucky coach Rick Patino.

The move by VitaminWater to use a Facebook page in the place of its Website isn’t that surprising when you consider Facebook’s recent redesign and the major force that its parent company has become in the social community with its Coca-Cola page. In addition, VitaminWater is likely reaping the benefits of Coke’s relationship with Facebook in getting the prime real estate (i.e. : the easy to find /vitaminwater).

Although there has been tons of grumbling from users about the new design Facebook is using, corporations are certainly opening up to it – with one caveat: there needs to be an easier way to find company pages. One way Facebook is making that easy for big partners, is by giving them their Facebook “home page” with a simple “slash.” Check out www.facebook.com/Microsoft or www.facebook.com/jeep. These easily identifiable and search-able pages will be in high demand as more marketers move to the “new” Facebook.

So how is the Facebook / TV spot call to action working for VitaminWater? They’ve garnered nearly 50,000 fans in the first week of the tournament and are trying to keep the dialogue going on the page by updating their stream with the aforementioned videos and celebrity photo endorsements / print campaigns (including Carrie Underwood and Alicia Keys).

5 comments March 23rd, 2009

BusinessWeek Syncs with Twitter on Business Exchange

By Kyle Austin

John Byrne and BusinessWeek.com are taking its leadership position with their social media efforts one step further this morning by syncing the comments on Business Exchange, its social-networking site, to Twitter. The move makes it the first major business media outlet to sync comments with the service.

Business Exchange, which goes by BX for short, posted within their blog yesterday that:

“Business Exchange now allows you to simultaneously post your reactions (brief comments) to articles on both BX and Twitter with the click of a button. Once you link your Twitter account, we will automatically tweet your reactions to the articles posted on BX. You can choose to post to Twitter on a case-by-case basis or send all of your reactions on BX to your Twitter stream.”

The move makes obvious sense for BX and their users, and BX has made recent changes which included shortening the length of comments and renaming them reactions to make the sync work. BX users were already able to sync with LinkedIn, and most users use this syncing ability to portray their LinkedIn profile within the Business Exchange community.

Following in the footsteps of  BusinessWeek.com’s overall strategy to increase reader engagement through user comments, the move is being made to increase user engagement with the Exchange community – which has been difficult to do so far. Elizabeth Holmes of the Wall Street Journal notes on Digits that:

“Only 3% of users have been actively commenting.”

Holmes doesn’t let on if the Journal is considering a similar move to sync Twitter with their Journal Community, but you know the folks posting for Digits and the creators of that community are itching for it.

Twitter isn’t anything new for BusinessWeek staffers, as almost all of which are on the micro-blogging service. In fact, @BWBX, Business Exchange’s Twitter handle, has been active for some time now — with Ron Casalotti (BusinessWeek’s Director of User Participation) and other staffers pushing BX conversations into the Twitter Stream. They’ve built a following of more than 2,000 and will become even more popular in the Twittersphere given the new syncing feature.

While the move is a step in the right direction, I still believe Business Exchange needs to implement a Facebook-like type of share feature that would allow you to read the uploaded content (News, Blog or Reference Material) without officially leaving the community. I’ve noticed Facebook doing this with publishers on their new pages on Facebook. You can read an entire story from Fortune Magazine without officially leaving Facebook, and commenting while doing so. This would make it much easier for the users on Business Exchange to comment within the community on the full content. You currently find yourself having to go back to the community – and away from the full content – to comment.

2 comments March 23rd, 2009