Energizing
Context was charged with developing a social media strategy to energize the base to raise brand awareness and promote sales of Electronic Art’s Smarty Pants trivia game for the Nintendo Wii. This strategy needed to be formulated with no promotional spend.
In response, Context examined various social media outlets, and selected Facebook due to its strong communications channels and propensity for viral spread. Context then designed a social version of Smarty Pants for Facebook, including viral features such as leaderboards, points, levels, and friend challenges.
Most users discover the application via a challenge from a friend. Users are requested to name their game, select friends to challenge, and are then presented with ten timed trivia questions. Quicker answers earn more points, and users are compared with their friends on game-specific leaderboards. The direct friend challenges drive the social competitiveness and viral components of the brand experience.
With no marketing support the application grew virally – over 1 million games were played in the first 50 days, followed by another 1 million games the following 25 days. Over 300 thousand users played 3 million games of Smarty Pants in the first 100 days by sending challenges through their social graph. Not only did the application launch without a media buy to support it, but EA placed online ads between questions to earn revenue from every game played.
Marketing content was integrated directly into the user experience flow, resulting in increased brand awareness and high levels of brand engagement.
URL: http://apps.facebook.com/smartypants/
