Made With Love: Match.com’s Four Custom Facebook Solutions

by stratton on February 26, 2010

3317_75783771105_62935431105_2105602_2120575_nValentine’s Day may come and go, but Match.com spends the other 364 days making sure that next year’s is a memorable one for its customers. The 15-year old dating site has matched up countless couples online through its website, but it has only recently embraced Facebook as a way to reach out to an even broader audience.

Over the last several months, StepChange has partnered with Match.com to develop its Facebook presence with four unique apps. Each app was custom-designed to provide a unique experience that complements Match.com’s core mission: to help singles find relationships that bring them happiness.

Success @Match

success01Success @Match is a custom tab on Match.com’s main Facebook page, where couples who met on Match.com can share their success story with the world. It mirrors a core component of Match.com that harnesses the goodwill of happy couples who met through Match.com and turns them into evangelists for the brand.

Clicking the “Share Your Success Story” link takes the user to the Success @Match section of Match.com, where they can submit their success story. When the success story is approved on Match.com, it also appears on the Success @Match Facebook tab. From there, Match.com fans can share the story via wall post or message. They can also “like” the story and post a congratulatory comment, which can also be shared.

Are They Feelin’ It?

chemistry06Developed for Match.com’s premium offering, Chemistry.com, the Are They Feelin’ It? app is designed to give users a taste of what makes Chemistry.com unique from other online dating sites. With its Personality Test and Profile and various online activities, Chemistry.com not only helps its users find what they’re looking for, it also helps them recognize matches who are looking for them.

The app shows the user photos of 10 different men and women and asks whether each appears interested, not interested or is sending mixed signals. At the end of the quiz, the app gives the user their score and explains what the correct answers were for each photo and why, according to Chemistry.com’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Dr. Helen Fisher, a PhD biological anthropologist and Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University.

Sneak Peek

sneakpeek05Sneak Peek is exactly what it sounds like: a glimpse of singles on Match.com who fit a fan’s criteria for gender, age and location. If the fan wants to narrow down the results by other criteria, such as body type, ethnicity or faith, they are redirected to Match.com and offered a free trial.

What’s really unique about Sneak Peek is that it uses Match.com’s own API to find results in Match.com’s database and import them into the Facebook app. It doesn’t run Match.com inside of a tab, and it doesn’t just replicate the functionality of Match.com among Facebook users who have installed the app.

Matchmaker

Our latest Match.com Facebook app is Matchmaker, which expands Match.com’s traditional offerings by allowing singles’ friends to play matchmaker. By bringing Match.com into a user’s social circle, the app has the potential to encourage someone who was indifferent or even skeptical of online dating to give Match.com a chance.

matchmaker04Like Sneak Peek, Matchmaker leverages the Match.com API to pull results from its user database, according to some very general criteria (gender, location, ethnicity and age). The user can then send up to five results to their selected friend, which sends them a Matchmaker request to view the results, as well as an offer for a free trial of Match.com.

Matchmaker, like the other Match.com tabs and apps, was created from the ground up to create a custom fit for Match.com. None of these are “_____ in a box” features, because a one-size-fits-all approach for such a unique service would not be able to immerse fans in a meaningful brand experience.

{ 0 comments }

Please Rob Me: Making Common Sense More Common

by stratton on February 19, 2010

Much ado has been made in the last couple of days about Please Rob Me, a new site that reposts public Foursquare check-in tweets as tongue-in-cheek “new opportunities” for burglars to break in to homes while their owners are out. It’s a unique and fun way to spread awareness of the fact that announcing where you are also effectively announces where you are not.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took a lot of heat last month when he said that the social norm has evolved over time to the point where people have gotten more comfortable sharing their information openly and with more people. But in his defense, Foursquare passed the one million daily check-ins mark a few weeks ago. MyTown has over a million users. Yelp has recently added a check-in element to its mobile app. Sharing personal information with the world is a core element of those services, and they resonate strongly with a significant user base.

Maybe early adopters were driven by a mildly exhibitionist nature or the desire for another excuse to play with their new smartphone. But there’s no doubt that location awareness is here to stay, because it has tremendous potential applications for users who want to forge a connection to the places that they frequent, and vice-versa. Some businesses are offering deals to check-ins and Foursquare mayors, while others are experimenting with using location-aware services as loyalty programs. And that’s only the beginning.

So there is value there, if the right balance can be struck between value and privacy. Brands and service providers have to be careful not to overreach. We have to err on the side of caution when it comes to the personal information that their customers and users have entrusted them with. The clumsy launch of Google Buzz should be a lesson to all of us in the social media biz about how quickly goodwill can be lost if we don’t think things through carefully.

At the same time, users need to evolve a new set of common-sense behaviors. But that’s nothing new. Almost every emerging technology that’s designed to make our lives easier comes with its own unique caveats. When ATM cards first hit the scene, people had to be warned not to keep their PIN numbers in their wallets. Despite years of constant warnings, people still open email attachments from people they don’t know. And someone out there is giving their bank information to an exiled Nigerian prince.

There’s a learning curve to all of this stuff, and sometimes it takes a few worst-case scenarios to wake people up. Hopefully a tweet from Please Rob Me will gently smarten a few folks up and spare them some grief.

{ 0 comments }

We’re #10! StepChange Cracks Facebook’s Top 10 Apps

by stratton on January 29, 2010

sweet victory!Today, Inside Facebook announced that the Nestle Crunch Challenge app that we developed in conjunction with our agency partners at Ogilvy ranks as the #10 emerging Facebook app for the week. Nestle Crunch Challenge experienced nearly 175% week-over-week growth and currently has just shy of 250,000 active monthly users.

Players choose to play for Team Chocolate or Team Crispies when they first install the app, which awards them points for correctly answering trivia questions. Some of the questions are drawn from information shared by the players’ friends, including the schools that they went to and their recent status updates.

Each day at noon (Pacific Time), 1,000 Nestle Crunch Bars are given away to players who earn 1,000 points while there are bars remaining. In addition, there are weekly random drawings for bigger prizes; all members of the team with the highest cumulative point total for the week are eligible for the weekly prizes. Finally, all users are entered in a random drawing for the $10,000 grand prize.

Many thanks to Nestle and Ogilvy for giving us the opportunity to work on such a sweet project!

{ 1 comment }

← Previous Entries