Viral Website: Case Study

April 17th, 2009 · No Comments

Who: Greenplug

What: “the first developer of digital technology that enables real-time collaboration between electronic devices and their power sources.” In other words a maker of a product that acts like a universal power adaptor; no need for multiple chargers and cables for all your daily gadgets such as cell phones, laptops, digital camera, MP3 player etc.

Why: Greenplug needed to supplement their corporate website with a viral site to generate public enthusiasm and media coverage. Greenplug was also a new company, with a new website (bad for search engine ranking), a start-up (ie. low budget). The benefit of their product (one plug adapter fits all your gadgets) is easy enough to understand but challenging to evangelize.

How: We first looked at the business objectives. Greenplug want device manufacturers to adopt their technology. And the most effective way we felt was to let the public speak. We honed in not so much on the ‘green activist’ latent in many people but on the inconvenience of so many cables that almost everyone can relate to. Everyone I know has a tangle of cables under their desk, a box dedicated to chargers and adaptors and have at least on one occasion had to buy a replacement phone charger. We wanted to relate to the business traveler as much as home and office workers. Ultimately the challenge was to gather data from site visitors and present that data as convincing information to target appliance manufacturers.

Output: As veteran web folks we realized that we had very short time to make a strong impression on the site visitor. We needed a site that presented the message and the desired action quickly and effectively. This meant use of pictures, text, call-to-action button, no scrolling, and an all-round intuitive interface. Also, we didn’t want to interrupt the momentum of the experience by offering links to other sites or pages which is why we opted for the ‘lightbox’ effect for discrete text presentation (click on the links at the bottom of the front page).

An important working assumption was that the vast majority of site visitors would be referred to the site by other sites rather than stumbling across the site as part a google search for a general keyword. This relieved us from providing a lot of information to explain Greenplug, their products, and the purpose of the site.

We presented the issue of cable/plug inconvenience in a triptych sequence of images that generates visual momentum and which leads directly to a call-to-action voting button. The voting process was simple and intuitive: choose your product brand and product (e.g. Motorola and cell phone).

An important consideration was the tradeoff between vote quality and vote quantity. We felt that the data would have more credibility with manufacturers if we could reasonably show that the votes came from individuals voting once rather than fake votes. We opted to explain that point to site visitors and give them the choice of submitting their email address or not. Thus we were able to collect more votes that can be segmented into ‘validated’ and ‘not validated’ and we designed the database so that it can report key indicators on products and manufacturers.

Throughout the site we provided visitors with the ability to share the site (by social network widgets: email, facebook, twitter, delicious, blog bookmarks etc.)

Outcome: The public as well as media reactions have been outstanding. The initiative has been covered by top internet publications including Treehugger XIII movie full

, Slashdot The Care Bears Movie the movie , The Standard, Daily Galaxy

, and around 11,500 other websites. There have been close to 13,000 votes from the public in the first 4 months and almost 700 people have left positive comments The Slumber Party Massacre ipod on the site.

We were brought into this project by social media maven Tracy Sheridan together with a top PR firm in Los Angeles (thanks Ken and Co.)

So get on over to the site, cast your vote, leave a comment and tell your friends: http://iwantmygreenplug.com/

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