DMA2010 Blog features Julie Nielsen

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!

the sammy and mobi awards

sammy-mobiYesterday, it was announced that two of appssavvy’s entries into digiday’s SAMMY and MOBI awards have been named as finalists! Our Public Enemies on Mafia Wars campaign, in partnership with Ignited, is a finalist for Best Engagement Campaign (a SAMMY Award) and our Powermat on MyTown campaign, in partnership with Maxus Global and M80, is a finalist for Best Location Based Campaign (a MOBI Award).

Both campaigns are finalists because they managed to engage people on the web in authentic and meaningful ways. We tapped into existing social activity: people playing Mafia Wars were completing jobs, collecting loot, and sharing with their friends, people on MyTown were checking-in to their favorite locations, collecting virtual goods, and again, sharing all this with their friends. By adding value to activities that people were already taking part in, appssavvy was able to achieve incredible results for its clients.

Winners will be announced at the MOBI Awards Gala on September 13 and the SAMMY Awards Gala the next day on September 14. Both events will take place at the W Hotel, Union Square, in New York. Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love your support.

Jonah Peretti on going viral

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.

Chris talks business at digiday:apps

appssavvy’s Chris Cunningham delivered the Lunch Keynote at digiday:APPS yesterday. In a segment titled “Brands and Apps: It’s all about social activity,” Chris talked about four shifts he’s seen in the last 2 1/2 years and shared the stage with Damon Burrell of MTV, Rachel Veiga of MediaCom, and Oz Solomon of Social Graph Studios. The message, as far social activity goes, is:

  1. Agencies and brands are partnering with apps rather than building their own
  2. Quality trumps quantity (it’s not about impressions anymore)
  3. Current tools don’t track or tell brands how to buy social activity
  4. Social activity moves the needle.

Windy City Office

final-chicagoofficeforwebRecently, 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!

Daisy Whitney takes a trip to a virtual mall

Yesterday, Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute featured appssavvy’s recently published Virtual Goods Study and noted that virtual goods were a $1 billion business last year. Check out the clip below.

The Power of Mobile & Social: Driving Real World Results for Brands with Virtual Goods

July 19th was an exciting day for appssavvy, we pitched Alberto Culber’s TRESemmé on the opportunity of mobile location based gaming, we released a first-of-its-kind study on virtual goods and then we were given the opportunity to present those results to a room full of marketing executives at IAB’s Marketplace Mobile. The result is a fascinating case study that sends a strong message about the future of advertising. You can watch our own Chris Cunningham share the stage with InsightExpress’ Joy Liuzzo as they speak to our findings after the jump: