Ahead of her talk at the DMA2010 conference & exhibition, Julie Nielsen, Director, Partner Development and Social Strategy at appssavvy, wrote a post for DMA2010’s blog entitled “Virtual Goods Drive Real World Results for Brands – says Julie Nielsen.” In it, she highlights appssavvy’s recently released study on branded virtual goods and how virtual goods play a key role in campaign strategy in social media.

If you happen to be in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 12, check out Julie’s session titled “Campaign Strategy in Social Media.” appssavvy folks will be in attendance so give us a shout if you’ll be there!

Last week we attended New York Viral Media Meetup hosted by Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed. The event included drinks, discussion, and two guest speakers: Christopher Poole (”moot”) founder of 4chan and Jonah Peretti co-founder of Huffington Post and founder of BuzzFeed.

Jonah delivered a fascinating presentation called “Mormons, Mullets and Maniacs” (link after the jump). He asks: How can you make your idea go “viral”? One major component of Jonah’s philosophy is what he calls the “Bored at Work Network” (BWN) which consists of the millions of bored office workers blogging, tweeting, and using Facebook all day. He suggests that the BWN is bigger than any traditional media network we know of (and we’re pretty certain he’s right).

Then Jonah presented his five strategies for going viral:

1. Create media targeted to the BWN network – easy to understand, easy to share, with some sort of social imperative. (You never know in advance whether your ideas will work, so try, try again.)
2. The Mullet Strategy: Business in the front, party in the back (e.g. behind the scenes at buzzfeed, they can add, test, tweak, optimize, and remove stories in real time).
3. The Big Seed Strategy: Expose a large seed audience to your content and then focus on maximizing its “social reproduction rate.”
4. Content is more viral if it helps people express their personality disorders. (Target Narcissists like Kanye West and Perez Hilton, Obsessive Compulsives like Wikipedia users and online gamers, etc.)
5. Make evangelism the core of your strategy - focus on the mechanics of how the idea spreads, not just the idea itself.

Check out the entire presentation bellow and make sure to follow Jonah at @peretti.

Recently, we announced the doubling of the size of our headquarters in SoHo and the opening of a physical office in Los Angeles, not to mention surpassing the 40+ employees milestone. Today, we’re pleased to continue that momentum by announcing the opening of appssavvy’s newest office in Chicago.

The office, located at 321 North Clark Street (pictured on the left), brings together our team in the Windy City under one roof and enables them to better serve our brand/agency clients and developer/publisher partners located in Chicago and the surrounding Midwest.

We’re thrilled to be a bigger part of the Chicago community!