Impressive Interactive Brand Marketing Comes To Linkedin

LinkedIn April 25, 2011 5 Comments

Every time I speak to businesses about marketing on Linkedin I’m always a little coy about how much can actually be done there given the B2B nature of the site. There are a whole host of ways to target people through Linkedin’s ads (which has made Linkedin a profitable company from early on) but in terms of interactive campaigns to target large groups of business consumers it hasn’t always been easy. In recent times though Linkedin have been making an effort to open up as a platform and with over 100 million users to target that has opened up a whole new raft of opportunities and Volkswagen in Holland seem to be one of the first companies to take advantage with this smart campaign. They have called in Linkedout and it’s a way of engaging their key target audience and is incredibly smart…

The Concept

What you have to do is head over to the site (It is all in Dutch which is a shame but you will be able to guess what is going on) and it asks you to connect with your Linkedin profile. We see this all the time with Facebook but this is one of the first times that a brand has used the new Linkedin platform to pull information out of Linkedin for an interactive marketing campaign of this nature. It’s called Linkedout and it’s all about promoting the new Volkswagen Passat.

The Competition

The idea behind this is genius because it actually encourages you to fill out your Linkedin profile more than it already is. You are asked to choose friends to battle and the competition takes place around areas like connections, recommendations and experience. You’ll be able to pick and choose people to beat quite easily but the overall competition winner in Holland will be the person with the most complete Linkedin profile so you can really see how this will turn in to a competitive test and get the key business audience engaged with the car itself.

Video Explanation

Not the best video I have ever seen summing up a campaign but it does show how you can battle your Linkedin connections via the app. The whole idea is that you would want to be competitive in a business sense and that this game would make you want to go out there and actually improve your Linkedin profile.

The New Facebook Marketing

We have all seen how quick brands have been to engage with Facebook apps and interactive tools like Facebook connect as soon as they came out and I think we will start to see the same thing happening now with Linkedin. I can tell you that brands out there are craving this sort of engagement on the world’s biggest B2B network but this is one of the first times I have seen it cracked by anybody and I would expect others to follow. It’s all about tapping in to that key audience of 100 million people who are very well off and who share tons of their data. Very smart move by Volkswagen.

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