Many social media platforms like Twitter or Flickr were built to attract people to share their content in an ad-free space, and people knew that their content wouldn’t be used to market anything. This makes it difficult — but not impossible — for Marketers to harness this media to sell products. We were careful and respectful of this nature when seeking out partners with the goal to leverage their platforms, however, in the end due to some of these conflicting non-commercial virtues, we decided to fly solo and create our own app that basically tweaks the Twitter idea of sharing brief messages and mashes it up with complimentary photography.
In this app, we attempt to pull each photograph based on what the person is saying to give an element of surprise. Without using keywords, it was challenging to create an algorithm to would weigh each word in the string and attempt to find the best possible match. Our .NET developer, Mustufa Baig did a great job in preparing all the data which I tapped into to feed this AS3 experience that stands on the hive framework.
By creating our own platforms, we had no restrictions around what we could do with the content and, by being upfront about where one could send their “moment”, we were able to distribute them widely to the Mobiel Momentjes (Mobile Moments) campaign site, to Hyves (the Dutch version of Facebook), to msn as an extra tab on messanger; and even to mobile devices thanks to our Marvelous partner.
Now that we have this infrastructure setup, it would be neat to open up this project and create an API for visual developers to play with the media. I was at the end of this project train and didn’t have much say in the design, but I can see a lot of potential in dealing with the raw data. For instance, the photography is scaled down is screaming for various full-screen views. I also think a different take on the ticker interaction could benefit from being to click on each moment to open them up instead of rolling around, similar to Flickr clock. Expanding the UI could include buttons to toggle the auto mode or refresh the app, but this is more for a power user and may distract from the simplicity of of the campaign goal to encourage people fairly new to texting to start sharing. Beyond that, this project was really the brain child of Omar Zuberi, our creative director for the Amsterdam office, I think his vision drove this project in some cool directions and it could take off here in Canada.