Yo
Yo—The One Word Campaign
Yo was one of the most viral apps of all time, but it all began with one mega influencer
Challenge
When the creators of Yo introduced the app to our team for the very first time, they weren’t sure what the app was for, what it would become, or if it had any chance of success. The one thing they were sure about was that it was the most addictive app they had ever seen. We understood that the only way we could ignite a huge PR spark around this app is by physically showing it to someone highly influential. Its viral effect couldn’t be explain in an email. Our objective was to position Yo in such a way that it could spiral into a viral storm across the tech blogosphere, mainstream media, and social media.
Process
Yo is an incredibly simple mobile app that does exactly one thing - send a notification with the word Yo to a contact. When it was first developed, it was given to a few team members to test and quickly spread to their community of friends and family. With viral potential like nothing we had seen before, we knew we needed to build our campaign around key influencers who could serve to introduce Yo to the highly interconnected community of Silicon Valley insiders, startup entrepreneurs, and tech media. We needed to plant a seed to push the story to go viral.
We started with one super-influencer who could raise awareness about Yo with just one social post, and whose influence would reverberate to the key industries we had identified. We found the perfect person - Robert Scoble . He is one of the most significant and influential players in the tech industry with a massive social presence of millions of followers across Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
Yo is the simplest app ever, but it couldn’t be explained. It had to be shown. We arranged a meeting for Scoble to demo the app in person so he could see it for himself.
One word from Scoble can make or break a startup. What were his words?
"I just got the stupidest but most addicting app ever.“Name? YO”
Solution
We allowed the conversation to grow organically, and shared a key piece of information in an interview with The Financial Times - this app that did nothing, had just raised an incredible $1 million. Now that made everyone really go into a frenzy!
Make sure the right people know and talk about your product. It’s all about who you know, who knows you, and using the right angle for the story!
Results
- We got 3,600 unique articles and coverage across tech media, mainstream publications, and TV shows, like The Colbert Report
- Our outreach was so successful in fact that Yo’s story overshadowed the launch of Amazon’s Fire smartphone on the same day
- The app achieved a record high of one million downloads in just 48 hours (beating Instagram’s record)
- Time after time we came up with great, timely angles to share with the media
- Yo attained universal name recognition and Silicon Valley fame. It served as the inspiration for an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley, where it was parodied as an app called Bro
Coverage
As featured in
“"Yo is mobile messaging taken to its logical - if ridiculous - conclusion. Yet the app is strangely compelling, and is winning fans in design-savvy tech companies such as Foursquare, Path, and Kickstarter, as well as plaudits on and from Robert Scoble, the tech blogger and professional early-adopter most recently famous for wearing Google Glass in the shower."”Read article →
“"The app has been called everything from pointless to amazing for its simple premise, allowing users to send a “yo” to friends with just one tap. It has also raised millions of dollars in funding."”Read article →
“"A new mobile app called Yo lets users interact with friends and contacts in zero characters -- yes zero. And you thought 140 characters was tough! In place of an actual message, users send and receive push notifications with one simple, single, predetermined greeting: "Yo.""”Read article →
“"You might have heard of Yo. It’s the app that lets you buzz a friend’s phone with a "YO" push notification. If you swipe on it, you’re brought into the app where you can proceed to send a Yo back to your friend. It sounds a little ridiculous, and a Yo war may ensue, at which point you might delete the app. But hold on a minute — beneath all the Yos, there’s the seed of a very interesting idea."”Read article →
“"A Wall Street Journal tech columnist today lays out a pretty compelling case that Yo is a clever and elegant communications protocol that he suggests could be bigger than Twitter one day."”Read article →
“"Twitter's 140 characters are so passe. The new hotness on the tech scene – for at least the next five minutes – is zero-character communication. "Yo" is gloriously simple, and simply stupid. Like Chindōgu, the Japanese art of inventing perfectly useless gadgets that nonetheless look like they should solve a common problem, it hovers the fine line between a fantastic, "I wish I'd thought of that" idea, and one which should have been laughed out of the room before anyone even bothered to write it down."”Read article →
“"That app, created by Or Abel and already funded to the tune of some $1 million, essentially does one thing only: It allows users to send the word “Yo” to their friends. The service proved popular in its first week–even topping Slingshot in the App Store yesterday, while racking up 100,000 downloads. Abel sees his creation signaling the demise of lengthy push notifications and told us that it “really helps cut through the noise.” That may be true but we couldn’t help but wonder: Is he a mad genius of marketing who has built something that might change the way we communicate, or simply, well, mad?"”Read article →
“"After the excitement over WhatsApp and SnapChat you might have thought that Silicon Valley’s creative juices were running low. But not so. How do I know? Yo."”Read article →
