Atari: Star Trek Online Multi-Channel Campaign

Complementary Twitter and Facebook campaigns generate over 21 million impressions for Atari’s launch of Star Trek Online.

Background

After its successful launch of the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game Champions Online, aided by Friend2Friend’s “Which Champion Are You” Facebook application, Atari and its agency SocialTyze turned again to Friend2Friend for buildup towards its major launch of Star Trek Online, another highly anticipated MMO game to be released Feb 2, 2010. Atari asked Friend2Friend to create applications for both Twitter and Facebook that build buzz, capture the role-playing feel of the game, and present an opportunity for pre-orders.

Objectives

• Build awareness for the Feb. 2nd launch of Star Trek Online
• Give gamers taste of the game’s look and feel
• Build on the strong existing Star Trek brand and fan base
• Leverage the viral nature of social media by creating something fun to share with friends
• Reach consumers through both Twitter and Facebook
• Create an opportunity for fans to pre-order the game

Tweet in Klingon

Friend2Friend’s Twitter app was Tweet in Klingon, tapping into the widespread enthusiasm of Star Trek fans by allowing them to tweet in this invented language. Using the rich visuals of the Star Trek online game, the translator let users write their own tweets or choose from a list of handy Klingon phrases. The result was a fun app in which fans literally spoke in the brand’s language. As one Twitter user put it, “Oh loD, jaH Daq tlhIngan ghaH vaj nerdy je Doj!” or, for non-Klingon-speakers, “Oh man, tweeting in Klingon is so nerdy… and awesome!”

Trek Me

With Star Trek such a well-known franchise across generations, allowing people to become Star Trek characters on Facebook and show off their morphed images to their friends made sense. Friend2Friend used the exotic and detailed backgrounds and characters developed for Star Trek Online, and added tools to easily adapt the user’s picture. Gamers could become a Borg, Cardassian, Klingon, Vulcan or one of eight other races, select one of several different scenes for the background, and share their alien picture with friends.

Results

These dual social media campaigns generated a powerful set of branded impressions during the weeks before launch. Results included:

• 150k users participated in the multi-channel campaign
• 100,000 Klingon tweets sent, with 10,000 sent in the first 2 days
• 40,000 Star Trek characters created on Facebook
• 212,000 minutes of engagement time spent by over 100,000 participants
• 21 million social impressions generated through tweets and newsfeeds
• 300,00 page views of the apps
• 30,000 likes added to bring the STO Facebook page to 50,000 likes at launch
• High levels of fan interaction on the Facebook page prior to product launch
• “Tweet in Klingon” mentioned in over 50 blogs, including Mashable and the Huffington Post, and more than 100,000 references on Google within the first 2 weeks of launch
• Thousands of clicks on the Pre-Order banner

“I’m not a Trekkie, but the #klingon Tweet translator might be a little bit addictive,” tweets one user. For Atari and Cryptic Studios, these fun and creative apps allowed fans to amplify and share the exciting visuals and previews of the Star Trek Online game. Both apps delivered on marketing’s holy grail of getting your fans to speak in the language of the brand (in this case literally; Klingon) and project their own images onto the characters in the games, creating far more impact than a traditional media campaign and delivering an impressive return on their marketing investment.