We’re thrilled to share a new case study based on our recent work with Intel. Intel is doing an outstanding job with their social media work on Facebook and we are proud to be part of their effort. For those interested in learning more about how Intel is leading the way, check out a recent panel discussion led by Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Strategist at Intel. The presentation shares some great tips on how to drive fan acquisition on Facebook, which also happens to be a key element of the case study below.

Intel Reaches Out To Their Community On Facebook
Back in October, Intel challenged Sprout to create a new Facebook fan page and application, with the goal of building a significant Intel community on Facebook. Sprout knew Intel had to deliver immediate value, which worked well with Intel’s concept of linking laptop pricing to fan acquisition. The result: the wildly popular “Fan Plan” campaign, which empowered Intel’s Facebook community to incrementally lower the price on three laptops with every new fan added. It reached hundreds of thousands of people and landed Intel over 24,000 new fans—in just two weeks.

The Challenge
Without a pre-existing community on Facebook to get a campaign rolling, Intel needed an integrated approach that included Facebook ads, a fan page, and an application that drove fan acquisition. Sprout’s role was to turn their concept—empowering fans to lower laptop prices—into an application that fully leveraged the viral power of the Facebook platform. Sprout ensured that visitors converted to fans and shared the Fan Plan with their friends through a combination of incentives and viral hooks.

Integrating an Engage App and Fan Page to Drive Virality
The Engage App that Sprout developed for the new Intel fan page was a powerful nexus of social media technologies, desire, and reward. Every time someone became a fan, the app lowered the price on three popular Intel laptop models. Fans were motivated to tell their friends about the Fan Plan in order to further drop prices. The Engage App enabled them to do so easily by letting them place an interactive experience into their friends’ Facebook Activity Streams. Those friends could then join the Fan Plan and share the experience with other friends right from their Stream. A countdown clock provided a sense of urgency and encouraged users to participate before the Cyber Monday deadline, when they could purchase the laptops at the lowest prices.

Delivering Value to the Stream
Sprout belongs to the select group of Facebook Preferred Developers partly because of their expertise in implementing campaigns that maximize relevance and in-stream presence in the face of increasing competition and ever more stringent Facebook relevancy algorithms. Sprout does this by dropping highly interactive content that outperforms simple images or video content right into the stream. Sprout made sure the Fan Plan content drove users to the Intel fan page for the latest laptop pricing because overall fan page traffic increases publish-to-stream relevancy. And because interaction rates in the Activity Stream are much higher than interaction rates in the display ads on the periphery of the page, this approach also helped reduce Intel’s reliance on the supporting ad buy.

The Numbers Say It All: 24,000 Fans in Two Weeks
Intel built a solid Facebook community in record time, and ensured the community’s engagement by delivering immediate value. Over 8% of fans shared the Fan Plan with an average of two to five friends, and 16% of Fan Plan application users purchased a laptop, making this campaign a huge success. Mashable agreed, citing the campaign as “a fan-friendly, brand-conscious initiative that not only actively and passively works to generate buzz around the Facebook Page, but also rewards customers for recruiting their friends.”* For their next campaign, Intel can leverage this existing fan base and rely even less on Facebook ads.

Sprout and DoubleClick Simplify Ad Building and Ad Serving saving time and money
Creating rich, engaging Flash ads quickly and cost-effectively is at the top of the priority list for most ad operations teams. But client revision rounds can slow time to market when each change requires more coding, and bringing interactive features into ad units—RSS feeds, polls, or the ability to share ad content on Facebook or Tweet about it on Twitter— can be complicated. In late 2009, Sprout began efforts to integrate their Engage Ad Platform, a web-based visual authoring studio that eliminates the need for Flash coding, with DoubleClick Studio. The goal was to enable advertisers, publishers, and agencies to quickly create Flash ads that could be served and tracked through DoubleClick Studio and DART.

Geeknet Ag rees to Beta Test Sprout’s Engage Ad Platform An existing DoubleClick customer, Geeknet, understood the challenge of rapid rich ad creation and agreed to beta test Sprout’s solution. Matt Wessel, as Flash Developer and Ad Product Technology Specialist for Geeknet, creates ads for the site, which sells products geared toward technology and gadget lovers.

Sprout’s Platform Eases Pain Point of Flash Ad Creation for Geeknet “The Sprout social advertising platform was really easy to work with. As a designer I loved the amount of creative control I had over the ad. I wasn’t forced into a template or hindered in any way,” said Matt. Matt’s first ad included an RSS feed that brought dynamic news content right into the ad. “I was really pleased with how easy it was to bring an RSS feed into the ad,” said Matt. “All I did was drag and drop the component onto the canvas and link it to the correct URL. Working with RSS in Flash is hard but with Sprout it was really simple. In fact, it only took me about 15 minutes to build the ad,” Matt added. Once the ad was created, Matt was able to share a fully functional demo— rather than a static mockup—with the customer for approval. “One benefit of working with Sprout is that I have a functional mock-up to show customers. If the customer wants something tweaked I can do it right in the Sprout in real time.” Upon receiving approval, Matt used Sprout to auto-generate a DoubleClick Studio-compliant zip file containing a SWF and backup image. He uploaded this zip file to DoubleClick Studio and QA’d it as normal.

Sprout Ad Served Seamless ly via DoubleClick with Above Average Performance

The ad ran in mid-December and boasted an above-average click-through rate of 1%. Geeknet is currently creating a second ad unit using Sprout’s Engage Ad Platform; this time they’ll pull blog posts right into the unit to bring rich, meaningful content to their audience. They plan to keep working with Sprout and DoubleClick as these two companies continue to revolutionize display advertising. Sprout Engage Platform Benefits:

• Quickly create rich, dynamic Flash ads with a web-based drag-and-drop visual authoring studio. No Flash experience necessary.
• Create fully functional mockups to speed client reviews and ad deployment.
• Drag and drop interactive features like Twitter and RSS feeds, polls and video components into your ad units in minutes.
• Easily upload and track ads through DoubleClick Studio.

Before reaching out to Sprout, Webber Shandwick had already used Sprout Builder to create an awareness widget to promote their product launch. Because they’d had success with their own effort, they decided to get in touch to see how else Sprout might be able to help. That’s when we popped open a can of our Sprout Engage to create a Facebook application that would get their community engaged.

Here’s the widget that Weber Shandwick created on their own:

Sprout tapped into the vibe of the project by creating a Facebook application that allowed users to throwback their look by importing a portrait of themselves, or taking one with their web cam, and placing it into a customizable retro template.

The overall campaign was so successful for Pepsi that they are relaunching in December! Keep your eyes open for that and in the meantime you can learn more by reading the entire case study.

Rock the Space was a music competition, which invited bands to enter a digital demo-tape contest for a chance to win a MySpace Music recording contract, prizes and promotion on MySpace’s home page. This campaign exceeded everyone’s expectations and blew the initial submission goal out of the water within hours of the contest launch.

One of the concepts behind the contest was to bring the idea of the demo-tape into the digital domain. Following this, Sprout created an application that allowed bands to create a custom demo-tape design which was submitted along with their music. Here’s a quick video clip with the winning band in which one of the members explains how the band’s cassette may have influenced their chances or winning:

Another part of what made the demo-tapes so powerful was that they were embedded into a widget, which was created as part of the submission process. Bands could then share their demo-tape widget with fans and their fans could pass along the widget to their friends. The widget also included MySpace Music and Toyota branding and could be updated across all embeds at any time by the brands.

We’re thrilled to see such a successful application of our technology. Congrats to Toyota, MySpace and Call The Cops (the winning band). Here’s what their demo-tape widget looks like: