BattleCry.com
Live Oak Gives Christian Teen Social Network an Ultra-Fast Launch
The Challenge
Through mass stadium events around the country, Teen Mania Ministries already touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of teenagers. These one-to-two-day events combine Christian evangelism with motivational speakers, rock bands, break-out sessions and more -- all designed to reach a generation of teenagers immersed in the popular culture of sex, violence and materialism. But Teen Mania wanted a way to connect with teens on a more regular, day-to-day basis.
The organization decided to launch an ambitious online social network called BattleCry.com -- essentially a MySpace-style site with a Christian flavor.
Several technology requirements made this project particularly challenging. The site had to scale to support at least 80,000 active members on day one. And with the immediate publicity, there were no second chances. The site also had to be self-policing and easy to administer, so that unacceptable content could be automatically purged and a small group of teenage super-administrators could make content changes easily and quickly. BattleCry.com also had to offer popular features found on other social networks, such as image and video sharing, blogging and messaging.
One other small requirement: The site had to be built, designed and launched in just three-and-a-half weeks – in time for announcement at an upcoming stadium event.
"We had to do a huge amount of work that would normally take us months in just three-and-a-half weeks," remembers Ross Kennedy, director of strategic alliances at Live Oak 360.
The Solution
Tocquigny, an interactive advertising agency, was selected to manage the launch. The agency hired Live Oak 360 to design the software infrastructure needed to power the social network. Working literally around the clock, Live Oak built a stable, scalable, feature-rich and easy-to-manage platform.
Among the features that Live Oak incorporated into BattleCry.com:
Content-Management solution Because registering users, adding pages and making other changes can be accomplished with intuitive browser tools designed by Live Oak, the administrators can manage changes themselves rather than relying on an expensive third-party vendor.
Collaboration tools Live Oak integrated the popular image and video-sharing tools YouTube and Flickr into the site rather than spending the time and money to build similar tools from scratch. Blogging, messaging and other collaboration tools were also incorporated.
Stop-word list New postings and content are automatically filtered and purged if they contain inappropriate words or phrases. An exhaustive stop-word list drives the filter.
Flag system Members can also flag inappropriate content on the site, but an intelligent algorithm analyzes who's doing the flagging and whether their flags should be accepted based on previous user behavior.
Intelligent banners Banners promoting upcoming stadium events, local meetings and other customized content are dynamically displayed to individual users based on the content of each page.
The Benefits
Less than a year after its ambitious launch, over 100,000 users had registered at BattleCry.com. With more than 135,000 blog entires and over a million comments, the social network for Christian teenagers is thriving and growing.
Teen Mania Ministries is happy, because the organization is fulfilling its mission of reaching teenagers throughout the country on a daily basis.
Other kinds of organizations and companies can also benefit from BattleCry’s example, says Kennedy. "Live Oak 360 has built a flexible, powerful social-networking platform -- a platform that can be adapted by all kinds of organizations looking to connect communities of people who have common interests."
