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…

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 .

What do Oxjam think about it?

“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.

“It does not have a traditional CRM system look and feel (white screen, grey boxes, spreadsheets of history). It’s very clean, clear, simple, easy to use, easy to find your way around the screen.”

“I mean what I say on my website, I really think it is the best product around of its kind.”

Click here to read the full interview.

The Results!

Thursday 29th April

• People were 50% more likely to be sarcastic about David Cameron and Gordon Brown than Nick Clegg.
• Overall positive sentiment as a percentage was 3x higher for Nick Clegg and David Cameron than for Gordon Brown.
• Overall disappointment as a percentage was 3x higher for Gordon Brown than Nick Clegg.
• Overall disappointment as a percentage was 2x higher for David Cameron than Nick Clegg.
• Nick Clegg had only 64% of the engagement levels that Gordon Brown and David Cameron had.

Tuesday 4th May

• People are being 72% more sarcastic about Nick Clegg than last week, David Cameron stayed the same, Gordon Brown 4% less sarcasm.
• Gordon Brown’s positive sentiment increased 3x putting him just above David Cameron and just below Nick Clegg (positive sentiment as a percentage of sample blogs 12%:11%:13% respectively).
• Overall disappointment as a percentage decreased 10% for Gordon Brown and increased 40% for Nick Clegg.
• Overall disappointment as a percentage is now only 5% higher for Gordon Brown than David Cameron
• Nick Clegg’s engagement has increased by 19%, 26% less than Gordon Brown and 14% less than David Cameron.
• There was a 16% increase in opinions on Gordon Brown (majority of which is increase in positive sentiment)

I am sure you will agree that there is a lot to be taken from these statistics, not just generally about how sarcastic we are as a nation (!) but also specifics. We found it very interesting for example, how little Nick Clegg was talked about comparatively. Over the past week Gordon Brown has had double the amount of results across all micro blogs compared to Nick Clegg! And more of Nick Clegg’s are factual and therefore not opinion based. So whilst it may appear that there is less disappointment and more positivity – is this just because less people are interested?

Pretty Pictures

As well as the pie charts, all the data is presented in a graph format so you can see the date and amount of blogs for each candidate. Here we can compare David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s graphs below to see not only what the sentiment is for a specified number of blogs, but also the date of the blogs enabling us to see if things changed on a specific date, or if there are any trends.  This is especially interesting to watch after public interviews or the TV debates to see how opinions have been influenced, and likewise could be used to watch changing sentiment after a product launch or press release.

disappointment sarcasm positivity factual

disappointment sarcasm positivity factual

Notice in Gordon Brown’s graph how positive sentiment has increased crossing with disappointment as it decreases after his speech:

disappointment sarcasm positivity factual

How we have achieved this

We have achieved this using our new application called Sententia, which enables you to filter any news, blogs and micro blogs for specific key words, for example “Gordon Brown” might be one search, or you can be more specific and have “Gordon Brown + economy”, whatever you want.  All this information is then fed back to you as a “game”, so that you are presented with individual blogs or articles and you then decide what you feel the sentiment is of that specific comment from a list of options that you have chosen.  You may want to measure positive vs. negative, humorous vs. serious, skeptical vs. converted, the skies the limit!

Playing the game

This is how you play the game, you read the comment (and click onto the link if you need to read more about it to determine the sentiment) and then click on the sentiment you believe this blog displays.  This result will automatically be displayed on the graph and pie chart and you will be given another comment to mark. You can view reports at any point in time and the data is pulled through randomly to enable you to do a fair sample without having to complete all of the results.

What’s the benefit?

The concept behind this application is that the english language can be hard to interpret due to our use of sarcasm, irony and humour. Therefore to give the fairest set of results possible and to show you results specific to your needs, this application requires human input.  By doing this it also enables you to search for any specifics you want because you are in control of the searches and the interpretations.

You can have a number of campaigns running in line with each other at once as well. For example, as well as having campaigns on the three candidates, we have been running campaigns specifically about some of their policies to see how people feel about them and about their policies separately.  You could use this feature to run campaigns about your products and about your competitors, or your online store compared to your shop, anything you want.

Conclusion

The information is out there, we believe the important step is interpretation and how this information can be used in the best possible way to fulfil all possible requirements. Whatever you want to measure online, Sententia enables you to be in control of what, who, how, and when – all from a game inspired by the Wii!

