- Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Kraft hopes the holidays are for sharing -- both goodwill and its new Facebook application.
 
The consumer-goods giant earlier this month hooked up with social marketing company SocialVibe to release a cause-related Facebook application. The twist: Kraft donates six meals to hungry families through the Feeding America charity for each friend users convince to add the application.
 
So far, the program appears to be working. In less than two weeks, more than 25,000 Facebook users have added the Kraft application. That translates into 1.4 million meals donated. Kraft has promised to provide up to 3.2 million meals through the program. At its current rate, it is on pace to reach that goal, with 50,000 application installations, sometime next month.
 
The apparent success stands in contrast to an earlier application effort from Kraft. Its Kraft Recipe Assistant, which gives daily cooking tips, has just 152 monthly active users. This is not uncommon for brand Facebook applications, most of which have failed to gain any sustained following on the social network.

Giving people the reward of social status to share the Kraft application was key to the program, according to Adam Broitman, director of strategy at Crayon, the new media consultancy that advised Kraft.
 
"There have been a lot of applications where people are ignoring them," he said. "We had a number of conversations about how to get around that. One of the things that came to mind is you can go into a community by yourself and put your brand stake in the ground or you can meet someone in the community and have them intro you around."
 
When a user adds the application, a notification is sent to friends via the News Feed, the ticker updating friend activities on the social network.
 
The concept behind SocialVibe is to tap into cause marketing to give people a tangible reason to flog brands in their personal spaces, whether it is through their blogs or social network pages on Facebook and MySpace. It claims 500,000 users on its platform.
 
Brands have mostly failed in social media, according to SocialVibe CEO Joe Marchese, because they have relied on the myth of viral distribution. Whether a Facebook application or a YouTube video, many brands have taken a myopic approach to encouraging users to spread their messages, he said. Instead, they need to make it worth their while.
 
"The only appropriate way to insert a brand into social media is to give some kind of benefit to people," Marchese said. "More and more marketers understand that. You don't trick people into sharing your brand."
 
The lure of rewarding users to share is much more important since Facebook made changes in how it handles apps earlier this year to address user complaints of "application spam" through constant notifications. Since then, viral distribution has gotten more difficult.
 
But will well-meaning Facebook users simply spam their friends to add the application? Marchese thinks not because the reward is too small. The approach of a brand buying its way into social networks is not that different from a typical media buy, only the "publisher" in this case is an individual.
 
"People are publishers of social content," he said. "Let's treat them as such."