• by Susan Kuchinskas , July 23, 2008

To introduce the F400 music phone, Samsung used a campaign that crossed social boundaries - in a good way. The premium music phone features outstanding audio quality and a music recognition app, so it was a natural for Samsung to help its target, the over-16 bunch, discover new music. Any unsigned band could compete for a Community Music Award by uploading a music clip to f400share.com. Every vote put them higher on the playlist, with the two top bands in each of two rounds getting play in the national advertising campaign.

Instead of picking one social media site, or working individually with multiple platforms, a campaign by Techlightenment brought MySpace users together with members of Facebook and Bebo. "We got all three of the social networks talking to each other," says Techlightenment CEO Gi Fernando. Thanks to a widget built by the company - which is part social media agency, part development shop, part CRM specialist - when someone uploads a song from one site, it's instantly available to the other networks, as well. "The applications and users don't need to reside in Facebook, but can take advantage of the Facebook APIs from elsewhere," Fernando says, and ditto for everyone else's APIs.

This is the kind of campaign that would have been not only tedious to set up site-by-site but also impossible to analyze. The widget let Samsung track viral growth, direct forward, and reveal "friend-graph penetration" - showing how far into someone's network the music player penetrated - across the sites.

Samsung didn't completely cut the social sites out of the revenue loop. It bought plenty of in-network ads to promote the contest.