App-lying marketing ideals to social networking sites

How one app developer leveraged on his business network of media owners to enter the realm of creating social networking applications for companies.

There are 13,690 applications (apps) on Facebook with over 168,000 developers currently evaluating the platform, according to Adonomics, the site for Facebook analytics, and the numbers are rising daily.

If you're wondering what apps are, they're the widgets that allow Facebook addicts to poke someone, have pie thrown at them, get bitten by rabid vampires and win races with their Ferrari F430s.

In Singapore, young minds are not just wasting their time with meaningless actions, but they are also getting into the fray, creating apps of all kinds. One company in particular, Onezine, has found a niche creating corporate brand apps for publishers such as ACP Magazine.

Onezine, an e-magazine portal, converted the Cinderella Live e-magazine into an app for Facebook users to download, share and use to virtually read the magazine as if they were flipping the pages themselves.

According to Onezine's MD Alvin Lee, the e-magazine app was uploaded onto the Facebook apps directory and in one month, 86 users downloaded it. Lee says his next campaign for Cinderella Live will involve a voting contest on Facebook where the winner will have to be a member of the social networking site, and will be given a makeover before being featured on the cover of the magazine.

"Frankly when I first entered Facebook, I thought it was childish with all the poking apps and some other boring and useless ones. I am a practical person and want to use apps that help me," Lee said. "Like in Cinderella, we made brand advertising fun and interactive. I do not believe in banner advertising at all."

Lee says his clients have always asked, "what is my traffic?", referring to the visits to their e-magazines, so he started creating apps for them and hosting them on popular sites as a way to bring the traffic directly to the client.

Other apps the company created, which are in the process of being tested and uploaded onto the Facebook apps directory, are ACP's AskCLEO game, cosmetics brand ZA's Compact Case Mix and Match game, and the Maybelline e-magazine - all of which were created in December 2007.

Using Marketing magazine as an example, Lee explained that if an app were to be created for it, all articles would become interactive. Videos would appear next to discussions on the latest TVCs, interviews with personalities would be available in audio or video files, new marketing products can be featured in 360 degree views, and links can be made on the products to direct the reader to its website. Additionally, comments to stories can be updated live and events can also be broadcast live.

Considering several factors such as how complicated the app needs to be, how long it will be hosted, and what other objectives it needs to fulfill, producing an app and marketing it can cost as little as $2,000 and as much as $30,000.

Ultimately, Lee says, corporate apps can help clients in many ways, including collecting user data, reaching users from across the world as easily as reaching a local audience, encouraging immediate sales as users can get directed straight to a shopping cart page, and reaching consumers who have already indicated an interest in your brand as they have taken the trouble to download the app.