Spymaster CEO: Use Spam, Err Sorry; “Viral Marketing”

Speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference, Chris Abad,  CEO of Irata Labs (who brought you the incredibly annoying “Spymaster”) told developers that they should “incentivise the users to [market] for them”. If you’ve not heard of it, Spymaster was a pretty boring web based MMO which was linked to your Twitter account. Every time you did certain things in the game, it would tweet the action from your account. This gave the player more in game money, and made everyone unfollow you, because it was frankly really annoying.

This is of course a tactic that has been used before. Referral links are used by those sites offer you a free iPod if you to get 10 of your friends to sign up for a free trial of Netflix. They are also known for being a little more than dodgy and extremely irritating, a trend which continues here.

Spymaster trended the Twitter topics for a good couple of weeks because people signed up curious to what their friends kept going on about. They joined to find that their accounts then spouted off more free ads for Spymaster. Abad continues to state that it’s “about [having] impassioned fans”, something which I agree with, however hijacking Twitter accounts is hardly impassioned.

Word of mouth is arguably one of the most powerful forms of marketing. If you look at all the viral ads that have gotten popular, or the larger memes, they come from word of mouth. (Or 4Chan.) The point is that if you have something interesting that people want to talk about, you’ll get the retweets on Twitter and the digs from Digg. Forcing people, by use of spamming is not the same thing.

We saw recently Naughty Dog pulling back the Uncharted 2 Twitter integration, with Naughty Dog’s Evan Wells stating; “We’re certainly sorry for any inconvenience, but I guess that’s the risk you run when trying to blaze a new trail in the complicated world of Social Media!”. There is an eagerness by companies and especially game developers, to latch on to social media because it’s the ‘œhip thing’, not because it’s actually useful. Twitter is a massive platform for people to talk about your product on, but not if you shove it down the user’s throat. Create enthusiasm because you have a good game, not because you can spam Twitter. (Last link NSFW).

Source: Develop-Online.net