The Blog - Archive for Case studies

1 Apr 2012

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We’re giving away 5 free websites

by Mark P.

We’ll build you a “support based application” to compliment your existing website. We’ll design it, set it up and host it for you. All you need to do is tell your customers!

Why are we offering these for free? Well, we want to build up some great case studies demonstrating social interaction and “customer listening”. We’ve got five to give away and we’ll let you know by the middle of April if you’re eligible.

There are two types of support applications that we’re offering to build for you:

Customer Voice

Allow your customers to ask questions, suggest ideas and discuss other peoples ideas. Your customers sign in quickly with Facebook or Twitter and can then add a new idea, question, comment or vote up somebody else’s idea or question. View by most recent, popular or just your submissions.

Great for product discussion, quick customer feedback, FAQ’s, etc.

Customer Forum

A traditional looking customer forum deeply integrated with Facebook and Twitter. You and your customers can start discussions about specific topics quickly and with just a few clicks. Presented simply for non technical users making it as easy as possible for you and them to interact around specific topics.

Great for in-depth discussion about any topic.

Both products offer tight integration with Facebook and Twitter, a design that fits your current website and integration with your current mailing system.

[If you can see the form below please try this link instead]

20 Oct 2011

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10,000 new customers in the trees

by Mark P.

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…

19 Nov 2010

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CLIC24 celebrate their anniversary with a new Neighbourhood

by Sarah Bale

A few weeks ago we met up with Neil Wilkins, MD of Viper Marketing & Communications Group to talk about our latest offering, Neighbourhood.

Almost immediately Neil had a client who he thought could benefit from their own Neighbourhood, CLIC24. CLIC24 is Europe’s only charity 24 hour mountain bike event, and for nearly 10 years now they have supported children with cancer and leukaemia through the charity CLIC Sargent.

We got to work straight away and here we are a few weeks later with CLIC24′s brand new Neighbourhood. We caught up with Neil to get his thoughts on the new Neighbourhood…. (Also see Viper’s own case study)

Simpleweb: What was CLIC24′s initial aim?

Neil: Well this was twofold really. The old traditional site acted as an information point but it was too much like a noticeboard with no real engagement and no opportunity for potential participants to put their stamp on events.

CLIC24 wanted to make sure that people felt a part of the event with an inclusive website that reflected the idea of community. In this way it was hoped that the website would allow participants to be a part of what the event becomes.

Simpleweb: What initially interested you in Neighbourhood?

Neil: I like to practice what I preach. You cannot expect potential customers to come to you, you have to find out where they are, you have to be in their space (Facebook, Twitter etc) to capture and be involved in discussions. There has been a shift in power to the end user and Neighbourhood draws all of this together.

Simpleweb: What do you think of the end result?

Neil: The initial responses I have had have all been that it is clean, simple, navigation is easy – well, you do not even have to navigate because everything you need is in one place! There is no lengthy detail, it does what it says.

Literally within minutes of it being online I had Facebook comments from people saying how much they “love the interactivity” of the CLIC24 Neighbourhood. I have had 100% positive feedback from everyone about it regarding the layout, structure, everything.

Simpleweb: Would you recommend Neighbourhood to others?

Neil: Totally, absolutely. I think especially for charities it is so relevant because of the way it enables a charity to engage with people rather than assuming people will come to them. It is very much on end user terms. I think it would be great for every charity and sponsor. Definitely yes, it is absolutely superb.

To read Viper’s own CLIC24 Case study click here .

17 Sep 2010

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New Neighbourhood for Oxjam

by Sarah Bale

Oxjam is a music festival run throughout October all across the UK. It’s organised by people who know and love their local music scene, and it’s all in aid of Oxfam. We, at Simpleweb, have been working with the Oxjam team to create their very own Neighbourhood for the up and coming October music festival in Bristol. With the help of Ian from www.Brokenlogo.co.uk who designed the header/footer and background image, we were able to integrate Google Maps, Facebook and Twitter to create a website for Oxjam that pulls together all their social media tools into one place and enables them to interact more efficiently with their audience.

What do Oxjam think about it?

“In this modern age of constant bombardment of information, posts, bulletins & message on websites and social media, Oxjambristol.com is precise, concise & laid out to achieve everything we wanted for a seven or eight page site into just the one page. With it linked to facebook & twitter, it allows us to intertwine our social media updates with our own site allowing to input information once without the need to be a trained web designer.

The site looks great with the googlemap being a fantastic centre piece, allowing us to have line ups & running times to be interactive rather than lists on a different page.

All the Oxjam team think it looks great & the concept of having all the vital information on one page makes us realise how much ‘filler’ most websites have. In streaming back what is actually needed, it makes the information more accessible with it easier to view, defined clearer into boxes rather than pages & the lack of need to go searching for throughout the site.”

(Ian Pook, Broken Logo)

Would you like your own Neighbourhood? Could you benefit from a custom built, easy to use socially connected website? Contact us for more information!

3 Sep 2010

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Go Trax site for Go Ape

by Mark P.

Recently GoApe asked us to create a website for their newest awesome forest adventure, Go Trax. Building on top of our newest service Neighbourhood, we came up with a very simple, elegant and effective solution.

“We were delighted with the quick turnaround of the project and the value for money offered by the team.”

Go Trax is off road Segways at great speeds in forests. Uber fun.

GoApe wanted to a way to “mash up” their social media into one accessible website that offered interactivity, sharing and immediate gratification. So we came up with www.go-trax.co.uk

We’ve used video to instantly immerse the visitor into the experience, squashing any skepticism about the fun to be had. Closely following the video are the newsletter sign up, sharing and where you can do it. The Google map allows us to add more venues at a later date without having to add any new pages, keeping the page concise and to the point.

As GoApe are rocking along with their social media strategy, it’s important for them to demonstrate this and give their users a single place where they can find out everything to do with Go Trax.

To this end we’ve built an aggregated feed of RSS from their blog, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr. When a user clicks any of the media it appears nicely on the page within a “lightbox”, also keeping the user on the page. When the Facebook fan page comes online that will be plugged in as well offering everything in one place.

This method of aggregating all of the Go Trax content into one place allows GoApe to use the same tools as their users to push out content and centralise this into a single point of entry. Some users will prefer Twitter to Facebook, some Flickr to Facebook photo’s. With this solution every potential customer is catered for.

Other elements of the site include a Facebook comment box allowing users to leave comments that get posted to the page and also to their Facebook profile, ensuring social propagation and community on the site itself.

Here’s what Emma from GoApe had to say about working with us:

We asked Simpleweb to create a website for us for a new product and it’s launch: Go Trax. We were delighted with the quick turnaround of the project and the value for money offered by the team.

Their proactive approach meant we were able to benefit from their knowledge of the latest technological and online developments.

They seamlessly integrated with our existing technical partners – including our email service provider and booking engine and I am confident that the site will continue to deliver positive results for us.

The team understand our brands well (are also fun to work with) and I look forward to working together on future projects.