The Challenge
As a small community-gaming site for tweens where users can create their own virtual worlds and games, the executive team of ChallengeYou was seeing some stagnation in the activity level of their user base in the face of competition from larger gaming outfits and the release of browser-based games such as Quake Live. Due to the youth of the target audience and the regulations placed on online contact with that age group, ChallengeYou was unsure if they could deploy an effective social marketing strategy to increase user engagement and interactions.
The Solution
Pandemic Labs was contacted to implement a community-building campaign via social marketing and online community channels through which ChallengeYou could galvanize its current user base, increase interactions, and improve engagement.
Pandemic Labs initially engaged the target audience on several fronts: social networks, online video, forums, and the blogosphere.
Leveraging major social networks and relevant gaming and parenting blogs, Pandemic established branded presences to increase the visibility of ChallengeYou and to gently push the upper limits of the target age group while connecting with parents to increase ChallengeYou’s parent adoption.
Simultaneously, the younger end of the target demographic was engaged with video channels by creating short promotional films that featured well-known ChallengeYou users and games.
The final piece of community infrastructure was a fully-integrated forum on the ChallengeYou Web site where users could collaborate on much larger video and game design projects. The forum is seamlessly tied into the original ChallengeYou website and was built completely COPPA compliant.
Once these pieces were in play and ChallengeYou’s social presence was established, Pandemic created a child-safe online community on the ChallengeYou site. Leveraging the various social communities via integration with the central ChallengeYou community, Pandemic built a structured and tween-focused forum to act as a central location for ChallengeYou discussion, creativity, and community.
The Results
The communtiy-building efforts for ChallengeYou were extremely successful. For a game with only thousands of users, the community had over 6,000 active users in the first few months. This community now provides the ChallengeYou with a go-to location for game improvement feedback and a place to connect with dedicated brand evangelists.
The forum, implemented with COPPA compliance in mind, has remained a safe place for children and tweens to chat online and a prime location for engaging directly with the brand. User numbers for the forum have skyrocketed since launch.
The number of user-generated videos has steadily increased as has the prominence of these videos, making the discovery of ChallengeYou content on YouTube far easier for this tricky target demographic. These videos continue to serve three purposes: to reward existing users for their dedication, to create a steady stream of new and engaging ChallengeYou content, and to encourage ChallengeYou players to make their own video content, thereby initiating a culture of public creativity.
The executives of ChallengeYou are now able to move forward with other strategies that would have previously failed had they not had access to a dedicated fan community of actual players.
