Awards:
Not One,
but Two!
but Two!
codegent is a full service web development new media agency, based in clapham, london, uk, that delivers well-designed content managed sites, microsites and flash games supported by robust technology and integrated marketing solutions including search engine optimisation, pay-per-click and html email.
UR7s is a social network for everyone involved in Rugby Sevens. As a growing interest around the world, our client saw an opportunity to create a useful resource and a lucrative target market.
Ultimate Rugby Sevens (ur7s.com) is a social site for the international and rapidly growing sport of Rugby Sevens. UR7s is designed to aggregate what is currently a largely fragmented community on the sport's first online social networking and media website, coupling what is a dynamic, fast moving sport with some cutting edge technology such as Googlemaps mash-ups, highly bespoke advertising platform and our own red5 media platform.
UR7s was a brand new site and, as such, had no existing community to leverage or market to. One of the biggest challenges we faced was how to build community in the shortest time possible.
Our approach was to begin to develop it before we had even begun building the site by leveraging existing social groups on other social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook & Flickr. This approach served the dual function of collating contact information and establishing UR7s as experts in the field of rugby sevens through regular, informed content across multiple platforms. The result was that we were able to directly market the site launch to a substantial number of early adopters who in turn could use the social bookmarking tools on the site to further spread the word to their own networks.
The site gives its members access to a full social networking platform where they can create profiles, write blogs, befriend other members, teams or tournaments, direct message each other and upload rich media, as well as interact with the content other site members are uploading. Information and key activity is propagated through information feeds on user homepages and external alerts of key activity. This social functionality is coupled with news flow, games, live text commentary and special offers to deliver a fully immersive rugby sevens experience.
Team and Tournament profile pages have been designed to be public, accessible to search engines and with the ability to select unique, meaningful URLs and fully customisable metadata and content. As such UR7s provides a ready made, marketable, feature-heavy web presence for those who want it. A year after beta launch, we had approximately 85% of UK Rugby Sevens tournaments on the site. For larger tournaments who already have a web presence, UR7s provides a multi-tiered marketing platform to contact a rapidly expanding audience of rugby sevens enthusiasts.
Upcoming developments include e-ticketing, IPTV and online merchandising.
