• Harvard Business Review, Friday, February 19, 2010 10:28 AM

Wanting to see if social media is all it's cracked up to be for marketing a business, Rice University associate professor Utpal M. Dholakia and restaurant consultant Emily Durham set up a Facebook page for a popular Houston-based bakery and café chain, Dessert Gallery (DG).

Three months after the site's launch, they surveyed both customers who had become fans and some who had not, analyzed the data sets separately and concluded that Facebook changed customer behavior for the better. People who had become fans spent about the same amount of money per visit, but they made 36% more visits to DG's stores each month; spent 45% more of their eating-out dollars there; and had 14% higher emotional attachment and 41% greater psychological loyalty to the brand.

Requisite academic caveats: "It's important to remember that our results suggest intriguing possible correlations rather than definitive causalities" and "cautious optimism seems wise at this point. Companies should see what Facebook can do for them but use it as just one niche tool."

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