About Viral

Social Marketing Meets Garage App Development

Tuesday’s head on collision of the Toronto social media community saw a room full of eager developers and itchy marketers for the 4th FacebookCampToronto / Facebook Developers Garage series. We were introduced to the new platform changes that are coming about next week along with a quick demonstration on how to optimize Facebook advertising via targeting.

Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze presented on behalf of Facebook platform developers. His most important comment about the “new” Facebook is that it will be simpler for the user. New to the user interface will be a series of tabs at the top of the screen, “Creating a photos tab to handle the billions of photos was simply a priority.  Other improvements include an info tab on your profile and the customizable newsfeed.  Now you can decide how important things are for your friends to see by changing the size of information on the Minifeed.  First off it was great to come together and meet all the developers of new applications.  On display were some widely known applications like Mouse hunt, and the FedEx package as well as some up and comers like Refresh, Slangbook, and Praized.

In my opinion Facebook applications are like a sleeping giant. There are countless examples of rehashed ideas popping up with a slight tweak here or an adjustment there. For example, Praized, one of the applications showcased looks like something that may catch on. It utilizes user input to generate valuable knowledge for those who may be searching for pretty much any business. Praized visually displays areas, buildings, establishments that much like Digg, or any online voting system, can be ranked.

We already have these review based consumer sites on the web, think Yelp.  Restaurantica has been running for years and has hundreds of thousands of reviews on restaurants. What may push Praized to the forefront are two simple features. One, it will rank any business and two it has social networking built in thanks to Facebook. Imagine if Restaurantica had a personal profile to back the comments being submitted. The social networking aspect of this App has strategically linked the confidence of ones own network of friends into an opinionated map of the city.

Mouse hunt on one hand looks great. Very visual and appealing but the skepticism remains as to how long people will continue to buy their virtual cheese. Interesting none the less and here’s hoping the talent of the organization will push out more great applications in the months to come.

Monetizing the applications was the question of the night. So what was the answer? According to Rebecca Sawyer, Director of Monetization for Facebook, the best way to make money on your App was to buy advertising on Facebook to catapult the viral spread. She stated upfront the presentation “was not a sales pitch,” but really what else could it be. Here top five points were nothing new for advertising. Target your audience, write compelling headlines and copy, use multiple ads, then measure and optimize. That strategy is the key to success not matter the medium. 

However, if you are like most independent developers you have put all your dollars into development. Most of this group is looking for the Holy Grail in the way of sponsorship. A relevant game can generate sponsorship like MGM’s recent sponsorship of the up and coming Flip Cup game to help promote the soon to be released movie College targeting youth. The App is still a work in progress and the next round of improvements are set for August according to the brains behind it, Keith Canivet.

If there was ever to be a killer App it may be thanks to the event sponsor Refresh Partners. Their new analytics tool claims to be able to provide aggregate demographics of App usage. This measurement is going to help developers and marketers report back to clients on their success of integrating a brand into the social network. But all of this is still in its infancy. Apparently development of this was only two weeks. Seems to be an awfully short development time for something of this magnitude (but then again I’m not a coder). I am going to be keeping a close eye on this one to see what impact it has on this budding industry.

The most rewarding part of the night was seeing how eager everyone is to jump into this emerging market. And coming from this blogger once companies learn how to integrate their brand with an application, release it in the right virtual market with a solid measuring system for ROI we will see more growth in major corporate spending.

Stuart Dykstra with notes from Doug Watson