https://usa.lewiswatsonmusic.com

Following the success of our LewisAustralia campaign, we wanted to drum up more excitement about Lewis Watson’s forthcoming trip to America by letting fans win a private performance in their own houses.

On the day before we closed for Christmas, I built a microsite where fans could register a unique link. The more likes that link got on Facebook the higher they would move up the leaderboard.

I built the site with a combination of php, mySQL, jQuery and the usual dose of HTML and CSS. The majority of the site is a single php page. An .htaccess rewite rule determines whether viewers should see the home page or an individual fan’s details.

On the home page I used ajax requests to submit a fan’s details to a mySQL database and assign each user with a unique ID. That id is then used to create a link that get’s shared with every press of the Facebook like button.

I used FQL to retrieve individual like stats for each link and a cron job would update the database every few minutes.

A number of fans artificially inflated their like counts with comments, so I needed to access and display actual likes instead of the combined total of likes, shares and comments.

The home page lists the top six contestants. I added pagination to retrieve the next six or previous six entrants. This was achieved with an ajax call with variables to php scripts that retrieved the records and ordered them by actual likes.

The competition was a huge success for engaging fans and spreading awareness in the USA. When we closed the competition Lewis posted a video revealing that he was going to play at two of the winners’ houses. One in Florida and one in New York.