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"Late last year, Facebook launched its Deals service and began allowing select businesses to claim their Facebook Place Pages and offer customers who check in one of four possible deals. \nPrior to launch, the Golden State Warriors \u2014 an NBA basketball team based near Facebook's Bay Area headquarters \u2014 were approached by Facebook to beta test the new program as a launch partner. \nThe invitation from the hot company was well-received, explains Kyle Spencer, the team's executive director of marketing. And so, the organization decided to offer a Facebook Deal for each home game for the remainder of the season.\nTrial and Error\n\n\n\n\nThe Warriors, like any other brand offering deals, have the option of choosing one of four types of deals: Individual Deals, Loyalty Deals, Friend Deals or Charity Deals. The team is mostly using the Individual Deals to offer merchandise discounts or post-game access to players for fans who check in to individual games. But, it's very much a trial and error approach designed to uncover the tactics that best drive people to engage with the brand on a deeper level. \nThe basketball team's greatest commodity are the players themselves, which explains the higher than average checkins the Warriors see when they involve a meet-and-greet with a player in the night's deal. \nFacebook, for its part, sends out packets to participating Places with promotional stickers. The Warriors have opted instead to create their own promotional materials, including concourse fliers, stickers, table tents and a physical check in table where fans need to go to pick up Warriors' printed deal cards.\nIn many ways, the Warriors have departed from Facebook's original plan for the Deals platform. Facebook makes it known that deal redemption is to be managed by the business owners, but it was likely not the company's intention to create a system that would require additional overhead on the part of each venue. \nSpencer admits that he has access to resources a coffee shop or small business may not have. The extra investment ensures that each Facebook deal fits within the brand experience the team hopes to create on a nightly basis.\nLocation and Leads\n\n\n\n\nThe Facebook Deals program is not without its kinks. To participate, a brand must claim its Place Page, distinct from its brand Page. The two pages can be merged into one, so long as the Place Page has the same name as the brand Page. Herein lies the problem for organizations, like the Golden State Warriors, that are not locations.\nIn the case of the Warriors, the team plays at the Oracle Arena, a venue the organization does not own. The Warriors cannot claim the arena on Facebook, and instead have created the Golden State Warriors Home Game Place on Facebook. \"The biggest challenge we have is getting fans to check in to the right venue,\" says Spencer. \nThe matter of location presents yet another challenge around brand awareness. \"We can't tie our place to our brand,\" says Spencer, who feels that this decreases the reach of fan checkins.\n\"I'd like there to be more synergy between the game, the checkin location and the brand on Facebook so we can drive more awareness to those 160,000 fans we already have on Facebook,\" he says.\nAs is the case with most location-based platforms, Facebook also offers brands very little actionable information they can use following a deals campaign. \n\"We'd love to know who these people are,\" says Spencer. To circumvent this limitation, the Warriors hope to turn each checkin into a transaction. Deals tailored around team store merchandise discounts help with this. So too do the two-for-one ticket deals the team has been experimenting with.\nInitial Results\n\n\n\n\nHaving offered 23 checkin deals, amassing nearly 17,000 total checkins, averaging 740 checkins per game (at the time of publication), Spencer reports that the organization is extremely pleased with the results thus far.\n\"We pride ourselves on the fan experience at the arena,\" says Spencer. \"This lets us take that experience to another level.\"\nSpencer reports incremental growth in sales at the team store on nights the Warriors run merchandise deals. And while he can't make the direct correlation between Facebook \"Likes\" and checkins, Spencer believes there is an important connection. \n\u201CSince the start of deals, we\u2019ve gone from roughly 80,000 fans to over 160,000. I think a portion of that can be attributed to people checking in and telling their friends they were at the Warriors game,\u201D he says.\nMore Facebook Marketing Resources from Mashable:\n- HOW TO: Create a Facebook Engagement Policy- HOW TO: Engage and Mobilize Facebook Fans Beyond the \"Like\"- 5 Creative Facebook Places Marketing Campaigns- 5 Facebook Giving Campaign Success Stories- 5 New Ways to Market Your Brand on Facebook\nImages courtesy of iStockphoto, Jamesmcq24, and the Golden State Warriors"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/02/14/facebook-deals-case-study/>