School 2.0 - Mobile Apps Getting Jiggy

My Point of View from Today's Class Discussion:
Mobile search continues to evolve with geo-based technology and apps.  Applications such as Yelp.com and Foursquare are quickly turning any geographical place into a menu of options.  This changes the marketing dynamic for competing retailers, restaurants and entertainment venues by the simple act of being able to present a mired of options to a user based on their vicinity.  Just like Pandora's advertising network is designed to be intuitive to the user's profile  http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/amplifier/39723/you-stream-music-pandora-streams-your-info-to-advertisers-capiche and markets them accordingly, mobile apps will be able to do the same based on user profile and GPS location.  I think it's genius.

Skwikee Social Experiment Project - Pre-launch Phase I

It's been 35 days since we initiated the pre-launch news of Skwikee.com  Our goal this first month was to establish a target market, then test relevance points within that market.   Unlike other market specific social sites, we decided to tie it directly into the Facebook API and use the social tools already in place.  Why reinvent the wheel when the people and technology already exist? 

Proving social gaming (in the form of video blogging) is a new and effective form of social marketing, we needed to test it within the dominating demographic for social gaming: 43 yr. old women.  We chose LA and featured nightlife, celebrity trends, fashion and press as the content.  As we hoped, we've hit the target demographic spot on.  Here are the results of our Facebook followers thus far:

Our next area of experimentation was to find out exactly what the target audience was most interested in.  Some examples were:

• LA celebrity spottings
• LA Fashion News
• Nightlife/Event Happenings
• Auditions for New Correspondents
• Early Wwarding of Badges (pre-game launch)

Here is a sample of the responses we recieved:

To conclude this early phase of the Skwikee pre-launch promo, it's safe to say we have enough data to determine we are on the right track.  Moving forward we now have a better idea how to relate to our demographic.  We have not seen very much viral activity, which tells us we need to do a better job of now influencing and connecting with our audience in a meaningful way.  Our theory is that if we build enough connectivity with the featured correspondents, we'll be able to give the follower a much better and meaningful experience.  This is what we plan to test in Pre-launch Phase II. 

The "Social Queen" Badge Experiment

This is a pivotal week in regards to school and my latest social experiment.  I put out a second casting call in Hollywood, see if I could garner some fun and interesting field correspondents to cover the places and things I want to feature in the Skwikee social game I'm designing.

The first casting call was a flop.  I realize why there's so many wanna be actors in this town.   I received a ton of responses, but only saw about ten people I'd consider being "the type" players would want to see featured in the game.  Out of the ten candidates, only two showed up.  Total waste of my soap watching time.  I was happy with the one gal we got though.  She's a member of the E! Network and does work on Fashion Police.  My guess is that she'll be good at reporting and featuring some interesting stuff, we'll see.  So this week, I'm back to searching for more fabulous LA people to invite.  Here's the thing, this isn't TV, so they don't need to be super georgous or anything.  I want real fashion obsessed and food whore people!  Auditions are 12/13.  I'll keep you posted on results.  Thank GOD Frosted Cupcakery is right down the street from the studios.  That in itself makes the trip from Beverly Hills into Hollywood worth it.

The second thing I did was an effort to create some viral buzz about the game.  Now I've built a Skwikee Facebook Community and since Facebook is slowly taking over the world, I assumed it would be smart to house all our social activities there.  So far we've got about 70+ members, 51% are 35-45 yr old women.; 26% 25-35 yr old women; 10% 18-25 yr old women and the rest are dudes.  This was affirmation I was on the right track with this particular social game because my target market is the 25-45 yr. woman.  Yay for me!  I get a cupcake for that one.

So I decided it was too obvious to ask people to suggest Skwikee to their friends.  Something about telling people what to do in a social media environment creeps me out.  I thought, "the objective of this game is to see how one climbs the social ranks in Beverly Hill and Hollywood, so why not give them pre-launch opportunities to do just that?"  Last night during an episode of Chopped, I created the Social Queen badge:

In Hollywood, it's not about who you know, it's about who knows YOU! Are you a true Social Queen? For the next 48 hrs. invite your friends to vote for you by posting your name below in the comments. Top 3 Social Queens will be awarded this badge and VIP access in the game. Good luck!

I've been watching the stats the last few hours and no one's clicked on it yet.  My theory is they'll click on it plenty (I get lots of click-thrus), but not take me up on the voting thing.  I think at the end of the day, we're all just a little tiny bit scared of putting ourselves out there for even our friends to judge us.  I hope I'm wrong.