Experiences with Bebo

We have been running pr and media relations programmes for Repak for a number of years now.  Every year it extends a bit further and we include something new.  This year we wanted to start engaging a younger audience having previously run the ‘Cash for Cans’ programme and other initiatives from education packs for school to targeting special supplements.

During Repak Recycling Week we built a Bebo Site for them with white board drawing competitions, polls, quizzes, advice section, photos, videos and a blog.  To keep it fresh we updated it daily with information on a different material to be recycled and invested a good bit of energy in building the friends network. 

Offline we had also engaged a school to customise or Bling some BringBanks for us that were placed around the city as street art.  One of the BringBanks was given a treatment of Tetris and a frame by frame video was made of the process (the background tune still sticks in my mind as it mimics the game) which we also posted on YouTube.  We had also developed a separate Repak Blog which was much more corporate in language but using similar content.  Some of the results surprised us:

•          Site  exceeded 11,000 visitors after 3 weeks.

•          41 Entries to the online drawing competition.

•          Over 760 Bebo Friends registered.

•          200 Comments

•          307 Quizzes taken

•          Over 500 polls taken

•          International hits from USA, UK, Germany and France.

•          Over 100 Views of You Tube video

•          Irish Independent and Silicon Republic Coverage of the site

We also got some nice external eendorsement of site on other peoples blogs.   What particularly interested us what the level of engagement/interaction and the amount of time that people spend on the site.   We keep it up to date with follow on campaigns such as Repak Green Christmas and the launch of the Carbon Calculator.  Once the content is tweaked for the audience it gives it a better afterlife than sitting on a file server or wrapping fish and chips. 

Finally the biggest spike in traffic was when we changed the sponsored link from the logo to a photo of models we used at the launch.