OpenSocial, an open platform for application development across multiple social networks, spearheaded by Google, was quickly developed and launched to compete with (or maybe complement) the Facebook Platform. The opportunities presented by the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial are very exciting from a developer’s perspective. Now they can focus on building cool technology and not on building traffic from scratch. From the perspective of consumers, they have more choices and better ways to communicate while having fun on their favorite social networking site. But what does it mean for brands? How can brands successfully leverage these platforms to build their business?

What is a social application?

First, let’s define a social application. A social application is a tool or service that is installed by a user of an existing social network that takes advantage of the friend relationships, profile data and other information that the user has supplied to that social network. Think of applications as features or mini websites that you can add to your profile page to enhance your experience on that social network.

More times than I care to count, I hear the terms “application” and “widget” used interchangeably, and as this space evolves, it’s important to know the difference. The primary differences between applications and widgets are that applications leverage the friend relationships, profile information, interests and communication tools of that social network. A widget doesn’t have access to this information. Widgets are also usually smaller and self-contained elements of a user’s profile. Additionally, as mentioned above, applications are mini Web sites that can contain full Web pages living inside the social network, while a widget can be placed on many different social networks, blogs, or other sites all simultaneously.

Why are applications important?

Prior to applications, if businesses wanted to interact with the users of a social network they were limited to creating profiles on that social network or to using existing online advertising methods to drive traffic from that social network to another site. Both approaches can be limiting if the goal is to engage and build a long-term relationship with users. Applications are important because of the unprecedented access they give to the users of social networks– over 100 million people on Facebook and more than another 100 million on MySpace alone. Applications allow a brand to engage users where users already are.

How marketers can leverage social applications

There are three primary ways marketers can use applications to achieve their marketing needs.

• Application advertising – This is standard CPM or CPC based advertising that can be purchased on specific applications. This can be a great, cost-effective way to reach a niche audience within a social network. Like traditional online advertising, application advertising can help marketers achieve branding needs as well as drive traffic back to their sites. There are several great application-specific ad networks including appssavvy, SocialMedia, and RockYou that can help marketers buy the right media on applications.

• Application sponsorship – Application sponsorship is a great way to build a brand by associating it with an already successful application.

• Custom application – Building a custom application to meet specific marketing objectives offers the most powerful marketing opportunity on social applications. Done correctly, it creates a viral, long-term connection with your customers and offers the opportunity to engage with them every day as they regularly visit their favorite social network. Creating your own successful application can be challenging so I’ve included five tips that will hopefully make life a little easier.

Five tips for building a successful application for your brand:

1. Think long term - If you learn nothing else from reading this article, this would be it: think long term. An application should be viewed as a long-term investment just like launching your first corporate website. Because users need to install an application and agree to give you access to some information about them, the hurdle for installing an application is higher than visiting a website. But once the application is installed you have a direct link and communication channel with the user. This is a very powerful opportunity, one worthy of long-term consideration. This doesn’t mean that campaign-based applications can’t be beneficial, but brands and agencies need to think about things from a long-term perspective when doing their planning.

2. Clearly define the goal of your application – I always recommend establishing one clear goal for an application. For companies like RockYou and Slide who have built businesses on growing apps and selling advertising, their goal for each application they develop is simple — get millions of people to use it so they can sell ads on it. But for brands that don’t have an advertising model, this probably doesn’t make sense. Here are some possible goals for building an application for your brand:

• Build brand and presence on social networks – A great way to do this is to create an application related to the lifestyle of your brand. For example, Nike just launched a Facebook application geared toward helping hoopsters organize and find pick-up games globally.
• Extend your current online business – If you have an existing online business, make it easier for users to participate from within their favorite social network. Doing so can be very powerful.
• Launch a new product – Creating a contest or game application can be a very cost effective way of spreading the word about your new product.

3. Choose the right partner – As I talked about above, the rapid growth of social applications and the constant changing of the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms means that working with an expert is probably the way to go. The launch of the revamped Facebook profiles last week is a perfect example. Unless you or someone on your team is living and breathing this stuff, building a successful social application on your own can be tricky.

4. Iterate – Just like your core product, your corporate website or your marketing message, your social application needs to be analyzed, modified and reworked on an ongoing basis. The most critical iteration should come in the first month of the application to ensure it’s setup for viral growth. The last point is critical. The biggest single opportunity of an application is the viral potential. By leveraging the built in invite, update and messaging systems of a social network, it’s possible to build an application used by hundreds of thousands of people with minimal promotional investment. To make this happen you need to optimize your application for viral growth. Your goal should be for every new application user to bring in more than one other user. This will yield exponential growth.

5. Make it simple – Successful applications are easy to use and instantly give users satisfaction and benefit. We learned this the hard way. The first application we built at Votigo in June of 2007 was almost a 100% replica of our contest community website. The problem with this approach is that we were trying to build a community within a community instead of enhancing the existing community. We failed to make it really simple for users to benefit from the application immediately. Lesson learned.

