Smart Decision: My Punchbowl Uses Facebook App to Extend Brand, Not Plan Parties

Online event organizing companies like eVite and My Punchbowl face a major threat as Facebook gains more popularity. The Facebook events applicaton — which comes standard on all new Facebook accounts — allows users to organize events and invite people from inside Facebook. All of a sudden, other event planning sites seem extraneous.

Rather than attempting to compete with Facebook’s pre-installed app, My Punchbowl has come to the table with a fun application that lets friends interact with one another while reinforcing the central theme of their brand: parties.

This is a smart move. Facebook users aren’t really looking for another application to manage their events within Facebook. Creating an event management application would have been redundant and mostly a waste of time.

Instead, the folks at My Punchbowl used the application as a way to extend their brand inside Facebook and remind people that when it comes to planning parties, it’s good to go with a site that specializes.

These brand-extending widgets are really the future of marketing. Sure, pre-existing online services like Slide, iLike and Pandora stand to make tremendous gains in customer base from building Faceobok applications. But so do companies without a Web-based offering of their own. By creating an application that adds value to people’s lives and uses a soft-sell model to reinforce the brand, you’ll reach people more cheaply and deeply than you would by spending millions on banner ads.

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