This is generalized from one example of a fairly poorly executed marketing campaign.

So I have to like a Facebook page to listen to a new Jay-Z/Kanye song? It's just too obvious of an attempt to create a viral loop. If the page had a great design or interactive concept, it would be different and might have worked.

"Ok Go" have done some very successful and creative campaigns to promote their music and music videos. With the right concept and execution, Facebook marketing can be very successful.

Off the top, there are a couple of problems with the article. First, the number of likes may be the easiest quantifiable measure to refer to, but by no means does it reflect the effectiveness of a campaign Secondly, music isn't the best subject for this "case study". Music is very fan driven and online marketing for rap and hip-hop is largely dominated by blogs (like nahright, illroots, smoking section). I would say rap spreads first through the blogs and reaction is very often expressed through Twitter. While This facebook "campaign" had significant visibility, I doubt it was their primary focus when releasing this song. If the article referred to a household good campaign (for example), I'd be more receptive to the conclusions.

The author is out by a factor of 100 with his attempt to quantify the campaign's success (80k is a respectable 1% of 8million, not .01%)

Secondly, whilst the dark pattern requiring you to "like" the song to listen to it may have been in place, it certainly isn't now. ~1% of group members actively choosing to "like" an individual song and sending out signals to all their friends actually seems pretty good.

I think Facebook is a great place to get people to talk about you. But it's not something that you can monetize easily. If you base your marketing campaign solely on Facebook, you might find it not effective. However, I think that facebook marketing is cheap enough that you can be seen by a lot of people and get people to talk about you while putting most of your effort and moneys on different medias.

I wonder what the author is using to judge whether this was a successful campaign or not. Although his being off by two orders of magnitude certainly doesn't help.

At the company I'm working for, we did a campaign for Keith Urban and it did pretty well, better than our (and clients') expectations. We built an application where for one week, we released 1 song a day. To get access to the application, you had to Like it.. and to listen to the song, you had to Like that too. He gained 60K additional fans from Likes (from a little over 1 mil fans) over 10 days or so, and albums sold were 150% above forecasts.

> In order to hear the song, one must “like” the page.

Or you could just click the link in the article and then press play? I'm guessing the author is just completely misinformed here.

The benefits of Facebook marketing for the song and artists is a good question... lots of interesting answers here.

But how about Facebook's end? Doesn't seem to me they were going to get much out of it either way?

SO how much revenue did Facebook receive on this event?

Not so sure I'd be buying a Facebook IPO... of course, being broke I won't have to deal with the question.

Why should I have to go to a facebook page and like it (when I 'm already a fan of both their pages btw!), just to listen to a song that I can hear with one click through to hiphopdx.com?

They botched the execution of releasing the song on facebook, that doesn't mean marketing on facebook suddenly sucks.

Facebook marketing had nothing to do with those numbers. There were thousands of people waiting for the release of the song due to a tweet by Kanye earlier in the week. When the song was released most of those people went to their favorite music blog to hear it.

Participation is the key. Clicking like on someone or on a page does not make this user a true fan. If a campaign does not create an event making people to want to participate, social marketing will not work just like any other traditional marketings.