A Swedish marketing agency, Forsman and Bodenfors, has experimented with an innovative use of social media.

The campaign for the opening of a new Ikea store in Malmö has been praised for its creativity as well as its simplicity.

The agency created a Facebook profile for the new store manager Gordon Gustavsson and photos of Ikea showrooms were uploaded to the profile. Facebookers were then able to tag themselves to items on the photos and whoever was the first to tag an item got it for free.

The virtual ‘word of mouth’ way of marketing enabled Ikea to utilise the capacity of social media to the full, gaining massive amounts of free advertising as photos spread across the users’ news feeds and profiles.

A video posted in YouTube outlines the campaign in detail:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE2LSp-hjbQ