Summary: In this interview with AlamoFire and Gowalla creator Josh Williams, we discuss how Facebook has had an impact on the Gowalla mobile game as well as the marketing of the product.
Try Gowalla on the iPhone
Gowalla is one of my favorite applications on the iPhone. At its heart, Gowalla is a mobile game where checking in at new places earns you rewards, and users are encouraged to complete “missions” to hit numerous locations in a city in order to unlock achievements (and beautiful iconic badges).
So far, Gowalla hasn’t been the beneficiary of their own spotlight in an iPhone app commercial, which leads me to how I found their app in the first place (and the purpose of my interview with Gowalla creator Josh Williams).
Using the power of Facebook Connect, I noticed that some of my friends were posting their location to my Facebook news feed, which in turn got me curious. So, it was through Facebook itself that I came to find (and love) this truly remarkable mobile game.
Facebook Marketing Review:
What role has Facebook played in growing the Gowalla product in
terms of members?
Josh Williams:
Over half of our active users have connected their Facebook accounts to Gowalla and 25% of our incoming site traffic is referred from Facebook.
FMR:
Can you quantify the percentage (or total number) of your signups which originated from Facebook? In full disclosure, I found Gowalla through Facebook!
Josh Williams:
Unfortunately we don’t yet track feed story conversions from Facebook to Gowalla, though informal and intuitive research tell us that those feed stories get a lot of play and comments from other users.
FMR:
What have been the challenges (if any) with including Facebook Connect functionality into Gowalla? Was it easy for you to include or a challenge to work with the tools?
Josh Williams:
We’ve been working with Facebook Platform for a couple years now. We’re firm believers in the value we receive in return for integrating Facebook Connect with Gowalla. They’ve made implementation very easy andwe’re very excited about expanding the functionality we support for Connect within the Gowalla application.
FMR:
PackRat is one of the more impressive Facebook games I have come across. How long did it take to build? Why did you choose Facebook as the platform to build it upon, and how successful do you feel it has been?
Josh Williams:
Play Pack Rat on Facebook
We launched PackRat in January 2008 after 5 months of development. Since then we’ve more-or-less rebuilt the application twice from scratch. When we began development Facebook was the only social networking platform in town with a compelling userbase. We still believe it’s the best platform to work on.
PackRat has a cult hit status on Facebook with around 75,000 active players. Though small compared to social gaming giants like Restaurant City and FarmVille, we believe our community of players is on the most vibrant and active you’ll find on the platform. We’re fortunately to have revenue coming in from the game that has allowed us to expand and build Gowalla.
FMR:
Do you have any plans to allow users to show off their Gowalla pins through their Facebook profile or any other achievements beyond just their last check-in spot?
Josh Williams:
Absolutely. We’re just getting started here. Ideally we want folks to share all sorts of interesting travel stories and data from Gowalla on Facebook.
FMR:
Facebook pages are a great way for businesses to communicate with their fans. Have you thought about ways that Gowalla might be incorporated into the Pages system to allow businesses to create their own trips and mobile based games? Tourism clients come to mind. Maps showing newly discovered places that occupied their own Tab on a Page would be an example (again, Tourism related specifically)
Josh Williams:
We’re very keen on providing as many tools as possible that allow individuals and organizations to share and promote their presence on Gowalla. Our goal is to put trip creation features in the hands of our users very quickly. Beyond that, our core focus is the release of the Gowalla API to allow developers to create their own toolsets for
Gowalla.There are far too many great ideas for us to tackle internally and the API is a way we can let others quickly build these integrations for us.
FMR:
What lessons have you learned from your use of Facebook that you have applied to other areas of your marketing?
Josh Williams:
We see existing social ties as a critical component for distribution of Gowalla. While Facebook has been very instrumental in driving traffic to Gowalla, we believe there is more optimization to be done to make our presence on Facebook more meaningful to users over there. Our goal is to offer the most relevant sorts of content to the feed, not just a spammy stream of irrelevant content.
Beyond that, we’re taking our experience from Facebook over to Twitter as well. Though the medium is different, the principles still apply. It’s a great opportunity to reach out directly to your users and their friends. Obviously we’re very keen on the space.
