For the next in our series of case studies looking at how small businesses are using social media, we caught up with Ed Relf, Chief Marketing Officer of Mind Candy, the creators of Moshi Monsters
In no more than 50 words explain what your business is
Mind Candy is a Battersea-based, global social online games developer / publisher and the creator of Moshi Monsters – www.moshimonsters.com – one of the fastest-growing online games in the world with over 15 million players. The game allows children to adopt and care for their very own online virtual pet.
How do you use social media as a business?
Social media is a crucial part of our mix. However, rather than just utilise social media as an acquisition tool for the game, we develop Moshi Monsters utilising many popular and emerging social media trends to better engage with our audience and allow players of Moshi Monsters to engage with players and the world around them.
Within Moshi Monsters, players are able to communicate via a number of moderated channels that encourage better user engagement and interactivity within the game world. Some of the most popular social features include the likes of our news feed – similar to what you see with other popular social networking sites – that allows the constant drip-feeding of important news and updates. Tools such as this allow us to better communicate with our millions of players around the world, helping to keep our players up to date with their in-game networks, important news or updated game features.
Outside of the game, we are now leveraging external social media channels more as part of our ongoing marketing campaigns for Moshi Monsters. With our most recent marketing campaign, “Hey Moshi” which launched earlier this month, we have built a fully integrated campaign combining traditional media targets as well as leveraging social media channels such as social networking sites and YouTube to help broaden the overall reach of the campaign and lead to better engagement / feedback with our customers.
As part of this global advertising campaign, players were encouraged to take part in a “Hey Moshi” style dance which was specially choreographed for the above-the-line campaign and, as such, many hundreds of movies have been submitted and viral impact of the campaign has been tremendous!
The most recent “Hey Moshi” YouTube movie that is also featured as part of our above-the-line global TV campaign, has had fast approaching 100,000 views in just over a week with many hundreds of response movies already posted online. The entire campaign drives traffic through to a dedicated global landing destination at www.heymoshi.com designed to streamline the new player registration process and reduce friction for new players wishing to sign up for the game. You can check out the “Hey Moshi” dance video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQHtbVtPS_8
Do you measure the success of your social media marketing? If so, how?
The great thing about social media marketing is that it can be targeted and evaluated very accurately. You can see exactly who is your responding to your campaigns and initiatives, when they responded and where they came from.
One of the easiest ways to do this is keep tabs on the number of fans or followers we have on social networking sites. However, we also monitor interaction daily within the Moshi Monsters game that has been described by the press as being “Facebook for Kids”. Safety and security is integral to this strategy and therefore we adopt a two-tier approach to social media. We utilise external social media channels as a way of raising awareness of Moshi and we then leverage our own game as a way of encouraging ongoing direct engagement with our players. Once players are within Moshi Monsters we then have a series of tools and metrics we use to evaluate the ongoing success of these campaigns and ongoing engagement with our players.
How does social media fit in with the other marketing your company does?
Social media is an additional way of reaching our audience and attracting new players or generating additional exposure for the Moshi Monsters game / brand. It is a great way of spreading the word online, allowing us to tap into new audiences and consolidate our fan base around the world as well as supplementing other marketing channels such as direct, email, online and search marketing campaigns. Everything we do is fully integrated, meaning marketing channels typically support one another across the marketing mix. So, when we run children’s TV advertising campaigns, for example, we typically see a direct impact of these campaigns across all areas of the marketing and social media mix. Understanding these trends, why and how multiple marketing channels support one another, is absolutely key to the success of our campaigns as well as clearly defining our key metrics and constantly evaluating our existing marketing programs.
More recently, with the “Hey Moshi” campaign, social media was from the start at the heart of our strategy. Through social media we can engage with our users in a way more powerful than other marketing channels and we know that building a more engaged audience will lead to better advocacy for Moshi Monsters and subsequent word-of-mouth support for the game. It’s important to remember that this is true for both children and parents and social media allows us to have dialogue with audiences as they are both critically important to us.
In the future, you will see us experimenting more with social media as a supplementary channel to our existing marketing campaigns as we look to increase viral impact of our marketing programs and build our campaigns into more conversational and engaging communications as opposed to just pure awareness or brand-building marketing.
Do you have plans to increase your use of social media in 2010?
As it stands, Moshi Monsters is one of the largest online children’s communities in the world. Our forum is flourishing and our blog is one of the most read children’s online blogs in the world! Yes, we plan to further increase our use of social media through 2010 and beyond by both integration of safe / secure social tools into Moshi Monsters but also from an external social media standpoint, building this into the heart of our marketing programs.
Social media allows us to build our marketing campaigns into conversational campaigns where we can build ongoing dialogue with our player-base. For an online game such as Moshi Monsters this is critical to our success in the future as innovation is key in the online gaming space. Working closely with parents is also crucial and through social media we are able to have increasingly closer dialogue with parents across the world. As a result, we have been able to build Moshi Monsters into a game that appeals to both children and, most importantly, parents.
In the future, you will see social media playing a much more critical role in both the defining of our strategy and integration across our entire global marketing mix for Moshi Monsters. Our goal is to continually spread the positive word of Moshi Monsters beyond our current reach and social media gives us this exciting opportunity like no other medium.
What would be your top 3 tips for businesses looking to get involved in social media?
- The top one would be to do it. Any business in this day and age needs to have an online presence because consumers – whether they are adults or children – are becoming increasingly tech-savvy and comfortable using such platforms. Social media enables a business to speak and listen to its customers in a real-time dialogue like no other channel before.
- Look at all the platforms and assess which ones are the most useful for your business. Experiment to see which content works best – video, photo, podcast, status update, tweets etc.
- Understand the metrics, define your strategy and your key measures and then build your programs around these. It’s simple stuff, however critical to judging the ongoing success of your social media programs and without it you are simply blind as to what is working or not as the case may be.
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