https://michaelbuble.com/afterallscrapbook

To gather momentum around the new Michael Bublé song, After All, Chloe Dunford suggested replicating the Twitter Scrapbook I built for Biffy Clyro.

The mechanic would be slightly different to the #SummerOfBiff campaign which only displayed curated retweets from the band’s account. For Bublé we wanted to pull in all photographs from Twitter and Instagram with the #BubleAfterAll hashtag.

This did present some new challenges, in particular; the sheer volume of photographs we’d be dealing with.

Instead of pre-loading all images to create the book, images would need to be loaded through ajax as a user pages through the book.

I wrote a php script to regularly make authenticated calls to Instagram and Twitter and add the results to a mySQL database.

To access the results through an ajax call, I wrote a simple API to provide results in response to a JSONP request. The feed receives the details of previously loaded images and determines which images to return in the next batch. This was all hooked up with Turn.js to continuously load new pages until there are no more images left to display

I used the latest version of Turn.js to manage the page turning effect. The plugin has improved significantly to include better device or browser detection and graceful fallback options for incompatible browsers.

The database was automatically populated by running a PHP script on a regular cron-job. The scripts would collect the most recent tweets and instagram posts, filter them for photographs and add the details to the mySQL table. I also optimised my past scripts to reduce the server load and speed by avoiding duplicate entries more efficiently.

Due to the scrapbook sourcing public content, I needed to build a moderation tool, allowing us to remove any inappropriate content. The admin tool would also regularly rescan the images and remove any that the fans may have deleted from their instagram or twitter accounts.

We also wanted to make it as easy as possible for fans to contribute to the scrapbook. I added two button to launch Twitter and Instagram. With a bit device detection, the appropriate links are served. On iOS and Android devices the buttons launch the relevant apps with the #BubleAfterAll hashtag pre-populated as a caption.

Luke Smith helped by designing the album cover and page layout. I finally pulled it all together and arranged to host it on Bublé’s official website.

The campaign worked really well and fans swiftly filled up the scrapbook with photographs. The encouragement to share photos of your loved ones really worked and the scrapbook provided a great snapshot of loved-up Bublé fans of all ages.