In our first and second blog posts about Mystery Skype, we talked about the meme origins of Mystery Skype and why teachers and students love this educational game. We also discovered the problems that they face when playing Mystery Skype. In this blog post we'll talk about how we launched Mystery Skype on Skype in the classroom.

After 3 weeks of investigation, design and development, we were ready to turn the Mystery Skype meme into a new Mystery Skype hub for teachers. Here's what happened and how teachers have responded.

Having consulted our new Mystery Skype hub with our teachers and client, we were ready to launch just 3 weeks after starting our teacher interviews. The Mystery Skype space on Skype in the classroom was launched in two phases.

1. Mystery Skype preview to existing users
2. Mystery Skype launch to existing users and new users

To ensure that teachers unfamiliar with Mystery Skype had a great experience the first time they used the site, we needed to populate the Mystery Skype community database before our full launch. In order to do this, existing Skype in the classroom members were encouraged to sign up to the Mystery Skype preview page. Within 24 hours of launching the preview page, we received over 600 sign ups. On September 9th we launched with nearly 1,500 sign ups.

In October, we’ve now seen over 3,250 teachers sign up for Mystery Skype and over 1,345 Mystery Skype requests being made. Thanks to the new Twitter feature on the Mystery Skype page we are able to follow conversations around Mystery Skype more closely - from initial contact to amazing feedback after a call. The #MysterySkype community on Twitter is flourishing - more and more teachers are flocking to the website and our social media channels to find out how to join, and Mystery Skype continues to be in the top five keyword searches on Skype in the classroom this year.

Here are some great things that teachers and students created to celebrate the brilliance of Mystery Skype:

Know your meme

Observe user habits and have a keen eye for recurring trends within your online community. Mystery Skype originated from a small group of educators in the USA – now it’s played on 6 continents. It is much easier to convince users to embrace your product if they have already formed its concept and endorsed it in the first place. And if you involve your users in the design and development process, you avoid alienating them as their efforts are essential to the success of your launch.

Sustainability

The creation of Mystery Skype on Skype in the classroom is a long-term sustainable acquisition activity for the service. This is because it is responding to an existing user trend rather than enforcing a behaviour on users. Users are more likely to continue being interested in this game than one pushed to teachers by Skype. And of course, teachers and students will continue to make adjustments to it to keep it fresh and interesting.

Measuring success

The success of Mystery Skype can only be measured by long-term analysis of acquisition stats, but feedback from teachers in the form of positive anecdotes in emails, photos, videos and social media updates help us to gauge whether we’re on track.

To celebrate, here's a great Mystery Skype video made by Katy Gartside’s class, called ‘Find Us Maybe’.

Read more:

Part 1: Mystery Skype - from meme to platform in three weeks
Part 2: Mystery Skype - from meme to platform in three weeks