South African Airways (SAA) is turning 80 this year, and Flow is lucky enough to be something of a party planner.
In conjunction with an above-the-line campaign, Flow was briefed to create a Facebook app with the goal of getting more likes on the Hong Kong FlySAA Facebook page.
Flow manages several FlySAA Facebook pages, each targeted at a specific country. This in itself is an interesting project, because each page has to be tailored to the country at which it is directed.
This means more than simply translating the same message into different languages; different countries have different cultures, likes, dislikes, interests, and other idiosyncrasies.
Project manager Kat Fouche has had to overcome not only language barriers, but find ways of ensuring that each page is interesting to people from cultures that are sometimes very different from our own.
Visiting the Hong Kong FlySAA Facebook page makes this abundantly clear. The characters that for most of us mean absolutely nothing have been translated for Flow by AfricaCreate, a China-based company, which also manages the page.
The brief was for Flow to create a competition that would encourage people to like the Hong Kong FlySAA page.
Kat conceptualised a competition where in order to enter the competition, people have to like the Hong Kong FlySAA page, write a Facebook comment saying which South African city they would like to visit and why, and then get as many people as possible to like their comment. The person whose comment gets the most likes, wins two economy-class tickets to South Africa.
The practical simplicity of the competition is supported by an ingenious set of technological creations.
The competition is mobile-optimised, which means it can easily be entered anytime, anywhere, and is easily accessed via QR (quick recognition) codes –barcode-like patterns that are read by an app on your phone, and which then direct you to a particular page.
The competition’s QR code is being displayed throughout Hong Kong on the sides of buses, along with an SAA advertisement.
As soon as someone reads the QR code with their phone, they are directed to www.flytosa.com, from where they can enter the competition.
This page looks simple and is easy to use. It is integrated with Facebook in a very clever way.
Without ever leaving this page, called a “like gate”, a visitor can like the FlySAA Hong Kong page, enter the competition and write their post, which is then posted to both their own Facebook wall and the FlySAA Hong Kong Facebook page. And, to top it all off, a person can choose whether they would like to do this in English or Cantonese.
Richard Frank who developed the Facebook app, says: “The site was built in pure HTML, which is a departure from our usual database-driven sites. This was because Facebook has a fantastic JavaScript integration library, and we were able to leverage it successfully to enable users to authenticate and publish their message.
“Building websites and campaign sites is becoming a lot more about how we integrate with other web and social networking websites like Facebook, rather than building all the social functionality ourselves.”
Says Kat: “It was an invigorating experience working with SAA on this project with such a talented team – design, development, the client and our partners.
“The collaboration resulted in a Hong Kong-specific Facebook competition being launched in a vibrant international social media landscape.”
Since the commencement of the competition on 1 August, the page has gained 330 new likes, and hopefully will gain many more by the closing date on 15 September.
Amy Chow, who is the marketing manager of FlySAA in North and South East Asia, says: “I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the support and guidance that I received from all of you over the past few weeks. It’s really a great experience working together as team on this campaign, and I did learn a lot from each of you. I look forward to a successful campaign, and working closely together in the future on other projects.”