MTV Builds Viral App for New Reality Show
While traditional media companies initially struggled with how best to utilize Facebook, their understanding of the Facebook ecosystem has improved in reaching their audiences during the past few months.
Most recently, the Viacom-owned MTV worked with Vitrue, a social media agency, to create a new Facebook app for College Life, the network’s new reality show. In the College Life show, MTV provides students with cameras so they can chronicle their day-to-day lives without the interference of producers or directors, who can cause “reality” shows to look staged.
The College Life Facebook App is essentially a personality quiz. After installing it on their Facebook pages, users answer 10 questions about their personality. Depending on their answers, the app will classify the users into one of five categories: Total Package, Art Freak, Loner, Party Animal, or Bookworm.
To boost the reach of the application, users may share quiz results with their Facebook friends. They may also post their quiz results to their profile. Any social action they take via the app will be published to the News Feed for their friends to see.
Conclusion
Although it remains to be seen whether or not this app will be successful in bolstering MTV’s marketing efforts for College Life, it’s encouraging to see traditional media companies take new approaches to promoting their products on Facebook. The early Facebook marketing efforts by media giants were dogged by apps and pages that lacked viral or social elements. By partnering with companies like Vitrue, whose business it is to understand the Facebook ecosystem, they might enjoy better success.
MTV has been the only one showing progressive approaches to utilizing the Facebook platform. Other examples include the following:
- Watercooler (AppData), one of the largest developers on the Platform, has been operating a network of hundreds of rich TV fan applications on Facebook since 2007.
- Slide (AppData) has also been distributing video clips for major media companies since last year.
- Back in January, during the inauguration of President Obama, the Time Warner-owned CNN posted two million status updates from Facebook to its site.
- In February, 10 entertainment sites (including CBS’s The Insider) partnered with Facebook so users could post status updates to participating sites about their thoughts on the Academy Awards as they unfolded.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Currently, it has 64 users. It’ll been interesting to see if they’ll be able to grow the app on their own. Haven’t seen traditional media companies have much success with one-off apps.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Building an audience from scratch is tough for an app developer these days and I think that goes double for branded ones such as College Life. It’s nice to see a big media company embracing Facebook and social media, but they could be in for an uphill battle by going it alone. They likely would have been better off working with existing developers/apps to leverage the audience that’s already there.
Bryan Bennett
Head of Marketing
Watercooler
April 10th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Agree with Bryan…
It’s interesting that we are still continuing to see brands try to garner a social media presence through custom applications, especially for something as simple as a personality quiz. I can only assume that in addition to spending money to build this app, they also have promotional money behind it to grow the user base. Sad to see brands spend their money buying unqualified users and building one-off, one-stop apps when they could tap massive, relevant audiences through integration on existing applications – not only getting a lot more bang for their buck, but working with the top developers in the country.
Curious to know how Social Media Agencies position themselves when they have no distribution platform. Feels like widget craze circa 2007.
Julie Nielsen
Director of Strategy
appssavvy
April 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Just read a few of these comments and this falls right into our plate. One of the areas AdParlor specialize in is seeding/growing facebook applications. Through our network of hundreds of application developers, we work with banner ads, pop-ups, incentivization and various other techniques to bring targeted users to new applications on a cost-per-install basis! To date, we have driven over 250,000 INSTALLS on many of the leading branded applications.
Hussein Fazal
http://www.adparlor.com