There's an app for that: harness the potential of Facebook applications.

• Author: Plothow, Brad
• Position: Techknowledge

For brands, Facebook is both a darling and a disappointment. The social network's ubiquitous popularity and sheer size--nearly 1 billion users worldwide--make it hard to ignore. But at this point in the evolution of the world's largest digital hangout, it's clear that not all marketing strategies that involve Facebook are created equal.

Increasingly, marketers have found display advertising on Facebook to be ineffective, contributing to the company losing roughly half of its market value since going public earlier this year. As one alternative, many brands are engaging customers and creating awareness through highly creative and customized Facebook apps.

In the wake of successful games like Farmville, the business world is just now learning how to harness the potential of Facebook applications. In fact, Facebook developer James Pearce recently wrote that since the site launched its mobile platform last year, handheld devices alone send some 60 million users per month to apps and games. Utah firms are figuring out that simply having a presence on Facebook isn't enough, but success isn't necessarily measured by how much content is poured into the network either. There are few firm rules in the social world, but solid Facebook apps tend to have a narrow scope and fanatical alignment with a broader strategy.

All About Awareness

Ben Craner found out that Facebook has stiff protections for profile pages when he tried to stick tacos to people's profile pictures without their permission. As chief marketing officer at Cafe Rio, the Utah-based Tex-Mex food chain, Craner was trying to drive engagement with customers on Facebook. So he created an online "food fight," allowing users to digitally accost their friends with items from the restaurant's menu. The burritos, salads and desserts would stay stuck to the victim's page until he or she removed it and, hopefully, retaliated.

"When their friends slapped them with a tres leches or something, we want them to think of Cafe Rio," Craner says. "In Utah, most people already know of the Cafe Rio brand, so my strategy is to keep them thinking about us. We want word-of-mouth advertising, and we just keep giving people tools to do that."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While Facebook ultimately didn't allow Craner's team to affect profile pages, Cafe Rio did use a modified version of the food fight app to great success, Craner says. When users were slingshotted, boomeranged or ninja punched with casual Mexican fare...