In 2009 Sky launched an annual mass cycling event across a number of cities in the UK know as Sky Ride. These mass cycling events – last year over 65,000 attended the London Sky Ride – have quickly grown to a nationwide cycling program incorporating large city rides and smaller ‘local’ rides running across 11 cities.
Social Media Audit
At the beginning of the Sky Ride initiative Sky came to us to scope out social media opportunities. After carrying out an extensive social audit analysing where cycling conversation was occurring across social networks, blogs, forums and Twitter, as well as analysing topics and drivers of conversation, we fed back our findings, recommendations and strategy for what we saw as a great opportunity for social media.
Social Media Outreach and Facebook Management
Absorb managed extensive advocate outreach across blogs, forums, offline cycling communities and clubs, as well as setting up and managing a branded YouTube channel, Flickr page and Facebook page. Our Facebook advertising campaign saw 1,000’s of targeted people being driven to the Sky Ride website to engage with the ride information and registration. Paid and organic activity here has seen the GoSkyride Facebook page fan numbers increase by 300%, all at very little cost.
For the 2010 ride schedule we also designed and developed a bespoke Facebook registration application and landing tab for the GoSkyride Facebook page, enabling fans to register for rides within Facebook itself. This within-Facebook signup process is far more in fitting with consumers’ usual online activity and therefore aids Sky in collecting even greater numbers of registrations for their Sky Ride events, capturing greater volumes of consumer data.
