Last year telco Verizon found itself confronted with a very specific marketing need: to find a way to publicize the broad menu of video-on-demand Indian movies available on its FiOS TV high-speed fiber optic TV service and on V CAST, its mobile video platform.

The carrier had already determined to use social network to reach these U.S. Bollywood fans—the “how” question solved. It just didn’t make sense to reach a mass audience with a product as niche as Bollywood cinema.

But that still left the problem of who to talk to, what kind of campaign to target them with, and where to find them in the digital thickets of Facebook, MySpace and the rest.

The “what” came about through a partnership with Saavn, a large digital distributor of South Asian entertainment content from music and videos to ringtones. In a partnership with Verizon, Saavn agreed to host and manage a Bollywood-themed dance party. U.S. entrants could download selected Bollywood tracks from a microsite, www. Bollypoptv.com, upload a video of themselves dancing to the music solo or in groups, and then solicit friends to come to the site and vote for their entry. Grand prize: a trip to Mumbai, the film capital of India, and a cameo role dancing in a real Bollywood studio production.

When it came to the “who” and “where”, Verizon and Saavn together turned to the social-graph services of Unbound Technologies to identify the true influencers in the field of Bollywood online fandom and get them interested in not only entering the contest but spreading the buzz to their readers and social network friends.

Unbound started mapping social groups about eight years ago, when the only ad-hoc social networks around were the mobile calls flashing around the globe and the instant-message platforms, some of which could not even talk to other carriers.

When true social networks such as Facebook and MySpace came along, Unbound took the algorithms it had developed mapping those person-to-person connections in the early days and applied them to the new medium.

Those algorithms turned out to be very effective in tracking and mapping connections between friends to measure “social density.” But according to Unbound founder and CEO Chase McMichael, the platform proved equally effective at tracking friends of socnet brand pages to build “affinity maps.”

“Every time a MySpace brand page was set up, we would map all their friends,” McMichael says. “And Facebook has taken it to the next level, because there are something like 600,000 brands on there. We’ve indexed those and created affinity maps. So now using our algorithm, I can say that a given member has fanned this artist, this Web site, and these products and services.”

It was affinity mapping of that sort that let Unbound pinpoint the social net members who had already expressed interest in Bollywood movies and music. (The company has more than 220 million profiles in its database, McMichael says, but those include overseas social networks that were not relevant to the Bollypop campaign.)

In this case, Unbound was able to identify for Saavn and Verizon the universe of fans interested in both dance and the Bollywood entertainment genre, and then to identify the key influencers in that group. A customized widget helped users share news and content from the contest with their friends via their social profiles.

“We started a social outreach program to all the Bolly aficionados—people very connected to the content, the actors, the music and dance,” McMichael says. “What made this contest go so well is that we focused on getting the highest quality people in first. They set the tone, the mood. Some of these people had 30%-plus friends who were also connected to the same content, according to our affinity mapping. That’s how we knew that reaching these people first was going to produce the strongest result.”

That approach resulted in acquiring 475 UGC video submissions during the month of the contest, 65,000 user comments on the Bollypoptv.com Web site, 10,000 site registrations (required to vote for a favorite video), and 300,000 audience votes cast. Users created 60 blogs specifically devoted to news about the Bollypop competition .

The custom widget itself enabled 1.7 million views during the contest—which was so successful that Verizon extended the deadline a month, to last December.

And the winners, selected from among ten finalists by Indian film director Ken Ghosh, director of hits like “Fida” and “Ishq Vishk”: two young dancers from Los Angeles, Sapna Rohra and Shivani Thakkar.



They were flown to India last December and filmed as part of the dance crew for a sequence in “Yahoo”, a movie about a middle-class Indian boy and his struggle to become a music icon. The film is due for release in 2009.

Last year telco Verizon found itself confronted with a very specific marketing need: to find a way to publicize the broad menu of video-on-demand Indian movies available on its FiOS TV high-speed fiber optic TV service and on V CAST, its mobile video platform.

The carrier had already determined to use social network to reach these U.S. Bollywood fans—the “how” question solved. It just didn’t make sense to reach a mass audience with a product as niche as Bollywood cinema.

But that still left the problem of who to talk to, what kind of campaign to target them with, and where to find them in the digital thickets of Facebook, MySpace and the rest.

The “what” came about through a partnership with Saavn, a large digital distributor of South Asian entertainment content from music and videos to ringtones. In a partnership with Verizon, Saavn agreed to host and manage a Bollywood-themed dance party. U.S. entrants could download selected Bollywood tracks from a microsite, www. Bollypoptv.com, upload a video of themselves dancing to the music solo or in groups, and then solicit friends to come to the site and vote for their entry. Grand prize: a trip to Mumbai, the film capital of India, and a cameo role dancing in a real Bollywood studio production.

When it came to the “who” and “where”, Verizon and Saavn together turned to the social-graph services of Unbound Technologies to identify the true influencers in the field of Bollywood online fandom and get them interested in not only entering the contest but spreading the buzz to their readers and social network friends.

Unbound started mapping social groups about eight years ago, when the only ad-hoc social networks around were the mobile calls flashing around the globe and the instant-message platforms, some of which could not even talk to other carriers.

When true social networks such as Facebook and MySpace came along, Unbound took the algorithms it had developed mapping those person-to-person connections in the early days and applied them to the new medium.

Those algorithms turned out to be very effective in tracking and mapping connections between friends to measure “social density.” But according to Unbound founder and CEO Chase McMichael, the platform proved equally effective at tracking friends of socnet brand pages to build “affinity maps.”

“Every time a MySpace brand page was set up, we would map all their friends,” McMichael says. “And Facebook has taken it to the next level, because there are something like 600,000 brands on there. We’ve indexed those and created affinity maps. So now using our algorithm, I can say that a given member has fanned this artist, this Web site, and these products and services.”

It was affinity mapping of that sort that let Unbound pinpoint the social net members who had already expressed interest in Bollywood movies and music. (The company has more than 220 million profiles in its database, McMichael says, but those include overseas social networks that were not relevant to the Bollypop campaign.)

In this case, Unbound was able to identify for Saavn and Verizon the universe of fans interested in both dance and the Bollywood entertainment genre, and then to identify the key influencers in that group. A customized widget helped users share news and content from the contest with their friends via their social profiles.

“We started a social outreach program to all the Bolly aficionados—people very connected to the content, the actors, the music and dance,” McMichael says. “What made this contest go so well is that we focused on getting the highest quality people in first. They set the tone, the mood. Some of these people had 30%-plus friends who were also connected to the same content, according to our affinity mapping. That’s how we knew that reaching these people first was going to produce the strongest result.”

That approach resulted in acquiring 475 UGC video submissions during the month of the contest, 65,000 user comments on the Bollypoptv.com Web site, 10,000 site registrations (required to vote for a favorite video), and 300,000 audience votes cast. Users created 60 blogs specifically devoted to news about the Bollypop competition .

The custom widget itself enabled 1.7 million views during the contest—which was so successful that Verizon extended the deadline a month, to last December.

And the winners, selected from among ten finalists by Indian film director Ken Ghosh, director of hits like “Fida” and “Ishq Vishk”: two young dancers from Los Angeles, Sapna Rohra and Shivani Thakkar.



They were flown to India last December and filmed as part of the dance crew for a sequence in “Yahoo”, a movie about a middle-class Indian boy and his struggle to become a music icon. The film is due for release in 2009.