If you happen to be in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 12, check out Julie’s session titled “Campaign Strategy in Social Media.” appssavvy folks will be in attendance so give us a shout if you’ll be there!

Both campaigns are finalists because they managed to engage people on the web in authentic and meaningful ways. We tapped into existing social activity: people playing Mafia Wars were completing jobs, collecting loot, and sharing with their friends, people on MyTown were checking-in to their favorite locations, collecting virtual goods, and again, sharing all this with their friends. By adding value to activities that people were already taking part in, appssavvy was able to achieve incredible results for its clients.

Winners will be announced at the MOBI Awards Gala on September 13 and the SAMMY Awards Gala the next day on September 14. Both events will take place at the W Hotel, Union Square, in New York. Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love your support.

Jonah delivered a fascinating presentation called “Mormons, Mullets and Maniacs” (link after the jump). He asks: How can you make your idea go “viral”? One major component of Jonah’s philosophy is what he calls the “Bored at Work Network” (BWN) which consists of the millions of bored office workers blogging, tweeting, and using Facebook all day. He suggests that the BWN is bigger than any traditional media network we know of (and we’re pretty certain he’s right).

Then Jonah presented his five strategies for going viral:

1. Create media targeted to the BWN network – easy to understand, easy to share, with some sort of social imperative. (You never know in advance whether your ideas will work, so try, try again.)
2. The Mullet Strategy: Business in the front, party in the back (e.g. behind the scenes at buzzfeed, they can add, test, tweak, optimize, and remove stories in real time).
3. The Big Seed Strategy: Expose a large seed audience to your content and then focus on maximizing its “social reproduction rate.”
4. Content is more viral if it helps people express their personality disorders. (Target Narcissists like Kanye West and Perez Hilton, Obsessive Compulsives like Wikipedia users and online gamers, etc.)
5. Make evangelism the core of your strategy - focus on the mechanics of how the idea spreads, not just the idea itself.

Check out the entire presentation bellow and make sure to follow Jonah at @peretti.

1. Agencies and brands are partnering with apps rather than building their own
2. Quality trumps quantity (it’s not about impressions anymore)
3. Current tools don’t track or tell brands how to buy social activity
4. Social activity moves the needle.

The office, located at 321 North Clark Street (pictured on the left), brings together our team in the Windy City under one roof and enables them to better serve our brand/agency clients and developer/publisher partners located in Chicago and the surrounding Midwest.

We’re thrilled to be a bigger part of the Chicago community!

These new six extend appssavvy’s team to more than 40 employees! (And we’re still continuing to hire.) For some background on our new appssavvians check out our recent press release, and if you’re interested in working for appssavvy, you can learn more on our website.

I was inspired by one of our previous blog posts, the great migration, to write something for MediaPost. It’s called Accept Everything We Do Is Social (And ‘Like’ It). Check it out. I’d like to hear what you think.

Chris Cunningham
Co-founder and CEO
@appssavvyceo