A couple of months ago, I wrote about a cool marketing campaign from NASA, which basically allowed you to register some details and, in return they flew, in digital form, your face on board Discovery, during STS-133, her final flight into space. After she came home safely, I returned to NASAs website and downloaded my certificate to prove I’d been into space!
Archive for the ‘Viral’ Category
A ride on board Discovery
It was good today to hitch a ride onboard space shuttle Discovery, for her final flight. Not literally of course (I couldnt get the time of work) but I liked the engagement campaign Nasa has been running.
You key in some details and an image and you then get a ‘launch’ video. Heres mine.
Whats really cool about this is that if you come back to the site when then shuttle returns to Earth, and key in a code , which they give you after the launch video, then you get a certificate to say you’ve been on the mission.
I think thats a really cool way of getting people to go back to the site.
Bing and Facebook Social Search now available
Last month, Bing and Facebook joined forces to bring some new social search features into the Bing search engine.
Today, this is now live for US customers, with rollouts globally over the next few months. This update allows users to sign in to the Facebook accounts within Bing and get a more personalised search service as a result. The first of these new services is Liked Results, which shows you relavant links to your search that are also liked by your friends in Facebook.
For more details on the other elements in social search you can read the full article over on liveside.net
YouTube extends length of videos to 15 minutes
Yesterday, YouTube announced that it was extending the allowed length of video that users can upload from 10 minutes to 15 minutes.
Couple of things to note from the official announcement. Firstly, if you have had a video rejected because it was too long, you need to go and delete it and upload it again.
Secondly, if you take advantage of your ’15 minutes of fame’, you may want to tag you video with “yt15minutes”. If you do by 4th August, YouTube will pick a few for a spotlight on thier homepage.
Heres a link to the official announcement http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/07/upload-limit-increases-to-15-minutes.html
Viral Gaming
Richie Costall and Pete McGann did a really cool Silverlight version of the ZX Spectrum game, Manic Miner, which has a level in it promoting NxtGen. (play it here).
Here’s another really good example of some games from Cadbury. Each of the elves have their own game, and they even have their own blogs!
These so called ‘Viral Games’ are usually small, easy to play, and usually web based.. and most importantly if you want it to spread, fun to play!
These games, if you can get people engaged with them, becomes a powerful marketing tool. But to be successful, you cant just write any old game, here some things to consider.
Marketing Strategy
So, you’ve managed to get half the world playing your game, but if the marketing message is not there, then all you have is a cool game. You need a theme that gets your audience thinking in a particular way is the key. Games that are way too over branded, or make you register before you can play, will be a turn off to the gaming community – which is who you will be relying on to pass your message around.
Get The Game Right
The game itself needs to have enough meat on it for people to actually want to play. It needs to look good enough to encourage people to have a go, but watch the size of downloads, bandwidth needed to play.
You don’t want a Halo, massive 3D game that takes 6 fingers on each hand to play, but neither do you want something that’s going to get boring after 5 mins. There needs to be a low entry level of difficulty, but that climbs up as you progress, to keep people wanting to beat their previous best. Placing high score tables for people that register, will add an additional level of competition and encourages registration. We do this for the Manic Miner game.
Get The Game Out There.
Most games will spread amongst work colleagues and friends on a peer-2-peer basis. but there still needs to be a number of initial people going this to get going in the first place. If you have a website lots of people visit, then placing a link, maybe to a ‘challenge’ (score more than 1000 points for a discount for example) to encourage play.
Remember, the biggest group of people who are likely to ‘distribute’ your game is going to be the gaming community, so placing you game on the many gaming portals is a good idea.
Deciding On A Technology
As I’ve already said, a lot of these games tend to be web based, so building the game to support this is really a must. Flash games abound on the Internet. As you are (hopefully) expecting a load of visitors, you need to make sure your infrastructure is capable of delivering the game. Imagine you have managed to attract 5 million people but you servers cant handle more than 20 downloads!
As well as the web, there’s another large market that can be exploited. Console community games. Games consoles, such as the Xbox360, and development environments such as XNA allow development of games that can be downloaded and played by the casual console user. There’s also the possibility to make a small charge for the game in this arena as well. With ‘proper’ console games costing in excess of £40, good, playable games costing £1 will be readily be adopted. The Manic Miner game is written to be playable both on the web and also on the XNA platform to take advantage of both audiences.
If you would like to find out more about XNA, then NxtGen is running an ‘XNA assault course’ in Birmingham on Saturday 5th December. Have a look here for registration details.