The Blog - Archive for campaigns

20 Oct 2011
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10,000 new customers in the trees

by Mark P. Filed under: Case studies

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…

13 Oct 2011
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Three simple questions for AB testing

by Mark P. Filed under: Knowledge

Here’s a super quick way to explain content testing (AB testing). I’ll get flamed for the brevity of this but in essence this is all there is to it and makes it simple to explain.

The three questions I need answers to before I set up a test are:

  1. WHAT to test?
  2. WHAT to try?
  3. WHAT to measure?

No matter how complex (or not) a test is, these three steps apply.

Example:

What to test

The copy within an “add to cart” button on a specific product page. It currently says “Buy now”

What to try

I’d like to try two different copy variations:

  • “Add to cart”
  • “Add to basket”

These variations could also be the size of the button, the background colour of the button, or combinations of all of these.

What to measure

  • button clicks – how many users have clicked the button?
  • general page engagement – has there been an effect on the rest of the page?

You could test for fluctuations in surrounding content as well, such as size drop downs, etc. Have they been clicked more or less? Without testing it’s hard to know what the impact of certain changes will be.

There’s a lot more testing than this for sure. One of the biggest questions is “how long should the tests run?” and to be honest there’s no hard and fast rule for this. I’d welcome more feedback on this as everyone has a different opinion.

31 Jul 2011
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A little monkey love

by Mark P. Filed under: Products

We all like cakes. We all like a bit of love. So when a mysterious box arrived at the office on Friday from a client with the most beautiful cup cakes in, we were super chuffed.

The sparkly cakes from the lovely folk at Go Ape were to thank us for delivering their summer campaign with such brevity and fabulousness!

We built the social competition using the pro version of our new Rusic.com product, enabling us to build the competition in days instead of weeks (or months). We think it’s pretty awesome and after only a few days it’s already got some amazing stories going on.

Craziness by Go Ape, design by Refreshed, social and tech by Simpleweb, and of course the CAKES by Rachaels Kitchen. Awesome.

28 Jul 2011
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Rusic adds moderation, UI tweaks and Webhooks

by Mark P. Filed under: Products

We’ve just put live a few sweet little updates to Rusic.com.

We’ve improved the “discuss” button from the previous orange link. It’s only a little change but the improvement is big. It’s much more obvious now what is expected of the user.

We also improved the footer and more importantly improved stability. You also no longer need to log out to view the buckets on the home page. Expect a big update in this area soon…

The PRO version (coming soon) is awesome

Check out the lovely new moderation area for the yet to be publicly released PRO version. It enables quick moderation of comments and ideas within a bucket. Nothing is deleted it’s just deactivated.

There’s also a new webhook system for firing events to external services, meaning integration with mailing providers is pretty straight forward amongst many other cool things.

Also GoApe is the latest PRO user for their summer campaign as you can see Rusic is fully skinnable… We’ll save that for another post.

8 Oct 2010
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This weeks Best Viral Ads 8th October

by Sarah Bale Filed under: Community

On a weekly basis most of us will see a large number of ads and campaigns through Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, email, etc that we then share with our friends – harnessing the viral effect. Sometimes these will be advertising genius, other times they will require crisis management, a lot of the time they will quite simply just be hilarious. At Simpleweb, we have decided to compile a list of our 5 top Viral ads of the week to share with you.

In no particular order…

1. Tippex

I think I could be one of the last to see this one as I only heard about it this week at a talk I went to by Will King, CEO of King of Shaves. This is an absolutely brilliant example of how a company, Tippex, have made a pretty boring, declining product into a fantastic advertising campaign.  Last time I checked the channel had had over 23 million views! If you look at all the comments as well you can see some of the hilarious things that people have typed in – Tippex seem to have thought of everything!

2. Cebu pacific

I absolutely love this and actually came across it in a news article. Whether it is a PR stunt or passenger video gone viral, to be honest, I think it is great either way! In the last 6 days it has had over 7 million hits!  That is 7 million hits for an airline most of us had probably never even heard of before, but will not easily forget – genius!

3. Sony Ericsson

As a part of the launch campaign for the new Xperia™ X10, Sony Ericsson have created a sequence of videos all entitled “Product Testing Institute.” The videos comically film models, seniors, glam rockers, toddlers, surfers and guidos comparing various SMART phones to see which one they think is the “Smartest”.

4. 10:10 How to cut carbon emissions

We have chosen this one because of the controversy it has caused across the media – resulting in it being removed.  The short film entitled, ‘No Pressure’ and directed by Richard Curtis, was apparently an attempt to “bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst make people laugh” - the problem being that not too many people were laughing (read the full apology from 10:10 here).  Whatever your personal opinion of it (funny or not), it is a great example of how quickly and easily an audience can make their opinion heard by the masses.

5. Subaru

This ad makes fun of the four-door sedan crowd, in a highly humorous way, in an aim to set their new Legacy apart from the rest… very clever advertising!

So there you have it, our top 5 viral ads for this week!  What are your’s?