Mike Sikorski, the CEO of Huggity Ltd.

Enterprise Ireland supported start-up Huggity Ltd. employs 12 people in the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin. Established in 2011, Huggity offers an innovative marketing tool to companies that take high-resolution photographs at large events and invites attendees to tag themselves in the photos. Mike Sikorski, the CEO tells us about the idea behind the business:

“The objective behind Huggity is to combine our photography, technology, creative and marketing skills with our love of sport and music to create a positive experience for fans and a powerful engagement tool for brands, venues, teams and artists through fan engagement tools.

Our core product is FanPic which is a giant 360º panoramic, multibillion pixel crowd image taken at a game or event. Once a FanPic is posted online, users can zoom into a crowd photo to find themselves and their friends. They can then share a branded message with friends and family on Facebook, Twitter or email through the “tagging” feature.

Most of the tools available to marketers and sponsors are designed to work either before or during an event. Once the event is finished, the focus of the fans is directed to another event. Huggity changes this by engaging users beyond the event with its content and increasing the length and return of the brand exposure related to the event. 
We are also using the fact that photos have the highest rate of engagement on social media platforms and fans are excited to have the chance to immortalise their image in the stadium or venue.

Most important for brands is that the impressions, tweets, likes and shares that FanPic creates are user generated. These stories are guaranteed to appear on the taggers news feed and timeline. The shares created are genuine fan engagement and not paid for advertising.

Huggity helps brands develop their online sponsorship inventory increasing the attractiveness of their sponsorship proposition.

All Huggity products are measurable so our clients can easily calculate their ROI. We also ensure that there are several means of data capture built into each product so that sponsors can build an accurate profile of their audience.

http://www.huggity.com