JaxLive 2005 was created to support the Super Bowl party hosted by Alicia Keys. After the success of FTGU, I was given the opportunity to work on another project that incorporated a lot of illustration, animation, and music, during a very short turn around time.
Sadly, it has been wiped from the Internet for the most part. 🙁
Frum Tha Ground Up (FTGU), a youth initiative based in Jacksonville, embarked on a journey to enhance its online presence and engage a younger audience. This case study explores the collaboration between FTGU and Hardball Creative to redesign the organization’s digital platform, emphasizing the significance of youth outreach and digital transformation.
FTGU sought to connect with its target audience through an engaging and fun online presence. The project aimed to create a platform that resonated with young individuals while reflecting the organization’s mission and values.
I was recruited by Hardball Creative to assist in designing and building FTGU’s new digital presence. The collaboration extended beyond conventional website redesign, incorporating strategic elements such as user content generation, message boards, and the integration of real-world events into the online experience.
To infuse the site with motion and energy, every aspect of the FTGU website was animated. Frame-by-frame animations were employed to create dynamic and engaging interactions, including page loads and menu interactions. This approach captivated users and heightened their engagement with the platform.
The visual design of the website embraced a youthful and hip-hop energy. Multiple images were redrawn in silhouette or vectorized style, enhancing the overall visual appeal and aligning with FTGU’s target audience.
The development process prioritized simplicity and user-friendliness, enabling non-technical individuals to easily update and manage content. The implementation allowed external text documents to be uploaded, empowering non-developer savvy individuals to contribute to the site’s maintenance.
The revitalized FTGU website garnered significant recognition and acclaim. It emerged as a finalist at SXSW and won numerous prestigious awards, acknowledging its innovative design, engaging user experience, and positive impact on youth outreach.
The FTGU relaunch yielded transformative results, revolutionizing the organization’s online presence and youth outreach efforts. By infusing animation, employing a youthful visual style, and implementing user-friendly content management, the new digital platform resonated with it’s users.
The King of Fighters XII was hurting in terms of having a mainstream community that was excited about the game. They had a flashy site, shareable widgets that created user engagement, a great contest with $10,000 in prizes, but still, nothing but crickets. The game was about a month away, and still had only 600 fans on it’s Facebook page, around 100 followers on facebook, and almost no interaction from Ignition over the mainstream audience. Now given the lineage of King of Fighters, and how hardcore the audience has been known to be, this was all wrong.
After my involvement, The King of Fighters facebook page had over 13,000 fans ready at launch, Twitter also had several thousand followers, and we had reached out and brought in advocates from neogaf, deviant art, several cosplay communities, fans of anime, import games, and several other niches that covered the demographics that would be in support of this game.
I also managed the PR crisis of laggy online play pre-launch, building trust in the Ignition company brand in the face of there not being a defined update to fix this online issues, and turned several of the biggest opponents of the game, into advocates.
All in all, a very succesful digital/social campaign.
Nostalgia is a traditional RPG for the Nintendo DS, from the makers of Final Fantasy III and IV on the DS. The digital marketing budget for this game was extremely limited, as was the promotional time.
Given these restraints, our first mission was to reach out to advocates of the Ignition brand, and build off those relationships first. With the past campaigns, one of our ongoing goals was to build brand loyalty and create evangelists to Ignition.
The next step was to create contests and initiatives for those evangelists to promote for us. Custom landing pages were developed with promotional items being used as incentives for lead capturing. These landing pages promoted the game, and by using the contest as a lead capturing opportunity, were were able to have additional opportunities to contact and interact with our audience.
We then reached out to the anime, cosplay, Nintendo DS, and RPG communities to concentrate our message on the niches that were most likely to make a purchase.
Lastly, we created several Twitter accounts to assist the main @NostalgiaDS Twitter account. Gamers were able to interact with characters with the game and build a relationship them. Day in and Day out, characters from Nostalgia talked to fans, each other, and characters within the Ignition brand. This tactic was highly effective in furthering lead generation and creating brand awareness in a crowded marketplace.
The strategy and tactics employed for the title, helped to further cement Ignition’s brand as a publisher that cares about it’s customers, and succeeded in promoting Nostalgia as great RPG on the Nintendo DS. Hopefully, the positive remarks and thoughts associated with this launch, will continue to give Nostalgia legs to run with in terms of sales, and make each Ignition title launch more successful than the last.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a niche title for the Nintendo Wii. It received a multitude of awards from the gaming press, but like many titles, had the difficulty of meeting sales expectations amidst a very limited marketing budget. Ignition proposed that I work on this title and see what I could do with no marketing budget social, and solely having swag and the time of those at Ignition. Wonderful.:)
The results, we reached launch sales expectations, trended to number 4 on Twitter Trends (curse you Miley Cyrus!), won several reader review awards (beating Wii Fit and New Super Mario Bros), and have a strong Facebook community that continues to push sales every month.
