LeapFish has great social features

One of the great things about social media is real-time content and video.  It’s like TV, except personalized to you.  I looked at the LeapFish homepage today and I see breaking news for Yahoo and the various NBA playoff games.  This is not just what you’d typically get on a news site—it’s interactive and has pictures and video.

What would make it even better is to use Facebook Connect to make it more shareable directly.  I see Facebook Connect is already employed, but it’s not quite as obvious to me as a new user how to comment directly on that page and see what my friends are doing.  For example, I clicked on the news article on how Dirk Nowitski helped the Mavericks win tonight, which took me to a Yahoo! News page, from which then I could comment.  Perhaps I misunderstand LeapFish as a news distributor.

And it could be that the new announcements coming in just 2 days at the Facebook F8 conference will change all that, since Facebook functionality will soon be available to all pages, not just those that reside on Facebook.  Curious to see what LeapFish is able to do when that new functionality rolls out!

LeapFish has a game-like name

Sometimes there comes a point where you’ve seen so many “web 2.0” names that they start to sound the same.  I know a game company called PlayFish, which is a lot like LeapFish.  Then there’s BigFish, PlayFirst, and other guys.  This type of brand confusion can be both good and bad.

If you’re the smaller player, then this is good initially, since the bigger brand has something you can draft off of.  It’s kind of like the Chinese manufacturers that make Nike replicas, but call them Mike with a swoosh symbol—most consumers couldn’t tell.  I certainly didn’t notice the first time that I went to Beijing and saw the knock offs.  The quality was good—and sometimes perhaps better than the original.

In the case of LeapFish, they are not a knock-off, but a legitimate brand that already has traffic and some staying power.  They’re Alexa sub 10,000, so you know that’s already decent traffic.  But they’re not in the top 1,000 sites, which means they’re not able to reap the premium CPMs that come with larger brand advertisers—or have the scale necessary to really make it happen with a direct sales team and an ad platform. 

But give it time!

LeapFish Dash for Cash terms of service

There is a terms of service page if you happen to click to the bottom of the main page.   Definitely go check it out if you’re entering the contest, since there are some rules you’ll clearly want to make sure you’re following if you’re going to participate and make sure that all your tactics to earn points are legitimate and that you’re not accidentally banned or have your points taken away from you.  That could potentially be a lot of effort wasted by not reviewing them.

Of course, the terms mention that you cannot use automated means to generate content or friends.  Thus, the article spinners and spammers are out of the game, unless they find clever ways to create unique looking content that passes manual review by the LeapFish folks.  And then there are the folks that will generate fake views of their YouTube video by having bots hit the video from a multitude of IP addresses.  Without having enough real looking comments, it will be reasonably easy to determine if this is fraud, especially if that user does not have a history of generating highly popular videos and is already a big name.

So be careful in what methods you use!

LeapFish can have a better fan page on Facebook

Saying that a brand should have a better fan page isn’t really saying much at this stage since so few brands even know what a custom tab is or how to create one via the Static FMBL application.  Most brands have the standard 4 tabs: wall, info, discussion, and photos.  They’re not aware that you can create a custom landing page—often called a “super tab” to mimic whatever other page they have on the regular web.

You see, LeapFish is sending their traffic to the wall, which is the default option.  And the page has no custom tabs.  With only 300 or so fans right now, it’s not a big deal, but if they got to 10,000 fans or more, such options would become more important. 

What if they placed a leaderboard on that Facebook page that showed everyone’s point status, which could then drive more interaction and participation?  Certainly that would promote more involvement by having the scores more prominent, versus only intermittently updated every day or so.  Who would play a video game that showed you your score only after waiting to the next day, versus the very millisecond that you killed that alien or earned points in whatever manner?

