Recently read how How Starbucks Builds Meaningful Customer Engagement via Social Media and out of all the points mentioned I absolutely connected to the one mentioned below.

“Social media fits within a larger digital strategy.
At Starbucks, social media is not a separate and distinct entity. Various departments collaborate online and offline to develop and implement plans designed to fully engage the community.

One such effort was Starbucks’ Love Project. Starbucks teamed up with several groups–including Playing for Change, Dave Matthews Band, John Legend and U2–to create the “All You Need Is Love CD.” With every $15 purchase at participating Starbucks locations, customers received a free CD and an invitation to participate in a mass sing-along by uploading their own video toStarbucksLoveProject.com, which thousands of people did. One dollar from the sale of every CD was donated to the Global Fund to Help Fight AIDS in Africa. Starbucks customers could also create a Love Drawing online and Starbucks would contribute an additional five cents per drawing to the fund for the first 1 million drawings submitted.

Starbucks could have simply offered the CD for sale, but it gave the project more dimension via the website, mass sing-along, Love Drawings, and special Love Drawing cups for sale in the store.”

It is not about building a website and marketing it. It is also not about making a Facebook application/game or a viral and getting XX number of clicks on it.  It should be an intercourse of the Social Media strategy and the entire marketing and business ideology of the brand.

PS – Any resemble to any Digital Agency living or dead is purely coincidental