I’ve said it a million times: the best way to make money with Facebook applications is through branded partnerships. Jeremiah Owyang has posted a case study about Sony using the Vampires application for generating buzz about their movie 30 days and 30 nights. The statistics are impressive yet not surprising considering the Vampires application is one of the top 30 applications on the platform.

Sony pictures was looking to have at least 10,000 users register for their sweepstakes in which a 4 wheel ATV was given out and $1500. The application ended up registering almost 60,000 users. This was way more than they expected to register and as a result the client was happy. So what are the suggestions that Jeremiah came up with after speaking with Rock You? Jeremiah came up with the following three things that worked:

1. Fishing where the fish are: Sony figured out where the already existing community was (remember to fish where the fish are) and rather than trying to rebuild something completely by scratch, they leveraged an existing successful application.
2. Rely on specialists for new arenas: In my many briefings with vendors and clients, specialized firms often provide something a general interactive firm or corporate web marketing team can’t. They have experience, know their area, and in this case, they knew to rely on someone that already knew Facebook (such as Social Interactive.
3. Compliment the existing user experience: Sony didn’t beat the 3 million existing users with heavy advertising (and I’m sure RockYou wouldn’t have let them) over the head, instead offered value by giving away prizes, and tied in a movie that already existed.

The main conclusion of Jeremiah’s post was that this individual campaign was highly successful and leveraging social applications for branding can be extremely effective. For Facebook application developers, you should be specifically targeting brands and looking for opportunities to forge new relationships. Do you have any examples of other applications that have used this tactic?