During the weekly Twitter #mrktchat conversation this past week, @motorad666 (thanks again for guest hosting), brought to light the fact that K2 Skis has been redirecting their entire corporate site’s web traffic to their Facebook page. The K2 team has a decent incentive for someone to visit their Facebook page in that users that “Like” the K2 page can then get a “sneak peek” at the 2010-11 ski lineup. Certainly a nice motivation for a die-hard fan, but not something that I think would be a real incentive for most people. But, in a comment on the All Facebook post about this, someone who I assume is a K2 representative notes:
The goal isn’t to gain fans – it is to reward K2’s Facebook friends with an exclusive preview of 2010-11 skis for 2 weeks prior to launching the new website to the public. K2 sells the vast majority of its products through local retail shops so there is no money lost in shutting down the 2009-10 site.
This strategy makes good sense to me and I hope that K2 has it in their plans to further engage with their dedicated fan-base as the 2010-11 winter season approaches and most of us get more into the hard goods buying mode. I’m not sure what it would be, but perhaps some way of letting your friends know what setup it is that you’re thinking of buying, or even a way to show them what you think they should be riding on…
Two last points in regards to this strategy, @elisabethos smartly pointed out that redirecting your entire sites to Facebook does have some SEO implications. And finally, when looking at K2 Skis page stats, their fans have increase significantly, from 24,190 on 7/17 to 31,133 on 7/23 and counting. What do you think about Facebook fan pages and what great (or not so) promotions have you seen winter snow sports companies doing?
Tags: facebook · k2 skis · mrktchat2 Comments
Eric, the good Captain Ahab of ScurvyPirates wrote about this very thing yesterday:
http://scurvypirates.com/2010/07/k2s-wild-wild-we...
I have some thoughts regarding SEO and potential "damage" for redirecting all traffic for a few weeks, and I'm not sure it hurts them that much at the expense of creating new fans they can continue to engage long after those two weeks are up and the stunt is over. Thoughts?
My take is that you don't know until you try it. Hopefully K2 had some expectations set in terms of number of views, new fans or even just articles about their Facebook move and from that they can judge success or not. It certainly shouldn't be rated a success or not by virtue of what I think In any case, I'm with the good Captain in that someone had to Guinea Pig the cliff and I'm glad that someone finally did!