fbpx

Implementation Guide for Shadowbox Live

First things first - Register as an Account and Login to your Shadowbox LIVE Portal

Once you have completed registration, we will invite you to your personalized portal and schedule a working session to get your team up to speed on our capabilities.

REGISTER NOW

You may invite any of your team members to the portal.    It can be used to view/manage your widgets, view your analytics (this is just V1 of analytics) and you can create palettes and use the Predictor tool to estimate your revenues from each client opportunity.

Getting Started Guides for Events and Venues

Click on the image to download the Getting Started Guide for Events and/or Venues.  This can be useful for socializing the capabilities of the widget with your team and your clients.

To power any of your existing client's apps and to enhance your offering to new prospects

The Smart Trip Tool can be used to allow your clients to plan a trip to see individuals, prospects, clients and other venues.

Following are some ideas for your client base for this capability, based on their content and what would drive their customers to travel:

 

To power your events

The Smart Trip tool can be added to any event system to allow anyone traveling to an event to find a hotel nearby.    It can also feature:

  • Speakers
  • Exhibitors
  • Celebrities
  • Workshops

To be installed on your customers' websites as a VISIT US page

As an enterprise account, Shadowbox Live will benefit from any of your clients that make their travel plans using your TripProximity’s Smart Trip Tool from any page on your website.

To raise money for any cause that you or your clients care about

Our Smart Giving anywhere tool can be used by Shadowbox Live or any of your customers to raise money for a 501c3.  Instead of our normal 10% donation annually to your charity of choice, with the use of the Smart Giving tool, on a quarterly basis, we will donate 25% of our gross revenues from bookings made using the tool.

Each individual widget can be a separate campaign for a different charity.   It can be used by your employees, friends, family or any group that your company is associated with.

The self-service version of this product is being released mid-May to our client base and as a channel partner, it will be available to you as soon as it is released.  We will keep you posted.

To integrate trip planning into any photo or video

As long as the photo or video has a lat/long, we can add a button to the screen to VISIT that place.

The Event Widget

The Event widget is one of our Smart Trip tools.  It allows you to embed trip planning in any event for any of your client’s apps.

It is distinct from the Venue widget in that it has a specific date range for the event and a location where the event is held.

Dynamic Tool Customization

Once we have provided the base events widget, you may choose to implement the dynamic variable elements that you wish to pass at display time to the appropriate widget snippet.  They should be preceded by the following two lines. Follow the variables with the closing code segment.

We’ve included the recommended variables for Shadowbox Live (shown encased in %VARIABLENAME% signs, which you will strip out in your actual entry):

<script type=”text/javascript”>
tripWidget({
eventStart: ‘YYYY/MM/DD’,
eventEnd: ‘YYYY/MM/DD’,
headerText: ‘Plan your trip to ‘,
appendPOI: ‘Y’,
poiName: ‘%EVENTNAME%’,
address: ‘%STREET%, %CITY%,%STATE%,%POSTCODE%’,
trackingCode: ‘%CUSTOMERTRACKINGINFO%’,
imageUrl: ‘%IMAGEURL%’,
imageLink: ‘%IMAGELINK%’,
})
</script>
Once you have the code installed, contact us with the test link and we will help to test on multiple platforms and on multiple browsers.

Accordion Title Text

  • The tool type is set to EVENT
  • The header text is set to “Plan my trip to “
  • Pass the Event Name as a variable
  • The POI name will be appended to the header text
  • We have stored a default image that you can override at display time
  • Pass the Tracking number at display time from your customer information
  • Pass the location information in the address field at display time
  • We default to the US and USD for currency
  • The booking brand will default to the hotels nearby events
  • You can customize the color scheme from your portal to customize the palette for the widget.  Each of your clients can have their own palette.
  • The widget is set to display the HOTEL tab in front.  If you would like a MAP widget as the default, we can change it or we can provide a separate widget for that purpose, which could be called based on a business rule.  We have a 10 booking per month minimum if you use the MAP widget to cover the costs of our mapping API.
  • We have enabled the Air and Driving tabs
  • The user can enter the departure and arrival airports at transaction time
  •  The event dates should be passed to us at transaction time

The Venue Widget

The Venue widget is one of our Smart Trip tools.  It allows you to embed trip planning on any page for any of your clients’ systems or apps where there is a contact with an address.  A venue can be a physical place, like a company or a museum, or it can be a location like a park or a beach.  As long as we can pinpoint a latitude/longitude, we can “trip enable” the contact record.

