Papa John’s Recruits Facebook Fans to Create Next Pizza

From Mashable:

In much the same way that Dunkin’ Donuts and Mountain Dew are tapping their online fans to create new products, Papa John’s is using Facebook to find their next speciality pizza.

The Papa’s Specialty Pizza Challenge tasks Facebook fans with creating the winning recipe for the company’s next specialty pizza through June 14. Although the campaign is just a few weeks old, there are already more than 6,500 entries.

Since the campaign launched, the application tab has been loaded close to 80,000 times, with users publishing upwards of 1,700 Facebook news feed items.

The volume of attention is to be expected as pizza creators are all vying for some serious cash and prizes. The top three submissions — as selected by “Papa” John Schnatter and corporate taste testers — will be integrated into the Papa John’s menu and sold in stores from August 2 to August 29. To the highest-selling pizza victor go the spoils: 1% of pizza sales post challenge (up to $10,000), pizza for life and a guest appearance in a Papa John’s TV commercial.

Masterminding a new specialty pizza is pretty simple. Users can name their pizza whatever they want, select a crust, pick a pizza sauce, add up to seven additional toppings and describe their machination. The final result is then posted on Papa John’s Facebook page where other users can like or share the specialty creation.

While it’s not the most original idea, the chain’s pizza challenge is an extremely savvy social media initiative. Since the contest is housed within Facebook, sharing is essentially baked into the campaign at every turn. So not only do Facebook users have to “Like” the Page to see the contest — with that behavior posted back to their activity feeds — but they can invite friends to take the challenge and post their pizza creations to their wall.

Another key element to the campaign is that the three finalists will likely need to use their social media presence to promote their pizzas if they want to win the grand prize. To help them with that endeavor, Papa John’s will give each finalist a marketing budget of $1000.

We’re curious to see how this challenge develops over the course of the summer. In the meantime, let us know if you plan to enter the contest, and tell us how you think the strategy compares to its rival company’s pizza holdout social media initiative.