The Blog - Archive for Case studies

27 Aug 2010

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ContactZilla Client Interview

by Sarah Bale

We recently launched ContactZilla, an easy to use Contact Management system, and we thought it was time to get some feedback. The good, the bad and the ugly, we wanted it all! And who better to help us on our journey for continuous improvement than Nigel Legg, social media and social CRM consultant.

“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.

5 May 2010

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Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit…or is it?

by Sarah Bale

For a week now we have been listening to the chatter on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, by people discussing the three election candidates. With over 30,000 results we have analysed a random sample of this data (1350) for 2 different dates. Specifically, we wanted to find out the sentiment of the chatter, what people really think about the candidates, so we could start comparing. We decided the best, and most interesting, sentiments to measure would be disappointment, sarcasm, positivity and factual

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

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!

25 Apr 2010

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New Blog for Brabantia

by Mark P.

Recently the Brabantia Life blog went live. We were asked by Lawson Clarke to create a stylish SEO friendly blog for the “solid household products company”.

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.

26 Feb 2010

3 Comments

The Four Pillars of a successful online campaign – Social or otherwise…

by Mark P.

In the Autumn of 2009 Simpleweb did an online marketing campaign for Fat Face (the high street retailer). It was their most successful campaign ever, increasing their list by 1000% and the amount of “eyeballs” involved rivaled a TV ad. The concept was very simple – there’s a case study elsewhere on our site that will give you plenty more details.

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.

24 Feb 2010

5 Comments

Fat Face, Campervans and business objectives

by Mark P.

“…the number of people interacting online was incredible and the resulting database almost ten times larger because of this…” – Ali Shears, Direct Marketing Manager at Fat Face.

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.