Background
The annual International Ubud Writers & Readers Festival featured a flash fiction writing component this year, called Kilat. The festival organisers hired Water & Stone, a digital agency based in Bali, to build up publicity for the segment.
The event organisers’ brief was four-pronged: to increase visibility of the festival, engage potential festival attendees, especially in Indonesia, foster development of young Indonesian authors, and to build goodwill.
Strategy
Water & Stone conceived and executed the contest site, and was responsible for promoting and co-administering the contest. Entries were accepted online in English and Bahasa Indonesian between 17 August and 24 September, and visitors can read, comment and vote on the submissions. Twelve finalists from each category would be chosen, based on popular vote.
Execution
Water & Stone's promotional strategy relied entirely on digital channels. Word of mouth buzz was generated through active engagement on social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, and through forum seeding through Kaskus.com, Indonesia’s largest community forum. Additionally, there were button ads on the primary Ubud Writers Festival website to drive traffic to the contest site.
Results
Over 2,000 entries were received, and website traffic to the Kilat site tracked 87,057 visits and 286,018 page views in total. The total number of votes received was 33,608, and 9,636 comments were recorded. Bahasa Indonesian entries exceeded over a thousand, and 155 English submissions were received.
“Both Water & Stone and the client have been very surprised at the strong takeup,” says Ric Shreves, partner at Water & Stone.
Site visitors hailed from 88 countries, with social media pushing 54.6 per cent of visits to the site. The total ‘likes’ on Facebook peaked at 5,848, and the number of Twitter followers stood at 1,908 at the end of the campaign.