Hi, I’m James one of newest members of the Leapfrogg team. I’m originally from Brighton, although I lived and studied in Bristol for a couple of years, before the lure of sea air and lack of cider drinking farmers was too much for me and returned to the seaside back in 2008.

My role at Leapfrogg is as Digital Marketing Trainee, which I’m really excited about since I have always been interested in social media, digital marketing and frogs…well, maybe not so much the latter.

The last month or two has somehow flown by, as quickly as my notes have mounted, however I’ve learned an awful lot about a lot of things, in particular web optimisation, paid search, copy writing and social media. This has been a really interesting inception to agency life, with the whole team making me feel very welcome and showing me around.

For my first post on the Froggblog I thought I’d write about the Nike Football Facebook campaign and what we can learn from its success.

When Facebook first started to get popular back in 2007, the only real commercial representation on the site was from music promoters and dodgy students offering dissertation ‘writing’ services. As we all know, with the massive increased popularity of the site (Facebook just overtook Yahoo in the US for regular visitors) many brands, particularly those with a youth oriented audience, have flooded to the site to promote themselves. Obviously some have done a better job than others and in my view Nike have done a better job than pretty much everyone else.

Nike Football’s fan page is certainly the best one I’ve seen on Facebook. The page has been spruced up with fancy bits of FBML (Facebook’s version of HTML) and looks nothing like a traditional default fan page.

It is often said that social media is a great way to interact and engage with your consumers – Nike has taken this interaction to a whole new level. The page features a training section which contains videos that users subscribe to. The videos featuring training tips and sessions with some of Nike’s superstars, such as Liverpool FC’s Fernando Torres. They import snazzy graphics and are professionally executed, which you would expect from a global brand.

What makes these videos so successful is the content they feature is genuinely worth something to the user. What makes the videos so effective for Nike is that they are able to cram as much of their branding in as possible and also add some less-than-subtle product placements that they could never get away with on TV or offline.

As well as the training videos, the page contains regular status updates on the football issues of the day; these updates receive hundreds of comments and ‘likes’ from Nike fans all across the world – all of which helps to increase awareness though Facebook’s news stream. Nike have also launched an IPhone App which updates users Facebook accounts about how far through the training schedule they’ve got.

So what can your brand learn from Nike? Obviously not everyone has the resources or budget that Nike does, however, that doesn’t mean you can’t create useful and engaging content and universally spread it (virally) via Facebook.

At the core of the Nike Football’s page success is the simple idea of offering content that is really useful and valuable to the user and allowing the content to spread so quickly. Instead of flashy training videos with millionaire superstar footballers, a cookery company, for example, could offer simple yet effective cooking tips in videos on the Facebook page. If the content is useful enough for the user it will spread and more and more people will find out about your brand.

Another important point to take from the Nike campaign is about scheduling your content. Their training videos are set up for a week-by-week programme; they could have been condensed into one longer video but that means users would have no reason to come back so by creating a schedule the user becomes far more engaged.

I am really looking forward to getting involved with similarly successful Facebook campaigns for many of our clients here at Leapfrogg; especially in the luxury retail market.