The Rugby World Cup comes to Facebook
Developing a highly scalable, viral and engaging experience.
Developing a highly scalable, viral and engaging experience.
The Rugby World Cup wanted to engage their already sizeable Facebook following (600,00 fans) to inform them of the launch of ticketing for the Rugby World Cup, and to grow the Facebook fan base by creating a fun, interesting way of introducing others to the Rugby World Cup.
We came up with the idea of creating the ‘Worlds Biggest Scrum’ Facebook application. It worked by dividing all the competing countries into pools, just like the real Rugby World Cup. Fans could then push for their chosen country. Countries pushed against each other, like a scrum. The more fans you got pushing for your country the more chances you had of winning. Each week the winning countries progressed to the next round, and so on, climaxing in a nail-biting final between Georgia and Ireland.
Taking place over a 12 week period, the application had to be robust enough to handle the peak demands placed on it when thousands of Facebook users came to it at the same time. Having architected a solution that included a load-balanced server infrastructure and cloud based services to serve some content, I then led development of the application itself, which included some complex gameplay logic, designed to ensure users continued to be engaged throughout the competition.
Facebook fans went nuts – both pushing for their country, and inviting friends to join their scrum. Fans even got strategic by pushing for minnow nations, trying to knock out countries they didn’t want to meet in the next round. Over the 12 week campaign period we had 15,000 active participants and 55,000 new Facebook fans added to the Rugby World Cup page.
