Our official tagline at Chronicle Books is: we see things differently. We pride ourselves on our distinctive books, on taking chances, and on having a little fun while we’re at it. Lately we’d been wanting to interact more with our Facebook fans, but the limitations of the standard Facebook interface and the legal rules surrounding contests made this a challenge.
Enter, Odyl!
We’d heard about Odyl on our social networks and noticed that some of the cooler contests we were seeing on Facebook seemed to have this little marker at the bottom:
We reached out to them and a small team from Chronicle Books sat down for a quick demo.
After a few minutes, we were already sold. Odyl provided easy-to-use solutions for so many of the roadblocks we had hit. Ability to host contests without breaking the budget or Facebook rules? Check! Ability for users to upload photos and send them around for voting? Check! Ability to share Scribd excerpts, book trailers, and other assets? Check, check, check!
From the moment we decided to test the tool until it went live, mere weeks elapsed. Everyone over at Odyl worked around the clock to get our tool live for the critical holiday book-selling season. And we were pleased to find that the tool is robust enough for us to give it our signature Chronicle Books look and feel.
We launched our tool in early November and named the new section on our page: Free Stuff! Our fans immediately gave us great feedback and hopped over to enjoy the free content. Then we announced our first-ever Odyl campaign: Boo’s Holiday Corner.
Boo, The World’s Cutest Dog, currently has 2.5 MM Facebook fans and stars in his very own book, published by us. Boo’s Holiday Corner kicked off in November and leverages nearly all Odyl options: a quiz, virtual gifts, exclusive holiday downloads, and a giveaway.
Our existing Facebook fans loved the free Boo holiday content, but when Boo himself posted about the assets on his Facebook page something exciting happened. New fans hopped over to check it out and within 24 hours, our new likes soared and we saw a nice bump in sales for his book too!
And through it all, Odyl has remained in constant contact with us, taking frantic emails and phone calls at all hours and fixing issues in record time. So, as we look back over our achievements this year, we wanted to give a shout-out to our new friends at Odyl. We can’t wait to see all that we can achieve in 2012!