The site is intended to be part of an online campaign to encourage community and stimulate content creation around the Brabantia brand. Various aspects of the companies social media activities needed to be incorporated on a tight budget and timeline.

Using WordPress as the blogging platform of choice we created a design based on the Brabantia brand. We wanted to use lots of white space with obvious calls to action and focus on the content.

The sidebar actions are to ensure that should a visitor have got to the blog by mistake and are looking for support or specific product information they can move on quickly.

Points of interest:

• Twitter Feed
• Social Media sharing of all pages
• Feedburner for easy RSS subscription
• Large obvious social media buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
• Google analytics with extended event tracking
• retractable header for frequent visitors
• An easy to update header for seasonal features

We’re very pleased with the final site. Lawson Clarke and the most excellent Sally Hems are doing a great job of engaging the visitors.

When analysing the results it was the first time that I could truly see what was happening in real-time, allowing an insight that has eluded me from the previous campaigns that I’ve done.

The Four Pillars

Being the simple kind of person that I am, I distilled the results down into four basic building blocks:

A well balanced campaign uses all of The Four Pillars

If a campaign is deficient in one of these key areas then at least one of the other pillars must compensate for it. We’ll discuss this in a later post.

I’ll attempt to briefly examine each pillar with an example from the Fat Face competition and another (mobile) campaign I did in 2003 for Dizzee Rascal while at the now defunct YRmedia.

Emotional content

You need to understand your audience. Who are you communicating with and why? Once you know this you can create an emotional hook…

Fat Face: Winning a VW Campervan. Who doesn’t want a sparkling campervan? A hugely desirable item for many different generations of people. Astutely Fat Face knew who they wanted to attract and what would pull their strings. By offering up a campervan as a prize they tuned into their target demographic with a one off uber prize.

Dizzee Rascal: We gave away ringtones. Beggars knew their demographic were teenagers with little or no money so they needed something tangible and easily attainable. The ringtone was free and offered in all formats, no matter how good or bad your phone was it would work – to some degree.

Other examples to discuss include: Burger King’s Facebook friend culling, beext’s Haiti help.

The Fan Base

Some campaigns begin well. There’s already a large number of “fans” that support the centre of the campaign, whether it be a product, artist or brand. Fans can be created via traditional advertising but we have to decide if this is necessary based on the other pillars…

Fat Face: Fat Face already had a good sized mailing list and a lot of loyal customers. Their customers are quite amazing in their dedication to the brand.

Dizzee Rascal: Dizzee Rascal was up for the Mercury Music prize and was getting a lot of music press. With Beggars excellent team already creating awareness, the fan base while small, was vocal and loyal.

The Mechanic

How does the actual online system work? Is it a microsite, Facebook app, Twitter retweet campaign? Do they sign up, sign in, share their address, share with their mates? What is it that we are trying to achieve?

We need to know the primary business objective and then carefully craft a way to make that happen. If we plan it right we will see the benefits of secondary and tertiary objectives being met.

Fat Face: We built a very simple prize draw for Fat Face. A user enters the draw. They then get their own page that they’re encouraged to share with their friends through Facebook, Twitter and Email. Every one of their friends entering the draw gives the entrant three more entries into the competition. The entrant feels like they were “getting somewhere” the more they shared, the more they shared, the more they exposed the brand to new people (a secondary objective) and the more data was captured when new people entered the draw (primary objective).

Dizzee Rascal: For Dizzee’s campaign it was even simpler. We developed a way for users to enter their details into a website in exchange for a free ringtone (Fix up look sharp) sent directly to their mobile. Users were only allowed to get one ringtone to restrict abuse. We used to call this the “viral bribe” where both parties were happy with the result of their transaction and then told others. The primary objective of building a highly targeted database of fans was achieved as well as creating a feeling of giving back to the community, brand awareness (I can’t tell you how many times I heard that ringtone in public) and website traffic.

Engagement

This is the least tangible of the pillars. You could argue that the other pillars combined constitute the “engagement rating”. Personally I think it can have a pillar of its own…

How does a customer/user/reader/client engage with the campaign? The mechanic facilitates the engagement. We’ve somehow got somebody to “engage” with us, now what? We know what we want them to do, but how do we actually get them to do that? This is where your psychologists and old school advertisers come into their own. Imagery, copy, branding, usability, anything that appears to be subjective can all be put at the engagement pillar.

