A bite sized, personalised map of your family travels

Over a tour of Iceland and The Faroe islands this summer, Kirstie Pelling and her family communicated with friends and followers using a new smartphone app that captured their experiences and added them onto their own personalised online map.

By the time they came home they had three movie mad kids, increased engagement with their readership, and a lasting record of their six weeks in one of the strangest lands on earth…

The first time I used Punkt, I fell off a wall while doing the piece to camera. I’m sure that never happened in Blue Peter! I’m the writer in the family and as a rule I don’t do front of camera on account of my bum being too big for the shutter. But there was something about the Punkt app that the kids and I found very addictive. In fact, after a while we didn’t bother getting out of the car unless we could Punkt the moment.

What is Punkt?

Punkt is a smartphone tool that geotags your travel experiences, enabling your followers to see your location while sharing your joy and pain. You can upload pictures, videos, tweets or snippets of gossip on to your own personalised and branded map. The clever thing is if you are somewhere remote, like we were most of this summer, it remembers the exact location and adds it to your map retrospectively when you finally manage to bag yourself a coffee and some wi-fi.

A wandering app for a busy, active family

For the past 10 years we have been taking our kids off on long adventures in the summer holidays, reporting on our experiences on our family travel blog The Family Adventure Project. We’ve biked all over Europe and New Zealand, railroaded across The States, eco-toured in the Pacific and this summer we traveled the whole of Iceland in our clapped-out family car. We’ve never bothered using video before; the thought of having to edit hours of fluffed lines from kids who haven’t washed put us off.

But Punkt worked for us because of its immediacy. We could spot a moment, shoot it, upload it to our family map and move on. The tool only saved one take at a time and editing was a no-no, so re-making ‘The Lord of the Rings’ wasn’t an option. But it was great for a family like us who travels a lot and can never remember where they’ve been; or which town in which country that great photo of a church was taken.

Our special moments

Our kids loved it as it was both an excuse to hog the iPhone and to put themselves centre stage. In fact they loved it so much that there was no escaping the app. If you have an ego then you need to leave it back at home when you are traveling with Punkt. There’s no makeup artist on hand to make you look good on very basic video, and it reveals a lot about your family dynamics and personalities in a way that blogging doesn’t. Our followers now know for sure that I’m the one who has to put up the tent in the middle of the night, that we can turn a car into a pig sty in minutes, that our boys are eco-vandals and that my husband has a latent talent for knitting.

Engaging your followers

But despite (or maybe because of) all that, our followers were very engaged. Many of them abandoned reading our lengthy blog posts and took to snacking on our bite-sized video clips. We made sure we captured our experiences on Punkt up to three times a day and it paid off in the stats. Average visit time was four minutes, there was a high return rate and Punkt tell us that we became our own mini TV station, with a recorded 32 hrs of viewing on our own branded holiday map. “More than your average stalker!” It helped people get to know us as individuals rather than an entity and helped reinforce our brand and what we are about. I’m looking forward to Punkt updates that integrate it more with my blog, allowing visitors to move more seamlessly between the two.

Engaging sponsors

And it reinforced our sponsor’s brand. For this trip we worked with Berghaus, as their ‘Everyday Adventurers’ for August. Our Punkt map was Berghaus-branded and much of the time we wore Berghaus jackets, providing positive and targeted brand associations ie; a healthy active family having fun together in the outdoors.

David Coombes, Senior Digital Marketing Executive for Berghaus said Punkt stood out for them as an opportunity to add another dimension to their online content. He said that Kirstie and her family “regularly delivered content that was consistently engaging, insightful and informative, which helped deliver results well beyond what we expected.”

The jackets and the campaign were a good fit all round and we are hoping our footage will attract other commercial sponsors in the future.

Continuing the journey

At half term we did a trip to London to look at the capital ‘Beyond 2012’ and what the Olympic and Jubilee legacy has left for a family who likes to have a bit of an adventure. We ‘Punkt’ the kids and I walking up the side of the 02 building, ice skating at the Natural History Museum and having a Prince and Princess afternoon tea. The children were delighted. They had missed the glamour of being on camera and the challenge of doing the filming. My bum was still too big for the camera, but I’m hoping you might not notice it on a map the size of London.

Find out more

The Family Adventure Project

Family Adventure Project Iceland Punkt map

From October half term onwards you can follow us here: punkt.luxson.com/FAP/

To find out more about how you can get Punkt for your own adventures visit: www.punktlife.com