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Building a Web App in 1 Hour For Promotional Purposes - IsHilarySwankHot.com

Prologue

Stupid, silly, and catchy pop culture things just work.  Like our IsHilarySwankHot.com. It’s that big watercooler effect.  You can debate all you want, but products like iFart grow.  I’d never want to make a company around them, but they’re awesome promotional tools.  In a lot of cases, they can bank too.

The Lightbulb

I love the show The Office, it rocks and it’s huge (insert that’s what she said quote here).  I started watching last night’s episode, which spent half of the night asking whether hilary swank was hot.  Seriously, it was an intense debate between everyone in the office.  After the show was over, I sent out a tweet saying that I did not think she was hot. Right after that I started getting a couple of messages in response.  BOOM- LIGHTBULB. I knew this was officially one of those pop culture moments to take a hold of for purely promotional reasons.  It was going to be the talk of the watercooler, and everyone loves the Office.  We needed to continue the discussion and give people a way to vote yes or no if hilary swank was hot.

Making It Happen

This is the type of thing that needed to come together in a few hours or we were at a disadvantage.  Spending years learning + subscribing to the notion of rapid development + simplicity pays off.  Seriously, stop bloating your shit, you’ll be able to do things so fast.  It was a little bit before midnight, and IM’d Mark Bao (fellow cofounder at Ramamia).  I told him the logic, and that I was going to buy the domains ishilaryswankhot.com and ishillaryswankhot.com .  We went back and forth on layout for a few minutes, and within an hour or so, Mark had a prototype ready.  Seriously, it’s a one page novelty web app.  I got it on the server, and by about 1 am it was live.

Promoting It

We put it live at like 1 am, and I was up until 3 or 4 am doing other shit.  We agreed we’d promote it tomorrow since it was late.  Ironically, so far, we have about 1460 votes.  The count has increased by a couple hundred within the time it has taken me to write this post and increases approximately 10 per minute.  We’ve gotten an article already on tvsquad, a Weblogs Inc. blog:  http://www.tvsquad.com/2009/01/23/so-is-hilary-swank-hot/#thankYou.  Below is basically our strategy for promotion.  Most of which we haven’t even gotten to yet.

  1. Our Personal Network- Everyone watches The Office.  Seriously, it’s a huge show.  Over the past few years, Mark and I have built a hell of a network on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.  So we started there, just sending it out to those networks.  Most of my friends I contacted via im afterwards had already seen it + voted.
  2. Viral Hooks- People want to talk about this.  They want to let people know their opinion.  It’s also a funny hot topic.  So we built in two buttons: Post to Twitter and Share on Facebook.  The Twitter button has been working for sure. (Facebook is hard to tell).
  3. Advertising- I gave Facebook ads a shot.  A lot of people have the office listed in their profile.  Approximately 2.4 million i think.  I went and got the free Visa Business Network ads for like one hundred bucks, so it was free.  I’ve only spent 5 bucks so far.  It brought us about 30 clicks.  Not bad, but not insanely effective.  We’re doing that in under 5 minutes organically.  Maybe we’ll up the spend, and focus in on college kids.  They talk more.
  4. Press- We’re going after all the major tv blogs, celebrity blogs, and pop culture blogs.  After i write this post, ill basically be emailing my life away.  If you have contacts or would like to write about it, email us.  TVSquad already gave us a hit, which was awesome.  I’m a long time reader there, so it’s pretty cool to have an article on there.
  5. Community Sites- I’ll be going to every office fan site and forum to pitch them.  The fan sites are a lot like press.  As far as forums go, I won’t spam, but will just make a simple topic.  People who are fans of the show enjoy this.

In Closing

Dumb, novel, pop culture focused apps can somehow be a great promotional tool.  We haven’t been able to see the correlation to it in regards to Ramamia sign ups yet.  That may be another post.  Even if it doesn’t bring us a ton of sign ups, it’s cool to make something funny that people enjoy.  That’s the great thing about the internet, you can make things just for the hell of it.

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Posted in Company News.

By Ramamia
January 23, 2009

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