Digital Media Specialists

The end client is a UK organisation that promotes Britain to global visitors.

Requirement

To develop a unique Facebook competition that promotes Britain as a destination to visitors from Australia, Canada and the USA.

Key functional elements included:

• Developing a competition mechanism that allowed users to register for the competition, be matched to a second registrant and then have to find their respective profile on Facebook.
• Building the entire application so that from registration to matching and emailing users it was automated and required no intervention from the client or end client.
• Ensuring that all entrants’ Facebook identifying data was masked so that it was impossible for users to cheat.

Technical Solution

The application was built in .NET 3.5, MS SQL 2005 and JavaScript and Flash elements for the front end and with integration to Facebook and Campaign Monitor (an email distribution firm) via their respective API’s.

The application was integrated with Facebook to pull user data, including the user’s profile image and Friend IDs, into a database upon registration. On a daily basis users were matched with one another and then emailed their matches via Campaign Monitor.

Additional functionality included allowing users to upload an image to replace their Facebook profile image and a moderation module to allow users to report issues and for administrators to react accordingly.

Project Mechanics

The project ran for four months from initial planning to the competition closing and involved working closely with the agency in order to create an application that hadn’t previously been developed for Facebook. Some key stages of the project included:

• Detailed requirements gathering and prototyping to ascertain if the application could actually be developed in the form proposed
• Developing a process to match users that ensured that both their Facebook identifying data would not be visible to other users and also to ensure that users could not be matched to anyone from their existing Friends list within Facebook
• Complete integration with Campaign Monitor to automate the creation and distribution of emails to users on a daily basis once they had been matched by the application
• Building an administration module that allowed the client and end client to view and moderate user comments and requests
• On-going application maintenance and support and implementing and supporting a load balanced cloud hosting solution

Conclusion

By working closely in partnership with the client from the outset of the project by first creating proof of concept prototypes we were able to develop an application that not only completely met the original brief but evolved during the project to create a richer, more user friendly experience.

The competition was extremely successful and user registrations greatly exceeded its original target. In addition the client received enquiries from other brands to develop similar applications for other market segments.