Correction: The original headline read, “Facebook Annexes Momentus Media, Marketing Magicians & Makers Of 8-Bit Avatars.” Upon publishing the article, a Facebook PR rep, Alex Kirschner, wrote to clarify that Facebook is not in fact acquiring Momentus Media but only hiring Chris Turitzin. In an email, Kirschner explained, “Momentus Media will continue as its own operation. Chris will join the growth and engagement team at Facebook.” So now you can look forward to catch viral ads from both Facebook and Momentus Media – a twofer! Accordingly, corrections were made to article where needed.
Now that Facebook is the current leader in online ad revenue, the company is likely to not relinquish that honor so easily. Perhaps to curtail any future slow-down of revenue growth, the social networking company has acquired social marketing shaman Chris Turitzin of Momentus Media. Really, this is one of those circle-of-life moments that happens every now and then since Momentus Media was born from the Facebook fund in 2009.
Momentus explained the deliberation and Turitzin’s eventual decision to jump aboard the USS Facebook today in a blog post:
Facebook approached Momentus a couple of months back because members of the growth and engagement team were impressed by the way we designed and built social applications. Our apps have been installed by more than 100 million people and we’ve had the opportunity of working with some great brands.
After months of discussion with Facebook and internally, we decided we wanted to join Facebook in some way. The opportunity of applying all of our learnings to a product of such scale was hard to pass up. Also important to us was being able to continue growing Momentus. The set-up we came to was that Carina, my co-founder, would lead the Momentus team in building awesome social apps, and I (Chris) would move to Facebook to help lead growth projects.
This means Momentus clients will still be able to release chart-topping social apps, and I will be able to apply everything I have learned at Momentus working at Facebook.
The science behind sharing is in its infancy. With this new opportunity, we push forward in our mission to help define how it all works.
One of Momentus Media’s more recent conjurings of success that used a mix of viral marketing and Facebook apps was their highly successful collaboration with Black Eyed Peas last year. The app, which generated heaps of traffic to Black Eyed Peas’ fan page, allowed Facebookers to generate an 8-bit avatar that they could share with friends on Facebook. And visit the Facebook page for Black Eyed Peas (which was the point).
Whatever the result of this business decision may be, at least Facebook’s hiring of Turitzin should fulfill the Net Cool Quotient for the fiscal quarter.
