Posted by: Meg Archer, Marketing Coordinator

To help you wrap your head around all the social media talk these days, I thought I’d throw out an example of a company successfully leveraging the trend.

Consider Electronic Arts (EA), a leading video game development shop. They partnered with Context to create a Facebook application. It’s based on EA’s trivia game for the Nintendo Wii called Smarty Pants. EA repurposes the same questions from the Wii game for the Facebook application. In the application, the goal is to earn the most points by answering questions correctly. The faster you answer a question, the more points you get. Users challenge friends to beat each other’s score, and there’s also a leader board, displaying the smartest smarty pants. As you get more points, you grow into different pairs of pants like pajamas, safari pants and clown pants – virtual status symbols.

In the first 30 days after launching the application, over one million games had been played, and its popularity didn’t wane – another million games were played the following month. Now in its ninth month, over seven million games have been played, and the game continues to migrate through Facebook. There was no media purchase to promote this campaign, and in fact, EA actually makes money from ads that display in between questions.

This social media campaign has been successful because the game allows users to be active participants. Smarty Pants engages users and gives them a level of control, allowing them to share the fun and challenge their friends. While users are happy to engage in some friendly, online rivalry, EA accomplishes its business objective of teaching more people about video gaming.

Have you seen examples of effective social media? Let us know…