Fi - The Interactive Firm: Burton Snowboards

With the successful launch of Kontain Enterprise, a turnkey solution for lifestyle communities, Burton Snowboards were very eager to take advantage of what the Enterprise product had to offer. Burton already had a massive niche following in the snowboard world and wanted to take a step towards bringing that conversation to the forefront of the web and allowing people to share their personal media from season to season, northern hemisphere to southern hemisphere!

As the new snow season fast approaches Burton fans and users have successfully gathered content to drive the conversation forward and bring the Community to life. Taking advantage of the Kontain CMS, Burton Community Managers feature daily content on the site keeping it fresh, relevant and clean. Geared up for this 2010 season the snowboard world is in for a treat of cool media content.

The Process

When people hear the word ‘Burton’ they think snowboarding. We made sure to tackle and brand that perception in the best possible way for Burton. Burton has a great design team up in Vermont and we collaborated with them continuously through the process to get everything consistent with the Burton.com redesign which would launch in parallel. This was a showcase challenge and demonstrated Kontain Enterprise’s true colors of being flexible enough to provide quick aesthetic prototyping and seamlessly skin and update the CSS to accommodate the direction set by Burton.

The process working with Burton to get the community live was greatly facilitated by defining a good project structure and plan while having strong producers in both companies facilitating the communications, tasks and milestones. Clearly defining the scope early was an important factor. Defining features such as custom e-commerce widgets to copy text was crucial in order to turn the solution around very quickly, a strong attribute of the Kontain Enterprise solution.

The Technology

Building a multi-media community portal for a global leading brand such as Burton requires an advanced technical foundation. By using our Kontain Enterprise product, Burton was able to instantly utilize an extensive cutting-edge technology stack, meticulously built to power high-traffic and custom-branded community portals.

Burton's extensive scalability requirements were addressed by Kontain's modern J2EE backend architecture based on advanced enterprise frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. With the solution being deployed in Kontain's pre-existing cloud-based infrastructure, we were able to absorb any of Burton's IT headaches from system installation to operation as well as offer high flexibility for addressing traffic growth in an instant and dynamic manner.

In order to convert any user generated media into a web-compatible format, Burton relied on Kontain’s powerful multi-media transcoding solution KIVATRA, offering high-speed video, photo, audio as well as thumb-nailing processing.

Burton and Kontain also engaged in a close technical collaboration to allow for an authentic and seamless integration of the Community into Burton's existing web eco system. In order to satisfy Burton's wish for syndicating community content in real time on burton.com, the technical teams defined a custom web service API for automatic content export.

Last but not least, efficient search-engine optimization techniques were addressed across all community pages, tailoring to Burton's marketing strategy and assuring high visibility of all community content on Google & Co.

The Result

The Burton Community has been a massive success for Burton Snowboards. As Burton steps into the realm of allowing a media-centric community conversate over a sport they love, they begin to bring more awareness to their brand and more importantly the sport of snowboarding which they hold deep to their hearts.

With traffic starting to spike in the winter months, more and more people are contributing on a daily basis and beginning to share their ‘first snow’ stories online with powerful media backing up their text.