SocialGOAT.in - Bringing content to life in a highly regulated category

Social / Community

Summary

Assisted in creating a community portal for one of our clients, DIAGEO India. While the core platform was created using Drupal 8, Unimity created a unique and personalized solution for the client using some of Drupal's Enterprise capabilities as detailed below

Case description

DIAGEO is a British multinational alcoholic beverages company, with its headquarters in London, England and offices on six continents. Given that the category has challenges in direct communication in India, our task was to help Diageo relaunch their portal which essentially is a surrogate platform used for communicating their brand positions. The primary gateway for this is their portal SocialGOAT.in. The key mandate was to assist Diageo as Technology partner and Support in building the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in Drupal 8.


Case goals and results

The relaunched site went live in the last week of August, 2019.
The business goal was to refresh and relaunch the brand and make it more contemporary which was achieved. In the medium term, the audience goal is to swing the mix towards organic traffic as opposed to paid.

Results:
Unimity was able to coordinate with an ecosystem of technology vendors across countries and launch the website on time
Provided critical inputs to the agency towards creating a contemporary UI/ UX design
Drupal 8’s Editorial Capabilities were leveraged
Page Speed was optimized to load in less than 3 seconds
Project execution Speed - Migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was achieved in just 5 months

Challenges

In addition to the very tight timeline to turn this Project around, Team Unimity got into the details with multiple partners in the ecosystem- e.g. UI/ UX and Infra.

Given the very nature of the category, it was important to draw out the Information Architecture and Content Architecture around non-alcohol content. As a surrogate, we used ‘passion points’ which were essentially brand positions for their brands. For example, McDowells stands for togetherness, friendship and the Johnnie Walker brand stands for persistence with the ‘ Keep Walking’ tagline.

Community contributions

Issues created as part of Project
https://www.drupal.org/project/lightning_media/issues/3075986
https://www.drupal.org/project/lightning/issues/3080752
https://www.drupal.org/project/s3fs/issues/2933045
Module on Personalized User Recommendations integrating GA360 with Drupal
https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/santhosh-kumar-rengasamy/3080577
Pune Camp Session on Agile Development on Drupal Project - using DIageo as a key case study
https://camp2019.drupalpune.com/session/bringing-agility-drupal-projects

Why should this case win the splash awards?

Drupal capabilities that were brought to the fore :
Device-agnostic UI
Editor features
Search engine optimization
Content Recommendations
Performance optimizations
Scalable & Cloud Support
Security Compliance
Accessibility Compliance
Technical features :
Platform was built on Drupal Acquia Lightning Drupal Distribution for Enterprise Authoring. This helped us speed up the implementation of application by using out of the box features like Media, Workflow, etc.
Other Editorial tools include: Custom Ad Banners with Editorial Control, Provision for editors to create Special Brand Category Pages with zero support from Development team, Manage Newsletter subscriptions & Interface for creation of Newsletters
Integration with Central Customer database through API calls, Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) for backend Editorial users was done using custom modules.
Caching Strategy -
Cookie based caching in Cloudfront to support personalized user content
Anonymous user Integration with S3 for assets
Authenticated user - Drupal 8 tag based caching was leveraged
AMP enabled
Migration - Unimity has migrated 1000+ Selected content items from existing site to Social GOAT. The process required mapping the existing data fields to new data fields. Utmost caution was taken to migrate images & videos along with tags (Keywords) and SEO-related fields like Alt Images, Meta Descriptions. Custom module was built to pick the selected 1000+ content from the existing database.
Structured data markup module was used to define rich content snippets
Custom event finder tool - A widget with a wizards flow to choose events in a city of your choice today/ this weekend/ this month was built in.
Custom newsletter creation - The newsletters retargeting happens through a centralized marketing tool. The ability to create newsletter issues that can be created in predefined templates by selecting existing article content was created and the output HTML of the newsletter was to be used by the marketing tool for broadcast. The subscription to newsletters was built as an integration UI to the central database
In addition to the best features of Drupal, we delivered these unique outcomes:
Personalization - Content personalization using user behaviour and history. This is under implementation
Web Browser Notifications - Web browser notification enables user to subscribe to notifications on Social GOAT site. A notification pops up on User’s device whenever new content is created. The User also has option to choose to get notifications for only when content is published in specific category like Fashion, Movies or Cricket etc. This non-intrusive benefit was well appreciated
“Age-Gate” Integration - Pertaining to legal stipulations in India there was an Age-Gate integration required for the Website. However, at the same time PII / PIA compliance had to be maintained. We integrated Age Gate into the application where the form will be fetched from client’s infra and displayed where the user enters the DoB. This personal information will be sent & stored client’s central database thereby meeting both age-gating and PII. This is an important step given how the Data Privacy landscape is changing across the world. Drupal helped us maintain privacy at the same time satisfy client’s requirement to “age-gate”

Given all the above reasons, we believe socialgoat.in is not just another website relaunch but clearly in the ‘lighthouse” zone.