The premise of the iPhone apps are both simple and practical. You take a passport style photo, drag on images to dress your character like a Drag Queen, Pirate or Halloween Character. Then using ShareKit, we share the photos onto Facebook (), Twitter () and Flikr.

There were three main goals in this experiment,

1. Get as many downloads as possible.
2. Get as many “shares” to Facebook and Twitter as possible.
3. Capture and Track the spread of the apps and the shares as well as possible.

1. Get The Downloads!

We initially planned to launch the iPhone apps simultaneously, the thinking being if three apps are grouped in the “Release Date” section of the iPhone App store, they would be more noticeable than one on its own*.

We also thought that if we put the iPhone App out for free initially (for the first week or two) it would gather a larger seed group than if it was launched at a Tier1 or Tier2 price point, which it will later swap over to.

Finally i had a little Guerrilla Manic Marketing madness.

1. I tweeted with hash tags on twitter.  “if you’re a #pirate, dress #pirate and if you want to dress #pirate? www.piratebooth.com free on #iphone #costume #halloween #fun“
2. I then did status updates on Silhouette Studios Facebook Page.
3. Then i got a little crazy and possibly unethical. I searched for all the pirate groups on Facebook, Liked them and then posted the tweet on their wall. I then did the same for YouTube videos, although i needed to break the link to be accepted piratebooth[dot]com not piratebooth.com. This wasnt enough for me, by which point i was crazy on the data (LoL) So i got my favorite artist Andrew Osborne to knock me up a pirate cat!!!! And created one of the silliest Facebook ideas around the “Like me or ill do something bad” Page. Ours was “If 100,000 people like this, we wont make the kitten walk the plank”. This got some attention, but not enough, so then i went onto all the cat sites on Facebook and posted a Bit.Ly Link http://on.fb.me/savecat. Just for fun at that point i went onto CheezBurger and made a LOL cat out of it. Which i then cross posted back to the Facebook page.

2. Share it on Twitter! Share it on Facebook! Share! Share! Share!

This part of the plan was remarkably simple. ShareKit was a breeze to integrate into the app and works perfectly. We just had to create the three sets of Facebook API and Twitter API keys.

3. Track the spread of the Game! OH NOES! Privacy!

I know there are a lot of issues with privacy, in particular Facebook, and peoples data being harvested. As a requirement of ShareKit, in the process of people sharing their images on facebook they need to “Like” the app we setup to do the sharing**. I’m hoping i can see the groups and things that people that use the app “Like”. Because then we can pay the owners of those site to advertise for us and hopefully allow more people to find and enjoy Silhouette Studios’ iPhone Apps.

We put Bit.Ly () links into the tweets and shares, which, while freeing up characters for the users to customise the default tweet we put in, also allows us to track how many times it is being posted. Which means every time someone shares an image on Facebook. We have a counter that increases (We don’t get to see all the great pics though.)

We also have Flurry integrated into the app. Flurry allows us to see a lot of app usage. e.g.

1. Number of Users and in which countries.
2. Number of times each user plays the app
3. The average duration of play
4. Events!

Events are a very cool part of flurry, you can custom trigger them whenever you like. I chose to trigger them every time someone shares to facebook and twitter (so i can verify the bit.ly sharing link counter). I also trigger a special custom event every share that tells me what setups their pictures have. So i can get the information on what costumes are most popular, which are least popular etc. This will be useful in future updates because we can remove items that people don’t use, and put in images that might be more fun!

Finally Google Analytics, Google is really only used to track people going to the landing page. For Silhouette Studios Google Analytics are amazing. We can see how many people come to our site and what search in Google brought them there (also what sites they may have been referred from).

So that concludes this part of the launch of iPhone Developer Silhouette Studios small trio of Entertainment iPhone apps. Drag Booth, Pirate Booth and Halloween Booth. I’ll post the sales data and my breakdown of it once they have been up for a month or so. Feel free to send me tweets and comments about anything specific you’d like to know.

Have a Creative Day!

AshleyLeach.com.au

*This fell apart due to Pirates being approved for sale and DragBooth being placed in “In-Review” limbo while Apple “Investigated it Further” Since it’s, from a technical point, identical to Pirate Booth  we are left to assume Apple prefers Pirates to Drag Queens (Joking). Halloween is still waiting for approval as well and with two days until Halloween it might miss out altogether (Sad Face).

(UPDATE) DragBooth was rejected because it contained an icon that looked like a Polaroid Camera, and Apple said it might be seen as infringing on their TradeMark. Which is fair enough. We are removing this and resubmitting.

** I’m not sure what data we get access to because of this. If people are curious I’ll blog about the nature of it once i see more connections.