Sting has a Winter record coming out called If On A Winter’s Night… - available today, in fact. We were asked by Decca Records to do this minisite based around the imagery of the Album. Originally this was a complete social network / community-based minisite with a blog by Sting where users could interact with each other, with Sting, post photos, create their own events, etc.

Unfortunately this got pulled back a bit to more of a standard microsite featuring the EPK, new Sting bio, music previews and ringtone downloads.

Regardless, it turned out pretty sweet. If you want to check out the Community feature we developed for this, hit us up and we’ll send you a demo login. We can develop it for almost any client as a free community or like we did for Sam Phillips with a Subscription Site & Community.

TASK: Create a Design Contest to engage the fan base, encourage creativity, develop new fan-generated merchandise pieces for the upcoming album cycle, and spark online interest in “new happenings” as part of the early album setup online marketing campaign.

SOLUTION: Created a custom “Design Contest ‘08″ Microsite and “Backstage” Content Management System [archived here] based around the existing Official Website design and aesthetic. The microsite supplied the fan base with the call to action and all details on the contest and submission process. Contestants used this microsite to submit their entries, which were placed into a database and immediately posted to the “Backstage” Content Management System. The “Backstage” was a password protected CMS which allowed Jason and his management to login and vote on each individual entry. Entries were sorted based on an average of all votes to easily determine the winning entries.

OUTCOME: Over 650 unique submissions were received, and because of the easy to use “Backstage” CMS system, winners were selected in a matter of days and instantly posted to the site. Winning submissions were instantly taken into production and under our watchful eye have been produced and are currently being rolled out on tour and the Jason Mraz Webstore.

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