Fat Face: A campervan, cool people, desirability and the use of personal recommendation combined to create a compelling engagement that even got people to re-word the messages that were Facebooked or Tweeted by the “mechanic”.

The buy-in by the user was so high that they began to modify the message to target their friends. We would never have known this if we were not monitoring Twitter and Friendfeed. A more powerful engagement process I am yet to see and we will definitely explore it further.

Dizzee Rascal: Dizzee’s was a whole different story. Kids were getting something for free AND cool. Most truetones at the time were £4.50 when the actual cost was very low. Fans felt like they were getting something of true value for nothing… All they had to do was give their mobile number, email address, musical taste, etc… Why would they share it “illegally” when they could go and get it easily and for free from the website?

Round things roll off uneven tables…

As you can see in the Fat Face and Dizzee Rascal examples given, these two campaigns have roughly an equal share of the pillars. If just one of the pillars is disproportionately deficient then the others need to make up the “height”.

Three Strong Pillars - needs to compensate...

For example if you have a small initial fan base you will need a stronger mechanism, higher emotional content and a deeper engagement level. Or, one super boost in one area, such as a really strong emotional pull such as beext.org and the Haiti people matching service.

Thanks for reading this far, I’m not sure how this post ended up being this long. I’ll find a couple of imbalanced campaigns to run through for another post.

To say we were pleased with the result is an understatement.

When Fat Face told us that they wanted to give away a VW Campervan we knew that we had to come up with something awesome to make sure that as many people as possible would get a chance to win it.

The objective was to increase the size of the mailing list, the offline mailing list and as a secondary objective, to build brand awareness.

We came up with a very simple online mechanism. Basically a prize draw – with a twist.

The landing page (click to view larger)

A user visited the site that we created, entered their details and they were then given their own page to share with their friends. Every friend that entered the competition gave the user three more chances to win.

We then encouraged the user to share their page in as many places as possible with Twitter, Facebook, email sharing and various social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Stumbleupon and Google Bookmarks.

The sharing page (click to view larger)

The Quote…

Here’s a full quote from Alison Shears, direct marketing manager at Fat Face,

“To increase awareness of the competition we wanted to implement the Media Genius’ competition application.  The ease of sharing information via social networks combined with the referral mechanic really drove the viral element of this – making it the biggest in Fat Face history.

The competition was great for brand awareness – the number of people interacting online was incredible and the resulting database almost ten times larger because of this.  Data capture enabled us to see the demographics of those entering, generating useful information for future marketing.  It was also great to see the volume of people who opted in for Fat Face information.  Obviously the incentive was well aligned with our brand!

It was amazing watching the buzz our campaign generated across social networks like Twitter and Facebook.  It’s easy to use with everything in one place making it simple to pull out all the information you need to evaluate campaigns.”

Eyeballs everywhere

Interestingly we noticed that even though email was used over three times as much for sharing; Facebook by far sent the most traffic. The average share ratio on Facebook is one to one hundred and fifty, whereas email is only one to one. That’s a lot of pairs of eyes looking at the brand and a lot of potential people that we can get to engage with it. Twitter has an even higher ratio but still has nowhere near the momentum of Facebook in everyday culture.

Evangelists replace street teams

Once the users were engaged, we were amazed at the lengths some of them would go to market their page. One enterprising entrant had over two thousand entries, this person had become an evangelist of great value to the Fat Face brand. Not so long ago we’d have paid a lot of money to so called “street teams” to do this for us, basically hiring key influencers and enabling brute force awareness creation in blogs and forums…

Peer to peer marketing

An unexpected, yet fascinating and incredibly powerful engagement observation was the way the entrants would modify the message that they were sending to their friends. The default message “Check out the Fat Face – WIN a classic VW camper at winacamper.fatface.com” started to become targeted with language that their peers would respond to. Entrants were starting to become a peer to peer marketing machine, tailoring the message for their own purpose. This totally blew us away and we will being exploring this in further campaigns…

Increasing the Fan Base

Every user that opted in had their details directly imported into Fat Face’s mailing list manager via its API. I can’t tell you the numbers, but, I can tell you that they already had a good sized list and it was increased by over one thousand percent… The take up for receiving the “snail mail” catalogue was also astounding, this is as much a testament to Fat Face’s very loyal initial fanbase.

This campaign used Simpleweb’s Media Genius set of tools for social monitoring and the actual prize draw application itself. Please contact us to see if we can help you.