Using our “community space” platform, RUSIC, we built a social photo sharing competition for the Go Ape summer campaign. Will from Go Ape explains it more succinctly than I…
In Spring 2011, we challenged Simple Web with the task to come up with a mechanic that would wrap up an inviting offer in something that was cost effective, on brand and allowed anyone to “share their adventures”. Our ethos is to encourage people to live life more adventurously so when Simple Web presented the Rusic platform as an ideal way to get people to share imagery it seemed to tick all the boxes – slick photo uploading, automated sharing, self moderating and adaptable. Once launched, word spread and the interaction was fast to pick up and sustained throughout the life of the campaign. Results spoke for themselves in eight weeks the campaign generated close to 10,000 new customers in the trees!
Will Blair – Go Ape Head of Marketing.
What?
The basic premise of the campaign allowed users to upload a photo of themselves being adventurous… They were then encouraged to share their page (with photo and bio) with their friends and family to gain votes and comments. The person with the most votes became the winner. A pool of prizes from sponsor companies was made available for the winners.
Every entrant and voter was rewarded with a voucher on completion of their task, i.e. entering the contest or voting for a photo.
How?
The campaign was built in days using the RUSIC social contest platform (created by Simpleweb). This allowed us to build a campaign very quickly using Facebook and Twitter to allow quick registration and social sharing. Users simply click an icon to interact with the campaign and then they are free to enter, vote or comment freely on the campaign. As users’ are using their “real” online persona, moderation is kept at a minimum as they were accountable for their actions directly as their avatars and links to their social profiles were displayed.
The Result
The results were way better than we expected. Within the four week campaign there were over 600 entries, 2,000 comments and 10,000 votes and a huge engagement rate. Some entrants generated over 2,000 page views, with the “most popular” entrant receiving over 800 votes. This demonstrates a very powerful aspect of social competitions; the brand influencer or the social evangelist, is a very powerful force that can be harnessed for very cost effective online peer to peer marketing.
Based on the high engagement rate we shouldn’t have been surprised at the voucher redemption rate. But we were. Wow. Over £160,000 worth of bookings were generated via the vouchers distributed through the competition. That’s over 60% conversion rate from the campaign.
When we analysed the actual web stats in comparison to the contest stats the correlation became even more interesting. The actual booking conversion rate on the main Go Ape website also increased, and while there’s not enough data to take this any further, optimistic speculation on the two sets of stats is easy.
Once the contest had ended, Go Ape were so happy with the result that after the results had been announced the contest was re-opened to allow users to gain more vouchers and prizes by creating captions for ten of the best photo’s. This ongoing, we’ll report back on this…
