The Blog - Archive for Viral

20 Oct 2011
0 Comments
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…

28 Aug 2011
0 Comments
bum

Mrzyk and Mariceau video. Style is priceless (NSFW)

by Mark P. Filed under: Community

This saucy little video by Mrzyk and Mariceau is one of the simplest, mesmerising music videos I’ve seen in a long while. Low budget, very simple to look at, making an average tune (Sébastien Tellier – Look) fantastic.

Simple is great and style is priceless.

To quote one of the comments from Youtube:

I’m a woman, i just watched another woman’s butt for 4min, and i found it the most beautiful thing evar. félicitations monsieur Tellier, félicitations Mrzyk et Moriceau

30 Jun 2011
0 Comments

Rusic goes live. Not a beta to be seen.

by Mark P. Filed under: Products

We’ve pushed a new product live this week. Rusic.com - It’s for generating ideas based around a topic or question.

It’s early days yet so we’ve got loads that we want to do, we just didn’t want to go down the “beta” route with this. It’s either useful or not?

We describe it as social ideas; in that it only works via Twitter or Facebook and it’s very simple to use and appears to self promote. The basic premise is to generate ideas or responses to questions.

For example:

“How can we improve our local playground?”

“What can we do to improve our website?”

“What shall I wear to the wedding on Tuesday?”

Rusic Idea Bucket screenshot

You can even use it to have Twitter conversations that need more than 140 chars.

A great feature that’s coming soon in a paid tier is custom skinning and domains. This opens up all kinds of possibilities as Fat Face our first paid customer demonstrates. The skinning engine is liquid as used by Shopify so it’s already easy to do.

We’ve setup an “idea bucket” for how we can improve Rusic so please let us know how we can improve. We’re not doing the beta thing, we’ve just put it out there and we’ll see how it goes.

We really do want your ideas for feedback so please let us know.

8 Oct 2010
0 Comments

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?