The Interesting Case of the “Laughing Gor” Facebook App
March 18th 2009, a seemingly regular night on Hong Kong television channel TVB, the popular drama E.U was on. Twenty-one episodes have gone by and ratings have held steady at an average of 29 points a week. However this night’s episode, number twenty-two, would eventually spark a best supporting actor award, a successful spinoff, a city wide frenzy about a character with magazine covers and also one of Hong Kong’s most successful Facebook application.
Eric Chow is a fan of the TV series E.U, closely following the entire series as the drama unfolds. But on the twenty-second episode, he was shocked like the other fans of the drama. The producers and writers decided it would be the end of the popular character “Laughing Gor”. Played by Michael Tse, who later won an award for this character, “Laughing Gor” was the one character most defined by the series and loved by the audience.
Later that night, an idea struck Eric. He personally felt the loss of “Laughing Gor” and thought it would be a good idea to create a digital funeral for this most loved character. This idea would manifest itself into a Facebook application that can be shared among the netizens.
Facebook applications are applications built on Facebook’s platform. Software developers can create applications interacting with Facebook’s API. This gives developers the ability to create applications utilizing Facebooks data and user connections. An example would be the popular game Farmville. Players in Farmville can interact with their Facebook friends for a social experience.
Eric Chow decided to make an impact with his idea, it would have to be done fast. Late into the night over a course of five hours, Eric created the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application. The application allows users to present offerings to “Laughing Gor”. After presenting an offering, As more users presented offerings, the “Laughing Gor Funeral” would level up an open up more potential offerings. A way for all the fans to act on a collective will.
Eric initially shared the application to four people. Not sure where this would take him, his family and friends also installed the application on Facebook and published their activities on their Facebook wall. To his surprise, the application caught on like a firestorm. Within the first week over one hundred thousand people installed the application.
Then over the next few months, over three hundred thousand people installed the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application. The users in the application presented over seven hundred thousand offerings. Each one of the offerings presented by users created a posting to their own Facebook wall that was seen by their friends. If we took the newspaper industry’s standard of calculating impressions, which is to multiply the number of readers or subscribers by three, the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application created potentially over two million impressions just by spreading through the user’s Facebook wall.
Though highly successful, the Facebook app was never noticed by TVB. TVB instead created an online petition on their own website to revive the “Laughing Gor” character. The petition was signed by over a hundred a fifty thousand people, far short of the number of users created by Eric Chow and his Facebook app. However if we look closely, the hundred and fifty thousand people who signed the petition never shared or spread their own activities among their own network of people. That means those were a static hundred and fifty thousand interactions. If we compare that to the number of potential impressions created by the “Laughing Gor Funeral” app, the TVB petition falls short by almost two million impressions, demonstrating mainstream media’s lack of understanding towards social media. This creates a large potential opportunity for people who understand viral ability and social media to fill a need in the market place.
Update:
Sent this to Brandon Cheung of wwwins and he said the average Facebook user has 150 friends. He thinks the multiplication of three can be higher. I used newspaper as an analog just to demonstrate but I think he’s right. I usually get a few comments on my stupid posts and those are only the people who comment. I wonder what the conversion rate of views to comments is?