https://www.hughlaurieblues.com/free-downloads/junco-partner.htm

To announce the forthcoming release of Hugh Laurie’s second album, Didn’t It Rain, we secured a bonus track to offer as a free download to fans.

I built a tweet to unlock campaign, where fans needed to work together and ensure that #HughLaurieBlues was tweeted 10,000 times before the free download would be revealed.

I built the system using php, mySQL and jQuery. In the back-end a cron job would check for new tweets every 8 seconds and update the mySQL database.

The front-facing part of the campaign looked great and worked very smoothly. I sourced a stock image of a classic car stereo and separated the dial from the radio face. The plan was to slide the dial from zero to ten as more people used the hashtag.

Every 8 seconds the page would make an ajax call for the latest tweet total, calculate the progress percentage and move the slider.

I used some slick jQuery animation to slide the dial as well as increasing the tweet count and progress percentage. The animation took 8 seconds to complete so while tweets were flowing in, it appeared to be increasing constantly.

Once the 10,000 tweet target was reached the page made a final ajax call to provide the download link. The call would confirm that the target was reached, in case anyone tried to cheat the system by digging around in the public source code.

The campaign took off really well and the 10,000 tweet target was reached within a few short hours.