Joining a list which includes the likes of Coca Cola, BMW, U2 and Barack Obama, Saint Martin’s Press has been chosen for Best Facebook Marketing 2009.

With well over 600 million Americans active on Facebook every month, big brands consider it a very important marketing tool.  The Facebook team set out to evaluate the best and most innovative efforts over the past twelve months.

In a week long campaign for Saint Martin’s Press, GVP partnered with LivingSocial’s Visual Bookshelf application for the book release of Plum Spooky, a mystery thriller by Janet Evanovich.  The campaign achieved record scores in the areas of Content, Interaction, Design and Virality from Facebook’s discriminating team of judges.

Featured as Book of the Week on Visual Bookshelf, Plum Spooky garnered a lot of attention from users in a natural way that did not disrupt the application experience.  “Our goal was to quietly and seamlessly integrate a promotion into an application.” says Paul Gigante, founder and creative Director of GVP.

Users were encouraged to add the book to their own bookshelves, specifying whether they were “currently reading” or “already read” the book, as well as rate and review the book.

During the campaign, users actively participated in sharing and promoting the book to their friends: 1,186 users added Plum Spooky to their visual bookshelves, and 123,750 News Feed updates were made.  Sharing continued after the campaign, with 103,000 more News Feeds sent.  A substantial number of  reviews were written, and five-star ratings given.

By partnering with Visual Bookshelf, GVP was able to effortlessly reach the target audience with the application’s existing user base.  They leveraged one of the most popular book applications to help drive social action in a cost effective, high reach manner.

See the report here.