It is distinct from the Event widget in that the dates of travel are relative to the date that the tool is displayed, e.g. travel 7 days from today for 1 night.

Click the HDQ widget above to see the widget for the Shadowbox Live website for people traveling to visit you.

We will walk you through the creation of a dynamic venue widget in your own custom portal.

In the next section you will find the instructions for our Dynamic tool, which shows you how to substitute your data for our variables in real time, so that you only have to install the widget snippet once.  Once it is installed, if you wish to make changes, you can edit the base elements of the widget in the Portal and you do not have to reinstall the snippet. See the defaults in the last section.

Dynamic Tool - Customizing with variables from your system

To generate the dynamic widget, once you build your venue widget you will add the following to the widget snippet. This includes the dynamic variable elements that you wish to pass at display time, preceded by the following two lines (your snippet). Follow the variables with the closing code segment.

Here is an example of a script to implement a dynamic widget on your web page (shown encased in %VARIABLENAME% signs, which you will strip out in your actual entry):

<script type=”text/javascript”>
tripWidget({
daysFromToday: ‘7’,
numberOfDays: ‘1’,
headerText: ‘Plan your trip to ‘,
appendPOI: ‘Y’,
poiName: ‘%CONTACTNAME%’,
address: ‘%STREET%, %CITY%,%STATE%,%POSTCODE%’,
trackingCode: ‘%CUSTOMERTRACKINGINFO%’,
imageUrl: ‘%IMAGEURL%’,
imageLink: ‘%IMAGELINK%’,
})
</script>
Once you have the code installed, contact us with the test link and we will help to test on multiple platforms and on multiple browsers.

Your Variable Settings can be modified in your TripProximity Portal

  • The tool type is set to VENUE
  • The header text is set to “Plan my trip to “
  • Pass the Company or Venue Name as a variable
  • The POI name will be appended to the header text
  • We have stored a default image that you can override at display time
  • Pass the Tracking number at display time from your customer information
  • Pass the location information in the address field at display time
  • We default to the US and USD for currency
  • The booking brand will default to the hotels nearby
  • The color scheme can be set in the portal for each widget type or you can set up templates for each client.
  • The widget is set to display the MAP in front.  If you would like a HOTEL widget as the default, we can change it or we can provide a separate widget for that purpose, which could be called based on a business rule
  • We have enabled the Air and Driving tabs
  • The user can enter the departure and arrival airports at transaction time
  • The travel dates will default to 7 days from the day that the widget is displayed
  • The default trip length is 1 night
  • These can both be overriden by the traveler

Tech Tips

Following are tips for the technical integration of TripProximity.

The product is currently container and device responsive.  We will need to work with your app development team to determine what changes are needed for the widget to render properly from within your apps.

Static or Dynamic Widget

The static widget contains the following:

async onload=”tripWidget()”

The dynamic widget does not load asynchronously.  If you turn on the dynamic flag in the portal in the widget editor, it removes that line from the code snippet that is generated.  If you try to install a dynamic widget directly into an HTML container on WordPress, it will NOT render.

External System Interaction

The TripProximity widget interacts with the following systems:

  • Google Places for lookup of the venues and addresses in the address field
  • Google Maps for lookup of the latitude/longitude of any address

Once the input from the widget is received, we pass a search string to our booking system.  It contains:

  • Brand to be displayed in the booking system
  • Travel parameters
  • Tracking information to provide reporting back to you for each client

CSS

The widget has its own style sheet that governs the display of the widget within a container.

Rules for Display

The widget can be populated with event and venue information.  Ideally, the widget needs the full address to do an accurate proximity lookup of the hotels nearby.

The date fields for events can be coupled with a business rule.  For instance if you have an event that begins before noon, you may want to set the date of arrival to 1 day before the event begins.  If the event ends after 3pm, you may want to set the date of departure to 1 day after the event.

Just a reminder, even if there is no address or a partial address (city/state), our new widget with the Google Places lookup can find the precise address of the venue or company that they are visiting (even a Starbucks or TopGolf! or finding a hotel near someone’s house that works from home).  The user controls this by using the pencil tool on the address field to do their own lookup.

Press Release Draft

We will work with you to draft a press release about our relationship at the appropriate time.

Email Announcement to your Customer Base

We will work with you to craft communications with your client base at the appropriate time.

Recommended Help Text

We will work with you to customize the help text for each client.

For any other details regarding widget customization, please access the Support Center.