The Blog - Archive for rusic

1 Apr 2012
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We’re giving away 5 free websites

by Mark P. Filed under: Case studies,Community,Company

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]

15 Jan 2012
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CHAMPION-ENTER-PAGE

The First Rusic Hack Day was amazing

by Mark P. Filed under: Community,Products

Yesterday was the first Rusic Hackday. It was awesome. Totally awesome. The skills that we saw blew our minds, with themes being created that we did even think were possible.

The £250 was split up between the designers as “Best use of Rusic”, “Best Design” and “Closest to complete”… Eveybody that attended voted, and by the end of the day there were a few friends of Rusic making it a little more interesting in the voting process (kindly sponsored IamKeir Inc.). Judging by the effort by all involved it wasn’t about the money though!

If you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

And the entries were:

In no particular order and with links to Twitter and the live application itself. It’s worth stressing that all of these applications were created from scratch in about four – five hours with Rusic. Some aren’t quite finished, but they’re not far off. Expect to see more of these themes…

@iamkeir – Rusicursive

Showing off the Websnappr'd entries to the competition

Showing off the Websnappr'd entries to the competition

A really interesting theme that didn’t quite get where it needed to :) Essentially you add a website and it pulls back the web page as an image and adds it into Rusic. Very cool and with a bit more work it could be part of an interesting theme for building on in the future. As Keir is a friend of Rusic he wasn’t allowed to to enter the competition. (Don’t ask about the name)

@daleanthony - Best Recipes

Lovely design and use of Masonry

Lovely design and use of Masonry

A really simple and beautifully designed theme built with Masonry. Add recipes and share them. Perfect for a cookery site. Dale is part of the Rusic team and built all of the deafult themes in Rusic, so doesn’t qualify for a prize.

@jamesGuest – Full English Breakfast

I want that breakfast

I want that breakfast

Building on one of the default themes, James after having to re-install pretty much everything in his laptop, spent a few hours coming up with this. Submit Cafes, their breakfasts and their location to find the best fry up in the UK. Combine this with the iPhone SDK and this is one awesome idea, anywhere you go you can find the nearest decent cafe. Seriously ESSENTIAL. Probably the best commercial idea of the day.

@tholder – Mountain biking locations

Lovely Google map integration

Lovely Google map integration

A really nifty geo based app for plotting the best mountain bike trails. Good integration with google maps and another app crying out for the iPhone SDK. While Tom would’ve liked some cash he’s part of Rusic…

@adambu1988 – 360k

A beautiful code snippet in Rusic

A beautiful code snippet in Rusic

Adam’s tag line of “Three hundred and sixty thousand pixels & 360kb to do something awesome with…” is pretty cool. Reminiscent of the demo scene popular “way back when”…

This is one of the themes that blew us away. Adam has managed to make a “code gallery”. Coders paste in their code snippet and then other people vote on it. Slick interface, great idea and slick implementation. Hard to believe this was created in an afternoon.

 @jegtnes and @mark_js – Blah Blah

Liking of Comments.

Liking of Comments.

These two guys, students at UWE performed a minor miracle. I’m still not sure how they did what they did… Essentially they found a way to add “like” states to comments. This is not a core feature of Rusic, it may be one day, but right now it isn’t. Somehow they got it to work. Awesome. Really.

@scottifydotcom – FootoFan

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!

I think this goes down as another really good commercial idea for an application, especially combined with the iPhone SDK. Essentially when you’re at the football you submit the match, and then photos and comments as you’re watching the game. I suspect this theme needs the most extra work as it needs some clever implemenation tricks to get it rocking… although Rusic that won’t take long.

@benjaminReid – Eye Bomb

The lovely action hover bar

The lovely action hover bar

A beautifully designed theme just for submitting pictures of inanimate objects with eyes on. :) Beautiful action menu appearing over the main image and a nice simple navigation. Worth mentioning the cool Google maps integration here.

A worthy mention goes to Roy that completely stripped and one of the default themes of CSS and javascript and rebuilt it semantically as HTML5. I can’t find your Twitter address or theme Roy. Where are you Roy?

And the winners were:

Best Design - Eye Bomb and 360k.

Best Idea - 360k

We didin’t do the “Nearest to complete” prize in try end as the guys that used the default themes were the  closest to completion which we thought wasn’t on in the end. ;) So instead:

Generally Cool - Footo and Blah Blah

Overall a really awesome day and a testmant to the talent in Bristol. Feed back on Rusic from the guys was really positive, we learnt a lot as well. Thank you so much to everybody that came. Roll on the next one.

Just in case you missed it at the top of this post if you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

20 Oct 2011
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mini

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…

3 Aug 2011
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Custom tweets and Facebook posts from your Rusic account

by Paul Filed under: Products

One of the great things about Rusic is it’s really easy to share your actions on the site with your friends. This is all done through your Twitter or Facebook account, and we’ve just finished adding a neat little feature to make this even better.

Soon you’ll be to customise the message it sends out whenever you create a new idea, like an idea or comment on an idea. And not only can you include your own content but you can also give the message some great context too. We’ve made it really simple to drop in tags for things like: the idea’s title, the bucket name, the comment text as well the user performing the action and the idea or bucket owner.

As a quick example, you could setup the twitter post for creating an idea to this:

Hey {{bucket_owner}}, {{idea_owner}} just created an awesome idea 
called {{idea}} in the {{bucket}} bucket, have a look here: {{link}}

Now, whenever a user creates an idea, a tweet is posted from them saying (something like):

Hey @joebloggs, @johnsmith just created an awesome idea called 
"Some idea" in the "Cool thoughts" bucket, have a look here: 
http://cool.rusic.com/cool-thoughts/likes/123

This is all done using an amazing templating engine called liquid which was developed by the guys at Shopify, so hats off to them!

We’ll be rolling this out as a feature on all paid account soon, so keep your eyes peeled!