Here is my presentation about virtual goods business models and pirate metrics (AARRR) from the Webinale conference

Nowadays, a fan page on Facebook is a must-have for every brand. Having a fan page alone, however, is not enough. A brand also has to activate and constantly engage its fans. It’s about turning passive fans into active brand advocates, who recommend the brand to their friends.

The website Kino.de attracts more than 4.6 million visits each month and it is the leading movie and cinema related website in Germany. The company behind Kino.de, Gruner + Jahr, is publisher of leading b-to-b and b-to-c print magazines with focus on films. With Kino.de, it also takes advantage of Facebook and so far, it has attracted more than 5000 fans, which makes it the largest German language movie  fan page on Facebook.

To further grow and engage its fan base, Kino.de now partners with SnipClip. The result of this partnership is a digital collector’s album featuring the movie highlights in March:

The collection consists of eight movie recommendations made by Kino.de. Each collectible shows the trailer of a recommended movie. Users gather “movie stars”, an in-game currency that they then exchange for collectibles. The goal of the users is to complete the collection. If they do so by March 25, users have the choice to enter a sweepstakes and the chance to win a Blu-ray DVD player and free movie tickets.

In order to have more trading partners for their duplicate collectibles, users want their friends to participate the game. Jointly, they will also be able to gather more movie stars. As a result, users are highly motivated to invite their friends to the game and thus, they spread the brand across their social network.

Growing the fan base is one goal. Activating and engaging existing fans is another one. Therefore, Kino.de also publishes bonuscodes that can be redeemed for collectibles on their fan page:

The availability of codes is limited and only the fans who click the link first get a copy of a specific collectible. As shown in the picture above, fans like those activities and they also comment on them. This results in increased exposure of the posts and the Kino.de. Further, it increases the value perception of being a fan: as a fan you receive bonuscodes automatically delivered to your Facebook news feed.

This leaves us with inviting you to become a fan of Kino.de, to play the collecting game and hopefully, to win one of the valuable prizes. Good luck!

When you want to send a friend a virtual gift, Facebook now splits the gift dialog into different sections:

Click on Sport and Celebrities and you find a variety of branded virtual gifts:

Do you think those branded virtual goods are attractive to the Facebook users?

Brands are increasingly the sum of their most loyal and influential fans.

Taken from:

Matthew and Mark had to cancel their sessions at the Startup-Day. Christoph Janz and André Ballay spontaneously decided to join the Startup-Day speakers team. Welcome Christoph and André!

Christoph Janz is the (co-)founder of DealPilot.com, which he sold to Bertelsmann, and of Pageflakes, which he sold to MySpace-founder Brad Greenspan last month. His session is titled “Monetarisierung im Web 2.0″. He worked over ten years in the web industry, so I’m looking forward to learn from his insights, especially from his experiences in oversea. Btw: he is also an investor looking for the next big thing, so talk to him!

André Ballay is working at the 24 IP Law group. I don’t know André personally, yet. Robert Harrison, our patent lawyer, recommended him to us and Robert is a really smart person (I pitched him our business idea in the three minutes and he summarized it in three sentences; maybe he should do the pitching for us). André Ballay will inform us about intellectual property: copyrights, patents and brands. These are important issues, especially in the web industry, so we are happy to cover this topic as well at the Startup-Day.

I’m looking to meet you in Karlsruhe! Until then, have a good time!

Social marketing means: let the people do your marketing. And marketing not only means advertising. Primarily, marketing means to know your market! And who does know your market better than your customers? So it seems to be obvious to let the customers do the marketing.

(click here and read more…)

Never thought about this before: brand mashups. Today, I recognized this phenomena watching movie ads. Milka presented a new chocolate: Milka chocolate combined with Daims. Seems to be a trend in the candies industry. Ritter Sport combined their chocolate with Neopolitaner. Does anybody know an example from the web industry?

Jeremiah posted an impressive list of examples of (negative) social media branding:

Companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant. This doesn’t include the list of fake blogs, that’s on a different list.

See the list at: A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media

Last weekend I went shopping in Hamburg. When I saw a group of teens of which one wore this typical alternative clothes, it seemed to me that you have to wear Chucks to be alternative. This is somewhat schizophrenic, because alternative means being alternative to the mainstream. However, Chucks are mainstream in the alternative culture. Let’s take this thought further …

(click here and read more…)