Raise awareness for your event with a Facebook app

11 Jun 2010
3 comments

As some people know we built the "pomperlist" a while ago, as a tool to give annoying Facebook friends a punch in their digital face. But of course only when they deserved it. It was a fun little project, which introduced us to the Facebook API. For a short while it was heavily used and we even got some media attention in a Dutch newspaper.

Museum Night Festival

In April the Museum Night Festival approached us to have a brainstorm session about how they could raise awareness for their annual festival by using social media. Many festivals know how to reach their usual audience by using posters and flyers, but social media is still quite a grey area for them. That's a shame because it could be such an effective platform for raising awareness for events. It was a good brainstorm session and we had some crazy ideas that would probably never work. But then we discussed the "pomperlist" and we came up with the idea of using the same principle of posting stuff on somebody else’s his wall. Suddenly the Facebook app that we built purely for fun could actually be used for something more serious.

We figured out that there were three key elements that we had to get right for making this app. succeed.

1. Goal

We came to the idea of making an online V.I.P. list for a party hosted by the festival. By posting the information about the festival on your friends’ wall you get higher on the V.I.P. list. The top 15 people on this list get free entrance to the V.I.P. area at the party. This way the app is not just fun, but you can actually win something with it. Viral marketing!

2. Fun

To make the app. more fun to use we thought of a word that would be posted on your friends’ wall that sounds fun. It won't work that well if it just says "please come to the festival". That's why we used the sentence "potje vippen", in Dutch this means something like "I would like to go to the VIP area with you" but the word "vippen" also comes very close to the dutch "wippen" which could be explained as having a "sexy time" with somebody.

3. Technique

Since the launch of our "pomperlist", Facebook introduced a new API, called the graph API. It is completely based on clean url’s which return JSON objects. Since we have experience dealing with API's which return JSON objects and with the help of the python-sdk, especially built for the new graph API, it wasn't hard to implement.

Our goal was to make all the API requests server-side. This way the app. is not dependable on Javascript. As soon as we got to the test-fase we noticed that Facebook has a limit of posting to people's wall. Since that was the essence of the entire app we had to go back to posting with the Javascript API of Facebook. The Javascript doesn't seem to have that same limit.

Initially we had a preference for implementation of the API on our own server. This removed an extra click in the user interface because each user already allows our app. to post a message to their wall. The restrictions however made us reconsider and use the Javascript API instead. So, if you need to post a lot of messages on somebody’s wall, be aware of the limits.

Conclusion

We just launched the app. (11th of June 2010) and already the user on top of the V.I.P list posted the Museum Night Festival information on the wall of 58 friends! Hopefully the app. will help raise awareness for the festival and many people will visit it.

potjevippen.nl

Tags: Apps