Expedia FriendTrips – Context Optional

Facebook Contest for Expedia – May 2011

Expedia wanted to develop a larger audience on Facebook. Starting with a few thousand fans, they launched a contest leading up to the summer travel season with the goal to gain 1 million new fans. We accomplished this in 6 weeks with a well planned viral contest and targeted ad buys.

The contest allowed someone to enter (once they liked the Expedia page – gaining a fan). They could then enter 6 of their friends to take a dream vacation with them, these users then could enter their own trips with 6 of their friends. Users could decorate their own plane (with my flash-based application) and our Ruby on Rails application to save that data and display it for that particular user showing which of their friends had accepted. We set up the invitations to customize user profiles in the window of that custom plane.

The Facebook application not only got some of the highest traffic our company had seen to date but also working with the company who purchased the ad buys resulted in Efficient Frontier buying Context Optional, later selling the new company to Adobe which became Adobe Social.

Read some of the press about this campaign below.