In a world of direwolves, white walkers and dragons, there's one thing missing: bots! Meet GoTBot, a friendly Facebook chatbot with answers to all of your Game of Thrones questions.
GoTBot is a Facebook Messenger chatbot created in solidarity with all the secondary characters you forgot about, plus all the titles and heirs that you never knew existed. It's for those of you who realise that, in fact, you know nothing.
While we set out to create a genuinely useful Chatbot experience for Game of Thrones fans, we created GoTBot to capitalise on the perfect storm of chatbots reaching peak popularity, and the imminent release of the hotly anticipated Game of Thrones, combining the two to enable us as an agency to promote our services in the field of product design, featuring AI and chatbots.
Strategy
Even before building GoTBot, we wanted to make sure the data we are using will be relevant to the target audience. Through analysing the top Google searches for Game of Thrones questions, for actors, characters and general plot questions, we built a database of starting points.
By having a solid structure supported by data, we ensured that GoTBot will be useful for Game of Thrones fans. Another important action we took before launching was making sure that when AI fails (which happens quite a lot - AI is still quite young), GoTBot will have a hilarious response at hand to keep the audience engaged even when the answer is unknown.
Keeping up to date
To keep users engaged, we updated GoTBot after each Game of Thrones episode that aired, adding new easter eggs and character information as the plot evolves in the show. We teased the new additions through bespoke social assets that will make fans curious about what's new. Through using Mongo DB we were also able to track the most popular questions from users that helped us with regular updates that improved functionality and helped grow the average conversation time within the chatbot.
A good personality
In terms of marketing, we had to bring GoTBot to life. GoTBot has a strong personality and there is no better place to show that than on social - so we created a Twitter account for GoTBot, as well as a Facebook one. We had a nice conversation with fake Jon Snow of Twitteros and even tweeted a few things at Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner.
We included tailored messages in GoTBot just so that we could start a conversation with, let's say, George R R Martin. Just ask GoTBot if George R R Martin has a heart.
We wanted GoTBot to surprise fans that were engaging in a casual conversation. By asking completely random questions, fans would be surprised by the fact that there is in fact an answer! We planted clever easter eggs curated from our deepest curiosities or from user data.
Press results
In the first week of launching GoTBot, we have seen:
- 135 articles in 12 languages
- 5.5 million estimated coverage views
- 3.92K social shares of press articles
GoTBot made the homepage of Mashable, and was picked up by The Verge, CNet and even Esquire magazine.
"GoTBot covers everything from Jon Snow's nicknames to Hodor's favourite cereal." - Mashable
"The bot's creators clearly have a sense of humor about the show and do a fair amount of trolling when it comes to characters like Jon Snow." - The Verge
"GoTBot isn't afraid to be irreverent. Ask what's up with Cersei and Jaime and it delivers a GIF of actor Peter Dinklage giving a euphemistic description of their incestuous relationship." - CNet
"Better yet, the chatbot is full of snark, and the fun begins when you ask it questions it doesn't reconise. Seriously, it tells jokes and even disses the popular singer/producer Ed Sheeran." - SyFy
"If you never know quite what's going on in "Game of Thrones," there's a new way to find out." - Creativity
Chatbot results
In the first 2 weeks of launch, GoTBot had over 20,000 conversations with 15,000 Game of Thrones fans from all over the world. The longest conversation had 826 messages between GoTBot and an avid Game of Thrones fan - a new best friend, we could say.
With an impressive average conversation of 04:59, GoTBot has seen over 600K messages since launch, growing every day.