There is no question that social applications are here to stay. While the applications and the platforms they are built on are constantly evolving, it’s clear that applications have become a critical part of our participation on social networks. You need to think of applications as the strongest way to build a permanent presence within a social network and the best way to deeply engage the users of a social network.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years you know that the Web has become exponentially more social. It’s no longer simply another broadcast medium like television and radio. It’s a communication platform where friends, family, classmates, co-workers, brands and customers can gather and communicate with each other in a more vibrant way than ever before. If not already, the Internet is rapidly becoming our primary means of communication. Major contributing factors leading to this point include:

•    80%+ of active Internet users now have a broadband connection, so more people are getting online with connections that can handle the quick transfer of large amounts of data;
•    Digital cameras have proliferated, making photo-sharing nearly as common as a telephone call;
•    Social features like commenting, “share this” and tagging have become integrated into mainstream sites;
•    Social networking, blogging and user-generated contest sites have developed and grown at such a rate that they have changed our entire notion of what Web content can be.

All of these factors lead to an Internet population that spends a lot of time online and actively shares and communicates with friends (and for some even strangers). For advertisers, this creates a perfect storm for engagement.

For the purposes of this discussion, I define engagement as the communication between a brand and its customer, a brand and its potential customer or between two customers. Put simply, for engagement to happen, there must be some back and forth between folks. A comment on a photo or blog post, the sharing of a widget ad, the submission of a photo or video into a contest or the emailing of a coupon to a friend are all great examples of engagement in advertising.

Three recent examples that I thought were particularly effective were the Scion Speak campaign, the India Jones “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” Facebook promotion and H&R Block’s use of Twitter.

In the Scion campaign users could create their own custom “coat of arms” to reflect their personalities. These coats of arms could be made into window decals or even airbrushed onto creators’ Scions. For Scion, this campaign reinforced the unique customization options of the car (a key selling point) and allowed Scion to learn more about the varied personalities of their customers. On the flip side, customers were able to express their individuality.  Customers became engaged with the brand to create something together.

For the recent release of the Indiana Jones movie, “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” Paramount Pictures unleashed a massive campaign on Facebook that included custom applications, photos, videos, fan connections, and more. What I liked best about the campaign was it released 250,000 free Indy-branded Fedora virtual gifts. The first 250,000 Facebook users could send one of these limited virtual gifts to a friend. The Fedora’s were gone within 12 hours, a record for Facebook. Although simple, this is a great example of an advertiser integrating effectively into an existing social network and engaging with users without being interruptive and loud.

The last example technically isn’t even advertising. There was no media buy, no creative and no agency involved. During the past tax, season representatives from H&R Block monitored activity on Twitter for tax-related questions and offered suggestions from their H&R Block profiles. What a terrific way to communicate with existing and potential customers! The key to the success of this initiative was that H&R Block was transparent and it offered advice and suggestions without hard selling its services.

These examples show that consumers are hungry for and receptive to innovative approaches that appeal to their social needs without disrupting their user experiences. As social media and social networks continue to evolve, engagement will become the backbone of online advertising.  As marketers, we must also evolve in how we evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. I foresee click through rates and impressions being replaced by engagement metrics, such as, “how many interactions did users have with my campaign?” or “how many times was my message virally spread?”

Why is this so important? If you can engage with your customers you have built the deepest possible bond with them. And that’s good business.

At the same time, the brand effectiveness of traditional online advertising continues to diminish as consumers pay less and less attention to banner ads. This is where social media marketing, and specifically user-generated contests, can play an important role in your company’s overall marketing strategy.

First off, let’s define a user-generated contest. This is a contest or promotion sponsored by a brand or publisher where consumers submit photos, videos, text, audio or mashups under the guidelines of a sponsor in the hopes of winning some type of a prize. Prizes may range from something major, like the opportunity to star in a user-generated commercial airing on national TV, to something smaller and community-specific, such as free CDs from a particular band. Contest winners are usually determined by popular vote, a select panel of judges or a combination of the two. And while contests themselves are not new marketing techniques, the evolution of social media coupled with high-bandwidth Internet connections has made it possible to turbo-charge these promotions and drive measurable results.

Before racing out to embark on a new interactive marketing campaign, however, there are some factors worth considering. The points I raise below will hopefully help you make informed decisions that will lead to exceeding your marketing goals:

Why user-generated contests work for marketers:

• They create a dialogue with consumers – Given the current online marketing landscape, it’s critical for savvy marketers to engage consumers in an open, two-way dialogue. By allowing consumers to contribute to marketing campaigns through photos, videos, text and user-voting, campaigns become personal. You can learn a lot about what resonates with your core consumers in a very short period of time based on what they share with you on the site, as well as what they send to friends and family as contest participants transform into viral evangelists for your brand.
• They virally spread your marketing message – Assuming your contest site is built well and with the right viral tools at the disposal of users (see the tips below), user-generated contests can be a great way to virally spread your marketing message. What is unique about contests is that entrants have an incentive to promote themselves in order to get the votes needed to win the contest. And as we’re learning, in a digital world with a lot of noise, consumers have a higher level of trust and interest in content referred by their friends. This provides brands with an amazing way to expose their message to a new audience of engaged consumers.
• They build community around your brand – Creating a contest microsite with built-in social networking features provides the landscape for your customers to talk about the promotion. What’s a contest microsite you might ask? It’s a stand-alone Web site or sub-section of your existing brand Web site that’s dedicated to the contest and fully customized to your look and feel. In addition to contest rules, guidelines, user entry forms and voting it should utilize key social features allowing visitors to share and interact with the contest entries and each other. Depending on the theme of your contest, this interactive conversation could be focused on your product or brand specifically or something with which you want your brand associated with.
• They allow for safe participation in social media – As I often hear many brands are reluctant to turn over control of their marketing to consumers for fear of what the masses might say. Contests can provide a great way for brands to safely participate in social media. By clearly outlining rules and guidelines for entering contests and making smart use of prescreen and administrative tools, your brand can remain protected.
• They build your customer database – Because of the viral nature of entrants reaching out to friends and family to promote entries, contests can be a great way to build your customer database for future marketing efforts. It goes without saying, however, that users must opt-in to receive future marketing messages. We all learned from Beacon.

How to use contests to meet your marketing objectives

In my own business experiences and in checking things out across the Web I’ve noticed user-generated contests implemented to meet a wide array of marketing objectives. Some of the more common and/or efficient uses include:

• Launching a new product – We’ve seen this a lot in the music industry as bands have created photo or video contests to promote the release of a new album. In these campaigns users might submit photos representing songs on an album, develop posters for album artwork, or create music videos for a new single.
• Launching a new feature – Contests can be used to promote a new feature on your site. This works best when it’s a user-generated feature like a blog, or the ability to upload photos or videos. To promote new features, you can create a contest with guidelines that encourage the best uses of the new feature.
• Reaching a new customer segment – Think outside of the box: use a combination photo and essay contest to extend a brand’s reach beyond its core customer base of say, women and vegetarians to attract male burger junkies (or male chip junkies – whatever product your brand is shilling). It can be creative and fun, and yield a diverse crop of entries.
• Acquiring advertising materials – Let users create your next TV commercial, banner ad or poster for you, showing off what appeals most to them about your product. You’ve seen this done successfully by Doritos and Taco Bell. Now, the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council is testing these waters as well, with new user-generated ads touting the benefits of ethanol slated to run during this year’s Indy 500.

Five tips for making your contest successful

1. Clearly define your objectives – This may seem obvious, but clearly understanding your objectives will help determine if a contest is right for you and more importantly, what type of contest you should run. If a high number of submissions is the goal, a photo contest is the way to go because of the low barrier to entry. If you’re looking for high-quality content to be used in future marketing efforts, a video commercial contest might be a better approach.

2. Choose the right partner – Occasionally when I talk with prospective clients, they say something like, “We have photo upload and ratings so we’re thinking about developing the contest in-house.” That’s like saying, “I’ve got a hammer and a screwdriver in the garage so I think I’ll put in the new transmission myself.” Working with experts can be the difference between a wildly successful campaign and a dud. A few things to consider when evaluating potential partners:

- Do they support photo, video, audio and text?
- Do they have the necessary administrative tools to protect my brand?
- Can they handle the legal aspects of a contest?
- Does their offering have the viral and social networking features built in to make my campaign successful?
- Can the look and feel of the contest site be customized?
- Do I own the user data for participants in the contest?
- Can they help me get distribution and entries into my contest?
- What sort of metrics do they provide so I can measure my success?
- Can they scale?
- Have they successfully run campaigns in the past?

This last question is an important one. There are far more “platforms” on the market than there are experts in social media marketing. Choosing the right partner means finding a company with great technology and great expertise in the space.

3. Promote it – This doesn’t have to be expensive but you need to promote your contest if you expect to get entries. Your own site, a newsletter or a note to your following on an existing social network like Facebook or MySpace are quick and easy places to start.

4. Make it social – Lack of a social component is probably the single biggest mistake I see when marketers try to execute a user-generated contest. What does it mean to make it social? It means enabling visitors to use social media to interact and communicate with each other and your brand. It means ensuring that the right tools are in place for entrants to promote their entries. And your campaign is designed to be as user-friendly as possible to encourage this behavior. A good place to start is by implementing voting widgets and email tools for entrants to easily contact friends and family and promote their entries on their existing blogs and social network profiles. This can result in driving traffic back to the contest microsite. In addition, commenting, sharing, friend / favorite connections are all vital social networking functionality that will allow users to participate and become engaged in the promotion. Done correctly this will create a micro-community around your brand.

5. Use the results – Often times when a contest is over the marketer fails to capitalize on the great photos, videos, essays, comments and relationships acquired during the campaign. Instead, create a photo or video gallery of the entries on your website or mix a few quotes into your advertising campaigns. Extend your contest site into a branded social network where users can continue to share and interact around your brand. Any of these will strengthen the relationship you’ve built with your customers and make your marketing more authentic.

The benefits of running online user-generated video and photo contests are clear. They create a positive consumer association with your brand by offering tangible rewards for participation. Actively involving consumers in the campaign creates a unique way to inform them of new products and services and make them advocates for your brand. When considering a user-generated contest for your next campaign remember that not all contests are created equal and careful planning can make a world of difference.