LeapFish on Facebook

Facebook, in my opinion is THE most important and powerful channel for contests such as the LeapFish Dash for Cash—not just because there are over 400 million users on the platform, as well as a great set of tools for developers to build amazing application.  Why?  It’s because Facebook has a well-crafted strategy of allowing publishers to drive Facebook ads to Facebook pages.  There is a built in incentive to drive your ads to pages, largely because you get the benefit of the “become a fan” button.  Plus, if you send them off-site, then users will naturally not be as willing to be yanked out of their current experience, then have to back to where they were.  It’s one of the main selling points of the Apple iAd, but I digress.

LeapFish should be experimenting with some Facebook ads to generate a large fan base.  That base, once it reaches about 100,000 fans will have enough power and critical mass to be able to sustain itself—to grow virally without the need to continue to advertise. 

Tie that in with a properly built Facebook Fan Page and you have magic that few brands have yet to understand. That’s the next post.

LeapFish Testing Part 4

To further on the concept of Ghetto Testing, LeapFish should try out other channels to promote the CashDash contest.  For example, were I running this contest, I’d definitely create a Facebook page for it and also award points to users who not only fan the page, but also those folks who post on the page’s wall and invite friends.  I see there are 20 points awarded to folks who post a tweet about the contest, so wouldn’t you think that a Facebook fan is worth significantly more?

Facebook has significantly more traffic than Twitter—about 100 times more traffic, since last time I had checked.  Plus, it is definitely a more viral and trustworthy way of sharing content.  People frequent Facebook more because of the filters that are built into it.

Thus, by adding in a strong Facebook page, connecting the site with Facebook using Facebook Connect, and adding in the fan points system, there is a lot more that can spread the virality and conversion of the LeapFish Cash Dash contest.

In our next post, we’ll discuss what aspects of a Facebook Fan Page will be most effective for LeapFish.  And if the LeapFish marketing folks are reading this, all the much better!  Love to hear your thoughts on this!

LeapFish Points Part 3

Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, talked about the idea of “ghetto testing”, whereby a company could learn very quickly based on building “ghetto” prototypes and then finding out very quickly what users like and don’t like.  As it relates to LeapFish, I’m curious to see what they’re doing in terms of testing.

Were I LeapFish, I’d implement Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer to split test various landing pages.  I’ll bet that by having a landing page with video, their conversion rates would increase dramatically.  We made such changes to an entertainment brand recently and found average time on page to increase from 5 seconds to 76 seconds.  More importantly, revenue increased dramatically.  I believe that a video landing page would create massive differences for LeapFish.

Then again, a video requires a bit more effort.  You have to have people who are able to testify about their winnings—you have to be able to show prizes, plus do other things that increase the legitimacy of the brand.  The current page doesn’t inspire the level of trust that I believe will cause people to be comfortably converted into the contest.

Perhaps if most of the growth is viral—meaning that LeapFish is relying upon the trust of friends who are inviting friends—then they’ll be able to get growth.  However, I still believe video is one of the most powerful assets to test. 

In my next blog post, I’ll cover some of the items that they could do to further test conversion rates.

LeapFish Points part 2

Thus, by spreading the point levels out further and further, you can create the same psychological distance between levels.  Plus, the further a person gets into the game, the more involved they become—they are effectively locked into the game with a significant sunk cost and will continue to play.

If their friends are incented to play, too, then you have an even stronger lock-in.  This is how games such as FarmVille, YoVille, FishVille, BlitzVille, or whatever villes become incredibly popular.  You get sucked in and the peer pressure causes you to compete against those folks who are friends, even if you don’t particularly feel like playing.  In my opinion, this is a stronger addiction than gambling. 

As it relates to what LeapFish has with CashDash, one of the things they could do is create a personalized leaderboard.  Instead of showing just what your points total is—make it viral and involve other egos of friends by showing a leaderboard of how they rank versus their friends.  This is really just a social video game where you’re competing against your friends, so you should do everything you can to make it more addictive and viral.

Granted, this game is brand new, so there is still plenty of time to make these changes to increase the level of sharing and playability.