I worked with Ignition to develop a social strategy and the appropriate tactics to exact that strategy to completion, while adhering to there budgetary and logistical contraints.
Muramasa hit over 10,000 fans within 2 months of my involvement. We empowered the community with several user generated initiatives that assisted in gaining a viral presence and gaining ground in organic search of Wii titles. We also made sure to embrace and give adulation to key members of the community to create an environment where they can lead and the community can be self sustaining for the most part.
The overall atmosphere has stayed positive, with community members to this day pushing out there own content with a community manager now acting in a limited capacity. Overall, a tremendous success.
With Twitter, were able to quickly build a following that consisted of many influencers within the Wii and anime community. We also utilized the successful Twitter accounts created with ing of Fighters XII to assist and give personality and life to the newly created characters of Momohime and Kisuke. Fan were frequently involved in the quarreling and lives of Momohime and Kisuke on Twitter, and at the same time paying attention to link and product driving contests pushed by the corporate Muramasa Twitter account.
In addition Twitter parties, hashtagging tactics, and retweet initiatives pushed 1,000s of clicks towards Muramasa, and trneding Muramasa to #4 on Twitter.
With Muramasa , I created wallpapers for Iphone, Desktop, and Android, and deployed, tracked, and tagged them to increase the Muramasa’s presence in the market across several social platforms and generate sales.
To assist building up a database of leads to market the game to, landing pages and email creatives were designed and built to work in association with social based contests. The contests drove participants with a landing page that collected the lead, rewarded them with exclusive content on sign up, and resulted in open rates of over 95% and click rates of over 90% from each signup event.
With every social project it’s important to be able to track and measure the impact of the work. With Muramasa, I was able to track and measuer the performance of link distribution, the market share of voice that Muramasa was capturing, measure what aspects of the game the audience was more interested in, and show a definite ROI on Ignition’s investment.
With Muramasa, we had a much firmer grasp on the logistics of the company and established relationships with several bloggers and web site owners who had their own audiences, to assist in marketing the game. We created several sustaining relationships, created fulfillment procedures, and created protocol for how to conduct business with other influencers.
Not bad for not having a social budget?
The bank industry has been enduring a turbelent storm for quite some time now. Everbank, however has been able to prosper by investing in foreign currencies during times when the US dollar waned. To capitalize on this, Everbank needed a digital campaign to expose it’s foreign investment plans to its audience.
I designed and developed multiple banner ads, landing pages, and email creatives, that displayed how Everbank is a company that does traditional things in non traditional ways. It was important to visually convey this message, as tradtional ways are what have put many companies in dire straits.This campaign ended up having a clickthrough rate above industry average, and some great work.
Thank you for this opportunity, Everbank.
Pink Flamingo Day was Bealls’s first foray into social media. Before, there was no Bealls social media presence. But with this promotion, all that changed.
With this one project contributing to over $270,000 in in-store sales over a 3 day period, “Pink Flamingo Day” was a huge success, and has since become a regular event for Bealls. This has also lead them to us assisiting them in developing their own social media department (with me still acting as a consultatant, research and data provider, content creator, and community manager) and having a mich closer relationship (and bigger online sales) with their customers.
Happy Pink Flamingo Day! 🙂
Jacksonville and the Jacksonville Jaguars were going through a very tough time. Fan pride was extremely low in the city, the stadium was not selling enough seats for the games to be broadcasted, and the fans were feeling neglected by both the Jaguars and the city itself.
Touchdown Jacksonville is the remedy for all of these ailments.
A digital strategy was implemented to empower the fans. Touchdown Jacksonville became the liason between the fans, and the Jaguar camp. We covered Jaguars related events and promoted them to the community, and created new opportunities for fans to interact not only with the Jaguars, but with each other.
Tactics that rewarded fans for being fans, while at the same time, creating viral marketing buzz were employed. Twitter parties were conducted to rally fans for big events. We rallied fan pride and participation to heights not seen since Jacksonville actually had the Super Bowl here, and fan voting actually got the Jaguars to the “virtual” Super Bowl online (through Cambell’s Click for Cans), and earned the city 13,000 cans of food for the local food banks!
Touchdown Jacksonville’s success really stemmed from community management above all else. Jaguar fans finally felt that not only did they have somebody with authority who was listening to them, but they felt like they finally had a venue where they could talk with excitement about the Jacksonville Jaguars and their city.
With over 6,000 fans (none of which were purchased), and over a 1000% jump in ticket sales since it’s inception, Touchdown Jacksonville has been a huge success.
