mEgo: An Ad-Supported Uber-Widget for Social Set
ADOTAS – Advertisers that want to tap into every social network without advertising on all of them may have found a new ally in mEgo, an uber-widget/avatar dreamed up by Ariel McNichol and Julia Johnston. mEgos are currently posted on more than 600 social networking sites and garner more than 6 million widget views per month by users who are sharing their mEgos on their personal pages.
mEgo is a fully customizable portable online profile that integrates all of a user’s Flickr photos, social profiles and video feeds – and it’s automatically updated whenever a photo is added, a profile is updated and so on, McNichol and Johnston told ADOTAS.
mEgo has been in the works for a few years and $3 million in funding and countless tweaks later, the company is starting to gain a real presence online. It went live in January – the company has about 180,000 users with 1,600 new ones coming on board every day. “Just two months ago, we were adding about 200 people a day,” Johnston said. “We’ll have 1 million users by the end of the year.” Unsurprisingly, the lion’s share of mEgo’s users are between the ages of 16 and 26.
The company’s flagship ad deal is a sponsored contest with Adidas and Missy Elliot. They selected mEgo to be at the center of a global contest to attract attention to their “Respect M.E.” campaign (Elliot’s line of sportswear for Adidas). Applicants create a mEgo that explains why they deserve to be one of Missy Elliot’s global brand ambassadors and friends and viewers vote on the mEgos (which users have been encouraged to spread around the Internet) which will determine the 10 finalists — the 5 winners will then get picked by Elliot. The contest ends this month.
“One of the reasons mEgo works so well with global contests and advertising is because we’re available everywhere on any social network, saving advertisers from posting separate campaigns on the most popular networks in each country,” Johnston said.
Next up for mEgo: mining user data for targeted ad campaigns; a deal with Friendster in which mEgo will be site’s sole avatar; an iPhone application. Oh, and a socially responsible bonus that will likely please their more idealistic users: a certain percentage of every ad campaign will go to a nonprofit (nonprofits and exact percentages TBD).
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