My recommendation for LeapFish CashDash

LeapFish just introduced a new service or contest called CashDash, where they are giving away up to $100k in cash and prizes.  Go check it out and you’ll see that they have quite a few things on offer, from a cash draw to cool electronic gadgets you can win by being one of the first to hit certain point level targets—from 500 points to 10,000 points.

One of the things I’ve noticed about effective video game design is that you should spread out the levels with increasing distance.  So instead of having levels at an even 1,000 points apart or a similar distance, you should make each level 500 points, then 1,000 points, then 1,500 points, and 2,000 points apart, and so forth.

The reason you do this is because of psychological inflation.  In other words, the further someone goes in a game, the more points they need to earn in order to feel like they’ve achieved something.  For example, if you go from 1,000 points to 2,000 points that feels like a big jump—you’ve doubled your points.

But if you go from 100,000 points to 101,000 points, it doesn’t feel like as many points, even though in both cases, you’re added the same number of points – 1,000 points.

Leapfish actually will give out cash-- it just launched

When I first heard about this, I was wondering how LeapFish could possibly make any money by giving stuff out, but it turns out they make money on advertising, so it makes sense to do a contest such as this one to build up the traffic so they have more ad inventory to sell. One of the options you can do to earn points, and I think it's the one that has the most points associated with it, is to post a YouTube video.  You get 200 points for that and then another 100 points for every 1,000 people that view it.  Unfortunately, I suck at YouTube, so I'm probably not going to get many points that way.  But I am quite a heck of a blogger, and from my guess here I'm already at 130 words for this post, so I just need to have one more good paragraph.

The other part of the way to earn things, besides being one of the first folks to hit a point level, is to qualify by setting your homepage as the leapfish.com homepage.  I can understand that there is a lot of value in setting your homepage to leapfish-- at least for leapfish's sake, since then leapfish is what people see over and over.  The question is whether they're strong enough content-wise to justify being your homepage.  From what I can tell, it's not bad-- it's decently good news site.  Not sure how they populate the site with content, but it seems up to date and fresh.

Leapfish using viral methods to build traffic

I had lunch yesterday with Hywel, who runs Business Development for Leapfish.  If the other folks in this company are as bright as Hywel, then consider them a formidable player in social media.  They are running a contest with $100k in cash prizes, if you haven't seen.

I'm writing this second blog post, in full disclosure, to see if the system credits me for another 100 points for each blog post.  The contest rules don't appear to have a limit on the number of blog posts that one could submit about LeapFish each day, so I would guess that you could hire a bunch of Indians to crank out content, or even just use an auto-generator of content-- many, many article spinners out there to do this.

They are also offering 50 points per link that folks make to Leapfish.  I believe this is the most powerful of the techniques that they're using to promote the product-- and it should probably deserve more points than being awarded relative to the other ways to earn points.

The 200 word minimum is a good initial measure of quality-- to prevent people from writing one line reviews of the product to gain points.  As of my last paragraph, I was at 175 words, so I'm writing this additional paragraph to get above that limit.  Thus, this paragraph must have at least 25 words.

So--- did you sign up for LeapFish and how many points are you at?

Leapfish offering $100k contest

They have a points-based system, encouraging users to blog, refer friends, make LeapFish their homepage, make viral videos, and other items.  I'm doing this post to see how their points system works.  I checked out the privacy policy and it looks clean-- thus, doesn't seem like you have to worry about spam, unlike most of the other players in this space.  

You have to also hit 200 words minimum in your blog post, so it's not as easy as just doing a twitter update.  I'm curious to see if they have to manually review posts, since there may be folks who will say garbage (such as repeating sentences) or perhaps even post negative reviews just to get up to the word count.  There's also the issue of verification to ensure that the blog post being posted is actually owned by that particular user.

The act of posting any kind of contest will invite people who are looking to game the system, especially when there are prizes being offered.  The first 3 people to 500 points are to win an ipod touch, so it would appear that this can be easily done within 2 hours of easy effort.  I'm surprised to see that there aren't more people in the program yet-- then again, it's brand new.

Good luck to everyone to enters!