From the course: Creative Inspirations: Trigger, Interactive Design Studio

New frontiers: social media

(Music playing) Jason Yim: One of the big changes for us is that every campaign we have now has to tie into a social network, and typically, in the States, that would be Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. In fact, we've run some campaigns that exist only on the social networks. So it's no longer enough to, again, market to a single person and convince them to go to a film. The goal is to market to that single person, make them like an evangelist for the film and get them to pass the message on to all of their friends. When Facebook really kind of hit its critical mass, the studios actually started to put advertising dollars into the social networks. That's when it really affected us. Loc Le: What differentiates us from other companies is the fact that, on a small scale, we prototype a lot of the things we do, especially when we're working with newer technologies. Two years ago, we got into social media. We prototyped a lot of our Facebook apps, including the functionality, just to make sure we could do it on the level and scale that we wanted to, before we actually pitched it to a client. Compared to a lot of agencies that say they're the most creative or they have the best pricing, I think, in terms of that respect, we can say we do the same thing, but what we have to offer is on a different level where we actually have a portfolio that shows that we've done all these things before. Perry Wang: It started off with a Facebook application. So we created one just to take some of our old Flash games and put them in as Facebook apps. That was a natural first step for us was to take games and just put them into social. But as we're working with clients like Jenny Craig, that experience that we've had in that social area becomes that much more valuable to somebody like Jenny Craig because it might be there first time where they're stepping into social media. They kind of want to know what's been done before, what works, what doesn't work. We're able to bring that to the table. We'll say, "Well, here's what "you should probably do in Twitter, or MySpace, or YouTube. "Here's what will work in Facebook. Here's what won't work." With Jenny Craig, we've had the opportunity to manage their Fan page for, I think, almost a year now. We've been managing that. So, we're constantly pruning it. We're saying, "Okay. Who's responding? What are "the comments for today?" We look at those every day and we make sure we respond to them properly, but we'll additional content to keep sure, to keep it fresh, to make sure the community is continuing to talk and that they're still engaged, they're still interested. Anthony Palacios: You know, Facebook, that's part of almost everyday life on the Internet. Internet users are fully aware of Facebook, and it's a really useful tool for our clients to get messaging out in a more subtle way. It doesn't necessarily come off as marketing to people if their friends are telling them about a cool film that's coming out, or a cool brand that just released a really great product. So, it's become huge for us and our clients to come up with fun ways of interlacing Facebook with their marketing initiatives. So what we've done in the last few years or so is create games for Facebook, and having the game leaderboards tie into Facebook so that people can then compare their high scores to their friends. So it gets people engaged into the same media message without really knowing that they're kind of being in this marketing realm. I think, one thing that's going to be huge, probably in the next coming year, is going to be Facebook Connect, where just, I think, logging into Facebook, you can then be directly connected to another website, online. Before, there used to be the situation where people were really hesitant to have to register and login and create an account for a game. But now, with Facebook Connect, if you have a Facebook account, you can just use that account for a game. So it's less of a barrier for people to get involved and to become a part of a bigger community within a game or within a website. So, I think that's really the big appeal for our clients is getting people connected with the least amount of barriers as possible.

Contents