Shop mark beauty without ever leaving Facebook

I'm not surprised that Facebook is becoming a marketplace, but I'm a little surprised it's Avon's youth-oriented mark line making the big splash into the money pool. The brand is one of the first of 1.6 billion active fan pages to launch a selling application. Facebook reps said 1-800-Flowers was the only other fan page that they were aware had a similar widget. Read on for details of the shopping experience waiting for you on mark's Facebook page.

First things first, it's kind of hard to find mark's Facebook fan page. It doesn't come up when you search for mark or meet mark, the company's slogan. Then one finds that the Facebook fan page is under mark.girl. But wait, it's mark. girl with a space. I guess the company is counting on its reps contacting friends and potential clients through the "invite friends" option, making searchability less of an issue. Still, searchability's not for nothing.

Once you find the page, it's very easy to use. There's a shop tab, and two clicks gets you right into a store. You can purchase with or without having a mark rep, though you must enter a phone number and I'm guessing a mark rep is going to contact you. That might annoy some people unfamiliar with Avon's door-to-door sales model.

As for the socializing aspect of the site, the wall seems to be mainly reps posting sales and deals and talking to one another. Getting customers buzzing might be another thing.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that a brand known for a unique selling technique is one of the first to embrace social networking in this way, and by pledging $50 million to its social networking strategy no less. Normally there are two types of brands - ones that ignore social networking, and ones that sink money into strategies that don't monetize the tools which renders them useless to the bottom line. And if it's useless to the bottom line, it's not going to last or it's not going to be of high quality. Creating a shopping widget that will monetize Facebook in a real, immediate way puts Avon strides ahead.

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