urTurn

The Problem

urTurn is a social media startup. Born from the vision of their founder, a serial entrepreneur, urTurn was poised to seize a growing opportunity in the social media space. With a management team, board of advisors, and some funding, urTurn set out to capitalize on their chance.

Once they started, they found themselves with major problems in two areas. The urTurn idea was rich with possibilities, but was too complex for the average person to understand, making it hard for them to grow. Also, they found it difficult to execute their vision because the technical requirements were too great for them to handle.

The Solution

whiteMAKO was called in to make the idea and technology work again.

Step 1: Creating a Winning Message

Services: Strategic Consulting, Branding

Unlike the majority of Facebook apps that seem to be for wasting time, the urTurn Facebook app was actually very useful. However, how an app is perceived by users is more a matter of communication than just the facts. And for urTurn, the public image was very poor. Due to both the newness of the idea as well as technical and marketing failures, the app was viewed as intrusive, spammy, and at times, a scam.

We met with the management team to discuss their vision for urTurn. Due to the great number of possibilities with urTurn, there were literally hundreds of ways to take the company. Unfortunately, they were trying to do them all. It seemed they were caught up with what urTurn could do and were fixating on the next big thing instead of understanding that they had to position their company properly before diving head first. We had them stop everything and first consider the premise of urTurn to understand what it was and separate it from what it could do.

Once we separated the essence of urTurn from how it could be used, were able to come up with a universal transmittable message that fit everything together. This message was met with great success as users who were first suspicious and skeptical now seemed to understand the urTurn idea and gave it a chance.

Instead of rolling out everything at once, we got them to do was to pause and create a strategy for everything they wanted to do. Following this communication breakthrough, we rolled out a redesigned, rebranded version 2.0 of their Facebook app that focused on optimizing communication to grow the app.

Milestones

• Identified essence of company's vision that gave the company a greater longevity and realm of possibilities for the future
• Used transmittable message as primary objective for app redesign and boosted important app metrics greatly

Step 2: Saving the Technology

Services: Strategic Consulting, Social Media, Usability

urTurn's Facebook app version 1.0 was developed and launched with little success. The user interface was confusing and the back-end system running it all didn't work. In addition, the app would regularly go down as the app's inefficiencies maxed out the server's capabilities too quickly. It became apparent that the urTurn app required another level of technological mastery to approach it. This is where whiteMAKO stepped in.

On the Surface

At its core, urTurn's Facebook app was a part of a larger cross-platform social media enterprise, but this wasn't understood before development was started. Instead, countless hours were spent over the course of two months building an app for an unclear idea and it showed. We analyzed the app and found that two areas were crippling the app: technology and communication.

At the technical level, the app was built poorly and did not scale. Due to the grand scale of the urTurn vision, a very sophisticated back-end framework was necessary, but that was out of reach of the staff's expertise. Because of this, all development efforts fell short because they never took into account the greater picture. We built the 2.0 and the underlying architecture so that everything within the app would run much faster and so the app would scale easily to any number of users and any number of other social networks like MySpace and Bebo. What used to take a couple days to process all the users not took less than an hour.

The Real Problem

With version 2.0 we saw the first real entry into the urTurn enterprise. When the technology problems were solved, the app's greatest problem was able to be addressed. The real success with 2.0 was in communication. The transmittable message was woven into every aspect and communication touch point on the app to create a truly killer app. 2.0 was launched using a stealth rollout with no announcements, no PR and no messages of any kind to inform the users. The result was the highest growth day in the history of the company. 2.0 was so successful that we were asked to create a rapid deployment guide to document the model and protocols we used for them to implement on other social networks immediately.

Milestones

• Sped up app by 98% with a 95% smaller codebase and 99.8% smaller database
• Stealth rollout of 2.0 showed the greatest growth numbers in the history of the company
• With new app working, scaled to 200,000 users in roughly two weeks
• Featured in TechCrunch, the most popular Web 2.0 blog with millions of hits daily
• Boosted monthly active users by %177 from 9% (Facebook standard) to 25%
• All important metrics including page views and engagement as well as accepts, ignores, and blocks were improved greatly
• People started unblocking the app