The other week on the UK version of The Apprentice the task set by Lord Sugar was to create, market and release an app, the most downloads in 24 hours won. Watching The Apprentice normally makes me want to crawl behind the couch and shout obscenities at the way the teams go about things, you know the usual weak leadership, bitching and just general ignorance of at least 1/2 the team. But watching this episode made me want to cry.
How both teams totally ignored social media was totally beyond me.
The most obvious way of using social media in a task like this is to crack out a Facebook page – send an invite out to everyone you know and blam that should be at the very least a 10-50 extra downloads, at the most you’ve just generated thousands of downloads. In the same vein you could use twitter in a similar fashion. Follow as many people as possible to get people to them just to look at your latest tweet with a link to the ‘cool’ new app you’ve just created. Again in the worst case you’ve got a couple of extra downloads but in the best case you’ve got thousands.
In terms of these tasks repeat business and bad word of mouth matter very little, there is little to no forward thinking just sell, sell, sell, and get as many out of the door with as much profit as possible. In that situation social media tactics like those above would drive a quick spike of traffic to your product which makes it almost the perfect method to use in these high volume low quality situations. The downside is that as soon as people realise how poor the product is you’ll start gathering negative reviews but if those initial downloads in 24 hours are your only concern then who the hell cares?
Many thanks for sharing.
Amazing work