Earlier this month when Microsoft pulled the plug on Kin, its new smart phone for the Facebook generation, we figured that would be all for the short-lived social networking gadget. But it’s not so easy to completely eradicate a consumer product these days. Microsoft Kin’s heart continues to beat slowly on its Facebook page, where 179 die-hard fans and some bitter users still reside. The odd condolence and swipe continue to appear on the Wall there, turning a once-vibrant community into a type of virtual mausoleum. The dead Kin is not alone. Long abandoned marketing campaigns and defunct products are still visible across much of Facebook, turning the social network into an eerie graveyard of yesterday’s brilliant marketing ideas gone stale.

Here are some other notable tombstones we’ve come across:

The Snickers “Get Some Nuts, Grow a Mo” Campaign
This campaign was pure genius in its day. Was. Last autumn, Snickers dared enter the realm of glorious taboo: mustaches and Mr. T with the instructions to candy-bar-chomping fans: “Get some nuts, grow a Mo.” The snack food brand hosted a video contest, amply plugged through the campaign’s Facebook page, that asked Snickers lovers to show off their “Movember” (hint: think sometime between October and November) mustaches; the best “Mo” earned a prize. At the end of the 4Q, after the contest stashes had been shaved off and prizes sent to the manliest of participants, Snickers bailed from the group, leaving behind a campaign frozen in time.

To recap: the Snickers campaign had an impressive TV commercial that amassed about 10,000 YouTube fans, so we know the campaign must have been worth more than an abandoned Facebook page. Clever marketers will note, too: the campaign had a glaring limitation as the following comment shows:

The MTV/Honda “Hero Honda Roadies” Reality Show

This campaign partnership is still ongoing, and due to the show’s popularity in India, chances are it will be roadworthy for a while longer. So why does this qualify for our list of abandoned Facebook campaigns? For every new season of the show, MTV/Honda creates a new Facebook page to show it off. There are currently four separate fan pages for this one campaign, each corresponding to a single season and each with fewer members than the one it preceded: Season 5, for example, had 88,000 fans (last post: May, 2008) and Season 7 had just 1,140. At this rate, Season 8 will come in solidly in the three-figure fandom range. Wonder if the programming director notices, or even cares?

The Burger King “Whopper Sacrifice” Campaign

Remember this one? This marketing campaign challenged the very existentialism of Facebook by offering free Whopper sandwiches to anyone who un-friended ten of their Facebook friends. As part of the execution, Burger King created a sacrifice-your-buds Facebook app, setting out to prove that “Americans love the Whopper more than they love their friends.”

The social media campaign generated a ton of buzz. The New York Times even used the promotion to put a price on the head of each Facebook friend: a whole 37 cents. Burger King though “shut off the grill” on the campaign after Facebook intervened with a game’s over software tweak. Why such a killjoy? Facebook felt the King’s jokey “you’ve been defriended for a burger” notifications infringed on users’ right to privacy, the Times reported a week later. How quaint.

To recap: 233,906 friendships were lost for a free Whopper when it was all said and done. What traces are left of Whopper Sacrifice on Facebook today? A desolate app page of 2,000 fans with left-over image source code and a Take that! “about” section that reads:

Facebook® has disabled WHOPPER® Sacrifice after your love for the WHOPPER® Sandwich proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.

And finally…

What will happen to the countless other not-quite-dead marketing campaigns still immortalized on Facebook? Better yet, do marketers have a responsibility to purge from Facebook stand-alone campaign pages that have long passed their expiry date?

The culprit here is unenlightened marketing executives who continue to think in terms of quarter-spanning campaigns and who mistakenly believe that consumers view the world just like them. There is a movement underway at some of the more progressive companies like Sony and Coca-Cola where social media marketing initiatives are viewed as part of an ongoing discussion, not a series of 10-week contests.

There is help on the way, apparently. Just last month Coca-Cola in the UK sent an unambiguous message to the digital marketing community: that centralizing all fan chatter to a central hub rather than a series of campaign-themed destinations is the future of brand marketing online. Sony too speaks of the need to move “beyond campaigns” when using social media to communicate to the public.

We can only hope this means marketers go back and clean up some of the obsolete stuff they leave behind on social networks. Please, do so before the next season of MTV Hero Honda Roadies.

Reporting by Brian Skepys. Writing by Bernhard Warner.