Social Media Success Stories: IKEA’s Celebrate Brilliantly 2012 Holiday Catalog

This week, we are looking at some the best uses of social media. The next success story did nothing fantastic or sensational, nothing viral or completely out of the box. It simply took an expensive offline marketing piece and put it online in one of the most perfect ways possible. It harmoniously integrated a website with social media to give the web user a virtual store experience.

Today, we look at IKEA’s “Celebrate Brilliantly” 2012 Holiday Catalog. It was the first time that this Swedish home furnishing giant put together a seasonal catalog. It’s goal was replicate the experience of visiting a brick-and-mortar store. Complete with perfect social integration, this interactive catalog featured recipes, video clips and interactive “style solutions.”

So how is this a social media success story? Here are just a few characteristics of its social media mastery.

Promoting Sharing – As you scroll through the 31 pages of the interactive catalog, IKEA gave you many ways to drop those hints and share with your family and friends you interest in a specific item. Users could click on it to like it on Facebook, pin it on Pinterest, buy it online, or add it to your shopping list.

Built-in Interactivity – The catalog offered several different levels of interactivity. Clicking on different graphic elements allowed you to change the appearance of specific and allowed to morph regular rooms into specially decorated holiday rooms. Clicking on other elements allowed viewers to pull up recipes and other style recommendations.

The best part of this success story is that it just did its job extremely well. We often look for the most fantastic solutions possible. Here there was nothing fantastic. Congratulations to IKEA on a job well done.