How much does this Cuti-cuti 1Malaysia facebook page cost actually? Let's listen to what Preetham Venkky has to say. Preetham Venkky is the business head at KRDS India, one of the Facebook authorized app development firms in Asia.
source: http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/06/15/facebook-stupid-app-malaysia/While anything is possible, spending US $590,000 on six Facebook apps doesn’t make much campaign sense. So for an app like Citrawana (one of the six) to costs close to US $100,000, this is impossible since the app is pretty straight to the point. The money paid is seriously unjustified. It should cost anywhere between $ 12,000 – $ 15,000 inclusive of two iPads being given away as prizes. These costs would include (to quote directly) – “creative works, concepts and ideas, design, flash programming and coding, testing and debugging, uploading and launching of application, system server development and maintenance, and development of database from the contest”.Based on the minister’s statement, what’s important to note is that the cost does NOT include campaign management, monitoring, Facebook ads, or fan recruitment through Facebook and Google. In most cases, the costs can escalate quite rapidly if a key deliverable is fan count. If there’s a target to acquire one million US fans for the page (this could be a realistic expectation since the client is a Tourism client) where the CPC is US $1.10 (on average) then it might be a good deal. If I were to make a guess, I think it would make sense if $90,000 includes the development of six apps with the remaining money spent on media (buying ads) to propagate and rapidly increase engagement.What’s shocked me is something different altogether. The agency hasn’t used the basic mechanics involved in Facebook fans acquisition. For instance, a user can play the game without ‘liking’ the page. There’s a micro-leaderboard but no global leaderboard. How would the user be motivated if he doesn’t know where he stands globally? And honestly, it’s extremely difficult to get 50,000 points which will only encourage the users to give up soon.
Also, the developer hasn’t used any ‘virality’ at all in the app. For instance it doesn’t prompt the user to share their score as an update, it doesn’t have an option to ‘challenge’ and invite your friends to join the game etc. There’s a lot that could’ve been done with the app, but it looks like the development agency has missed out on the core features to make the app go viral and hence increase fans and awareness.
