TOPS Friendly Markets planned to launch an aggressive promotion for the summer of 2011, giving away one car per day to a shopper at one of their 130 stores across Western and Central New York and Northeast Pennsylvania. Every day for 36 straight days, a shopper who used her/his BonusCard (TOPS’ affinity program) was randomly chosen to win a vehicle or $20,000.

TOPS wanted to extend this promotion beyond its usual traditional media channels. With the recent success of the launch of a corporate Facebook page, TOPS was willing to try this medium for their new campaign. However, the team required that the content on Facebook must be duplicated on the TOPS website, so as not to alienate older shoppers who may not have Facebook profiles.

The SKM team created a Facebook campaign that would continue TOPS’ philanthropic investment in the community while remaining consistent with the car giveaway model. The promotion awarded a free car to a deserving charity that operated within the TOPS Markets footprint.Our system included three stages. First, we accepted applications from charities that wanted to enter and vetted each for legitimacy. Second, we asked individuals to determine the top 10 charities by first “Liking” the TOPS page, then voting for one charity per day. Finally, we again asked participants to vote daily for one of the top 10 charities to win a vehicle valued at $20,000.SKM understood the charities’ interest in winning a vehicle incentivized TOPS’ entire geographic market. SKM set up a securely hosted site to manage this promotion utilizing a Facebook tab to run a custom-built page, mirrored on the Topsmarkets.com website. Our promotional engine secured entries, eliminated fraudulent attempts at multiple entries and managed the vote tabulation in real time.

As a result of the viral sharing among charity supporters, SKM increased TOPS Facebook page “Likes” by 172 percent. Over a two-month period, we drove almost 71,000 visits to the voting pages, with almost half of these being new visitors to the website. This promotion delivered a 3.42 percent website traffic increase. We secured over 70 participating charities across several markets and earned thousands of free search engine mentions through organically shared communications from participating charities.