Dunkinâ€™ Donuts Launches Search for â€œPresident of Dunkin Nationâ€�

**Waqas** · August 22, 2011

If you missed your chance to become Dunkin’ Donuts’s ultimate coffee fan, you still have a chance to leverage your social media savvy for proper fanboy (or fangirl) recognition: From now until September 23, the food and beverage chain is giving customers who check in to U.S. Dunkin’ Donuts locations using Foursquare or Facebook Places a chance to be named the “President of Dunkin’ Nation.”

To enter, participants need to register their Facebook Places or Foursquare credentials on Dunkin’s Facebook Page. Fans are then invited to check in at Dunkin’ Donuts locations once per hour, up to 10 times per day.

The person with the most checkins each week is eligible to be named the President of Dunkin’ Nation for the week. (There will be five winners in total, for each of the five weeks.) A leaderboard on Dunkin’s Facebook Page will help them track their status in real time.

Those whose checkin behaviors are less naturally competitive are also eligible to win a $25 gift card simply for checking in.

One concern: spam. Ten checkins at the same retail location in a single day is considered excessive by most users of location-based social networks, and while users can opt not to broadcast their checkins to their friend networks on Foursquare, the same option does not exist for Facebook Places users. Although there’s a chance that so many checkins will quickly alert participants’ friend networks to the promotions, there’s also a serious risk that participants will overwhelm their friends, thus losing a chunk of their followers and developing a less-than-savory association with Dunkin’s brand in the process.

Kevin Vine, interactive marketing manager in Dunkinâ€™s brands division, admitted that he hadn’t considered the possibility of spam but noted that participants using Foursquare could hide their checkins. At the end of the day, he says, it’s more important to open the promotion to as many people as possible — and that means making it available to Facebook‘s vast userbase in addition to Foursquare‘s.

In speaking of goals for the campaign, Vine says the company would be pleased to see 100,000 people participate. He emphasized that the campaign is less about driving traffic to Dunkin’ Donuts locations than “celebrating and rewarding our dedicating fans who are already engaging in this kind of [checkin] behavior,” although the former is still important.

More About: dunkin donuts, Facebook Places, foursquare, MARKETING

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