Day two of our ’12 Days of Christmas’ client countdown and today we’re pleased to be thanking Zynga Inc! We think the two turtle doves would be most at home in FarmVille, but whether it’s CityVille, Café World, or Mafia Wars, the gamification of Facebook has over 200 million monthly active users tuning into Zynga’s pages. To see how Attention Span helped create Mafia Wars challenges to engage users, visit our Project Page.
See you tomorrow when we hear from some French Hens!
We’re celebrating the ‘12 Days of Christmas‘ with a client countdown to thank all of the amazing companies we’ve had the privilege of working with this year. To kick it off, we’re highlighting AOL. Having worked on several of their video series including Translogic and You’ve Got, they’ve definitely earned the title of Partridge in our Pear Tree! To see a complete list of the clients and brands we’ve done work for, visit our Client page.
Be sure to tune in for the next installment tomorrow when we feature two turtle doves…
Classic South Park SF startup moment: a few weeks after Eric Ries signed a half-dozen copies of his book, The Lean Startup, for the ASM team, we ran into the man himself at Caffe Centro! TLS has helped us look at development of Fanatical in a new way.
Not only is Ries a veritable god of startup business methodology – he’s also a super-nice guy. Accosted by a couple of frothing entrepreneurs in the middle of a conference call (fyi he was rocking standard white Apple earbuds w/ a mic), Ries took a moment to hang out, chat, and take a picture with ASM co-founder Garrett Law, who pulled off a nice visual pun by leaning back as I snapped the photo.
A recent op-ed piece by Mashable writer Jesse Comart sparked our interest in the realm of political-meets-digital. Explaining the glaring differences between the world of social media in 2008 (when Obama, the first post-boomer presidential candidate, came to understand that one could use the web as a low-cost means of creating “connection and engagement”) and that same world today, Comart argues that social media has morphed into “a two-way dialogue.” Citing Andrew Foxwell, manager of marketing and new media atvital for all candidates as they try to spread their messages and carve out their individual brands, especially among the younger cohorts. As Comart points out, “consistency is not the only barometer for success” and candidates will have to be ready to implement contingency plans depending on what messages take root the fastest and which platforms seem to garner the largest audience.
Attention Span, ever focused on audience relationship management, sees this need in the politico-scape as coinciding quite nicely with the recent announcement of Fanatical, our audience-development platform. So far we’ve used it in audience-building efforts for clients like Alloy, AOL, 19 Entertainment, Hulu and Zynga, but there’s no reason Fanatical won’t be as useful on Capitol Hill as it is in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Obama, we’ll be anxiously awaiting your DM.
Attention Span’s very own Garrett Law was selected to participate in Tubefilter‘s “Gettin’ Social in Online Video” panel as part of Social Media Week: Los Angeles. You can watch the whole panel in action, hosted at theStream.tv‘s amazing Hollywood facility, or keep reading for a few of our favorite key insights that came out of the meet-up!
ASM, Klout and EQAL
Alongisde Greg Goodfried of celebrity- and content-driven marketing agency EQAL and Amber Buhl of the online influence metric tracker Klout, Attention Span provided a linking bond between the two with our forefront goals of audience development and social media strategy. The panelists, moderated by Drew Baldwin of Tubefilter, spoke at great lengths about where marketers’ attention should be focused when it comes to online activity. With so much content out there, the big question everyone is trying to answer is: How do I get mine in front of the biggest audience? EQAL touted YouTube as their medium of preference, while Klout educated on the importance of influencer’s abilities to drive action. And Attention Span was there to tie it all together, expanding on our proven point of personal engagement over varying platforms giving brands a leg up on the colder side of auto-follows and raw, numerical statistics.
As a special treat of the evening, Garrett announced and introduced Fanatical, Attention Span’s latest and greatest project that has been propelling our expertise in audience development forward. Fanatical is Attention Span’s proprietary audience-development platform, and has been the technology powering our audience-building efforts for clients like Alloy, AOL, 19 Entertainment, Hulu and Zynga.
With a multitude of conversations had and connections gained at the post-panel mixer, the Attention Span team had a great evening and, as Garrett put it when describing audience interaction, “it really is all about a relationship.”
Digiday’s always-perceptive Mike Shields distills the formula for digital entertainment success in a story about the web series Leap Year, an ASM project:
Work your social media channels consistently. Treat the show as a community cause. And get influential friends to spread the word.
Attention Span Media served as the series’ social media agency. Check it out. Chances are, if you’re a tech entrepreneur, you already have:
ASM is working with Goodby Silverstein & Partners on building an engaged audience for Sonic Drive-In’s hilarious “This Is How You Sonic” campaign.
The full playlist is embedded below – the spots we’ve been focusing on are:
-Sonic ghost commercial
-Sonic robot commerical
-Behind-the-scenes making-of Sonic robot commercial
and latest but not leastest, the amazing:
-Sonic man riding jalapeno commercial
We’re really enjoying working on Leap Year with CJP Digital. Wilson CLeveland is a force of nature, and Hiscox, the sponsor, is pretty much the ideal client – very hands-off with the creative, very tech-savvy, just all-around awesome.
Leap Year writer/producer Yuri Baranovsky gives some great behind-the-scenes production notes in his blog post here. Check it out, and check out the show:
This infographic from Visually tells the timeless startup story: harried startup execs stay up late guzzling caffeine and toiling in obscurity so that their companies can present clean-shaven, smooth-operating faces to the world. True to ASM spokes-icon Ricky Chill’s retro modus operandi, Visually has decided that he is a smoker. Note to kids – that is the only thing that is not cool about Ricky.
