S.J. Petteruti's blog

The job of the Vice President of the United States is one of the most vaguely defined in our political system, but it consists of two absolute necessities:

         1. Be alive in case the president dies

         2. Help the president get elected (or re-elected)

Last week Vice President Joe Biden failed miserably in his latter responsibility when he tried to rally support for Barak Obama by telling attendees of a San Francisco rally that "the Giants are going to the Superbowl!."

As we know now, the Giants will in fact be going to the Superbowl, but to the chagrin of San Francisco fans everywhere and as anyone who's ever watched an NFL game knows; the Giants play in New York (New Jersey to be precise). Old Amtrak Joe most likely confused this team with their baseball equivalent (who do in fact play in San Fran), but nonetheless the gaffe is sure to stay with him as part of his legacy as Veep.

Not just a comical punchline destined for SNL's cold open, Biden's mistake illustrates a crucial core competency to successfully bring a product to market: Know thy Audience. I don't need a focus group to tell me that people will be more receptive to the product I am offering them if they think I can understand their needs.

History is littered with examples of companies large and small that dove into new markets without a full understanding of their audience:

·   Disney almost bankrupted their new park in Paris because they didn't serve wine, a staple of the European meal.

·   Coca-Cola had to recall their 2 liter bottles from Spain because local refrigerators couldn't fit them.

·   An American airline promoted that they offered "rendezvous lounges" in Brazilian airports without realizing that in Portuguese, "rendezvous" refers to a place to have sex.

Mistakes like this can undo months of planning, be incredibly expensive and worse of all- indelibly harm a brand's reputation among a demographic. At Viximo we are constantly expanding into new markets, so it is crucial that we take the time to understand the habits of our new audience. Not all games, branding, or marketing tactics will work equally well across our portfolio. That's why we take the time to work with our publishing partners to learn about their users, examine successful games already in the area, and research behavioral and social tendencies of the region, to decide which of our various games and promotions will work best to maximize our audience's enjoyment. Doing this kind of legwork before launching in a new market ensures that we are never encouraging our audience to do something like root for the other team in a playoff game. ...

This past month we released our first game on Facebook, an updated version of our popular photo-sharing game, Snap Me Up (we like to call it SMU).  Collectively on various social networks around the world, SMU has been played by more than four million people since its launch in 2010. Because of its success, and also because it’s really the only social game we have made, we decided this would be a natural choice for our foray into the Facebook frontier.

In Snap Me Up, players find fame and fortune by buying and selling photos of their favorite people.  Each player chooses their own path to riches and must decide to buy low, sell high or simply be the hottest person on the market.

This is how our PR folks have described SMU. In reality though, SMU stands apart by being one of the few social games that has the unique ability to take on a life of its own. Because we designed the game so that the collection of photos in it are comprised entirely of what the players submit, we never know what types of photos, or what types of players, will contribute to the game. That makes playing SMU sorta like a cross between a flea market and a masquerade ball.

Originally we intended to simply make SMU as standard of a social gaming experience as possible. You know, all the classics - energy, free gifts, achievements. If you threw a virtual monkey in there we wouldn’t be too far off from about 90% of the games already on Facebook. However, what we learned from listening and observing our user base is that there was a compelling need for more ways players could engage socially with each other. This led to our first set of game improvements, which seek to make the game a micro-space for social interactions, without having to go so far as to friend another player on Facebook.

Of course, SMU is far from finished. We are always looking for new ideas and listening to our players to find ways that we can make it better. Who knows where it will end. To modify one of the more famous Woody Allen quotes, “Social games are like sharks, if they don’t keep moving forward they’ll die.” ...