RockYou (Facebook AppCamp)

Held 20 Oct 2007.

This batch of notes is not mine, so it will probably not be edited too much.

Presenter:
Eric Yieh
RockYou

– Facebook, is 7x more viral than bebo. because of there
– superwall, Xme, zombies/vampires,
– Facebook has: profile, profile action, feed, requests, emails, notifications, wall.
– Should use all of the facebook api, some work better than others
– Rock You also provides an API to the super wall
– Having multiple apps lets you cross advertise, and have one app use the other app.
– Buy advertising to seed various different social networks with your app.
– Viral success factors: simplicity ( does the user get it immediately, keep invites really short), novelty ( has the user seen this invite before?, be the first with your kind of app), social persuasion (reciprocity, ego boost, “your friends will like you better if you install this app”), fun ( most people go to facebook for entertainment rather than work, not too many utility applications).
– rockyou and slide are the heavy hitters in the widget space.
– Must use the social network of facebook, people who wouldn’t otherwise
– “to get an app over 1 million users you must advertise”
– “it will have to hit a bnuch of people in the same high-school before the app spreads to the whole network”
– facebook invites only go out to the direct friends of a particular user.
– Invites are now limited to 10 invites
– FBML invites are not very good, need to have a very strong call to action.
– Want to make it easy to send invites (pre-set the invite text).
– maybe can monetize without having people install an app.
– you have a canvas page that people don’t need to install an app for, this lets you monetize your canvas page. (it’s just like an html page on the web)
– Create applications that require users to communicate.
– Hard part, need to balance uesr acquisition and engagement
– if you send a person to an invite page, they may not use your app.

– which ad network to use?
– pricing
– quality of the ads
– fill rate/campaign size
– want optimization features that let you tweak which ads are displayed
– channel tuning (let you not advertise for competitors)

– rock you has an ad network as well.

– CPI 0.50, cost per install, advertising. i.e. you pay 50 cents per user who installs you
– you need to monetize your app in some other way than selling installs.

– People will need to advertise to launch your app…
– In some cases people have built a small viral app to drive people back to their “real” site.
– advertisements in the middle of the screen are much better than top flier ads

– bebo focussed in UK, dont have a dev platform yet.

– flash autoplay will be allowed.

– should tie your apps across all of the big platforms.
– news feed and mini-feed are both very effective.
– facebook doesn’t let you store user data for more than 24 hours… can only store theire user ids.
– Eric says that you need to do internal studies to figure out what kind of demographic gives you.
– monetization: peanut lab.
– clickthrough rates on facebook are low.
– as soon as a click takes you outside the site, the user closes the window because they don’t want to leave facebook.

– maybe myspace will allow unlimited invites.

– rockyou doesn’t care about their destination web site…. they care more about how many users they have on various social networks.

– Rockyou assumes that all of their users are teenagers and build for the teenage market, whether or not they are teenagers. This is because when people are on facebook, they’re not looking for productivity, they’re looking to hang out with their friends.

– Thinks that the movie studios etc. will build viral facebook apps to advertise new movies soon, instead of having a fancy website.
– “Who can do better than george bush”
– Rock you sold a resident evil branded version of zombies on facebook to sony, and sony’s going to buy again.
– rockyou has relationships with various advertising firms
– anything that distracts from the invite flow will reduce installs of an app.
– advertisers are targeting younger users on the social networks.
– Each platform is building their “own version of the internet”.
– which means that people will rebuild the internet inside each platform. So take the most popular apps from the web and rebuild them inside the platform to make money.
– Make sure to track ROI on a campaign.
– what’s the “hover over” rate.
– branded advertisers are more concerned about the messaging (the layout, the look and feel etc.) rather than necessarily the click through rate.