The company Wislr has recently employed a variety of new marketing techniques in an effort to promote its app, also called Wislr, to the school’s student body.

The app, launched in October of 2013, was created with the intention of building an invite-only “private mobile network for high school students to connect with classmates and schoolmates”, according to its Facebook page description. The app allows students to create and answer their classmates’ polls about their interests. At Los Altos, Wislr has partnered with Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), with several members of FBLA serving as interns for the company. Interns help promote the app to the school’s student body and serve as liaisons, relaying and giving feedback about the app. The FBLA-Wislr intern team consists of freshman Emiley Kim, juniors Michelle Deng and Michele Tom and senior Tiffany Wu.

As the first part of its Valentine’s Day campaign, Wislr hosted a “secret” lunch on a bus with the Wislr logo parked across from the school off of Almond Avenue from 12 p.m. to 12:45 p.m. A Facebook Event page was created for the lunch several days prior to the event and around 100 students from the school were invited. The 20 attendees that showed up on the day of the luncheon were treated to free Pizza My Heart pizza and tested a new feature of the app, which allows users to send “hearts” representative of different qualities to other users of the Wislr app as well as those who hadn’t yet signed up for the app. Examples of these “hearts” include “Sassy”, “Flame”, “So Fine”, “HMU”, “Wink”, “Swole”, “Brainy”, “Playa Playa” and “BAE”.

“It was basically an experiment to get a large number of people online to see how the app would work,” junior intern Mehr Singh said.

The event was also held with publicity in mind.

“Basically, it was meant to spread the word about Wislr’s app around campus,” junior intern Michele Tom said.

Wislr supplemented its luncheon with promotional gift-card giveaways to further incentivize students to use its application: the highest giver and receiver of hearts at the end of the week on Valentine’s Day were given gift cards. A Valentine’s Day leaderboard for students who received the most hearts was created for students to see where they stood amongst their peers: http://wislrapp.com/leaderboard/lahs/100

Hearts and messages were also written in chalk on parking spaces in the school’s main parking lot and the sidewalks at the front of the school. The first three students who parked atop chalk hearts and sent photographic evidence of it to Wislr also received gift cards. Some messages written along the sidewalks at the front of the school included “ARE YOU BRAINY?”, “#WISLR” and “ARE YOU SASSY?”, a reference to the application’s new heart-sending feature.

Wislr’s Valentine’s Day campaign wasn’t its first. Wislr also held a “Hallowislr” campaign in October and a “Collegeweek” campaign in November.

Wislr followed up its Valentine’s Day campaign with a tour for students from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. the following Monday, February 17.