Project – Experience Swap, Outdoor Activities Social Networking Website
Objective
In 2008 some of the people behind Mogi Marketing set up Experience Swap, a social networking site for outdoor enthusiasts.The idea started because there was no dedicated place online to network with like-minded people and had experienced the frustration of not knowing where to go or what was available in an area for anyone who loves the outdoors.
The concept is simple:
In 2008 some of the people behind Mogi Marketing set up Experience Swap, a social networking site for outdoor enthusiasts.The idea started because there was no dedicated place online to network with like-minded people and had experienced the frustration of not knowing where to go or what was available in an area for anyone who loves the outdoors.
The concept is simple:
"Share your outdoor adventure experiences with others to be able to access new experiences with like-minded people."
The business had to be appealing to advertisers and generate content that would appear in search results and be used in social media marketing to build the number of followers. The website would not need to be geographically specific but because the Mogi team were based in Wales it seemed logical to start there and see how appeal grew organically elsewhere.
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The Approach:
With heaps of enthusiasm and no experience of building a fully functioning social networking site, working out what was to be required was the first challenge! With lots of sheets of paper and a review of the functionality of other websites it was possible to gradually build a picture of how each part of the website interacted and to identify the functionality for two distinct target audiences: Advertisers and Users. With a rough idea of the specifications it was then time to work out the practicalities of building a social networking site, there are many fantastic tools out there that allow the ability to build membership profiles and to login and search along specific criteria. Ning.com for example allows you to build social network style functionality for free but lacks sophistication in some areas. There is also software built for dating websites that is ideal for matching, searching and creating profiles with the ability to include adverts but to deliver all these solutions and then customise the site so people didn’t feel like they were actually on a dating website would have been costly. The final solution came in the form of a Drupal Content Managed website. Drupal is a very popular open source content management system (CMS) that is self hosted and allows complete customisation both in terms of the look and feel and also functionality through the use of modules and filters. This specialist software is free and reasonably straight forward to use at a lower level but with the level of functionality the Experience Swap users and advertisers would need we decided to employ a specialist team of Drupal developers. With the website built, marketing was the next challenge. The aim was to create multi-media content within the website that would be suitable for sharing with social media sites and also contained important keywords to enable search engines to feature the content within results. As well as online marketing the Swansea Outdoor Show was used as a marketing vehicle for Experience Swap to promote the website through Swansea’s first outdoor show. Ongoing work includes implementing regular e-mail marketing campaigns, adding more content in the activity guides section and blogging. All are designed to increase brand awareness and the number of visitors directly (via email, social media etc) and indirectly via Google results and link building. |
The ToolboxThis project enabled full use of tools available for online marketing including:
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