Tropicana-Twitter ad campaign

I recently interviewed Leslie Bradshaw, Public Affairs Communications Manager at New Media Strategies who created a novel advertising campaign tied to Twitter for Tropicana.

Q: I noticed an advertising campaign at http://www.anorangeamerica.com that seems unique.  This campaign seemed to be tied to an analysis political talk on Twitter during the recent U.S. presidential campaign.  What exactly are you doing behind the scenes?

A: Not to totally geek-out here, buuut, to make it work, we take a sample from Twitter every 30 seconds and analyze them in 50-result batches for associations and term matches. They accumulate for 5 minutes and then we flush sample aggregates to the database. So the database has samples from when it started through present in 5-minute granularity. As new terms trend, they begin to populate on the X-axis. The system back end will be implemented using a Java-based stack and PostgreSQL RDBMS. The presentation will be implemented using Flash targeted to Player 9, standards-compliant XHTML/CSS targeted to modern browser versions with significant market share (Safari 2+, Firefox 2+, IE 6+).

Q: For those who might not be familiar, what exactly is Twitter and what is a Tweet?

A: I could go on and on about Twitter, because I love it and think it is an extremely useful tool... I think founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and the Twitter team are incredibly brilliant for creating and harnessing the simplicity of what is human nature to us all - our ability to produce short, random, meaningful, silly, insightful, introspective, engaging and/or social thoughts. Hopefully this isn't too much...

Broadly ~ Twitter is a new communications application that allows users to send short updates to other users via the Internet, Blackberry, cell phone, and instant messenger (IM) applications.  Generally considered a "micro-blog," the application allows a user to send a text-based message, of up to 140 characters in length, to other users who have requested to receive updates them from that user.  When you post, it is called a "tweet" and the act of posting on Twitter is "tweeting." It's growing in popularity due to its simple, easy to use, and stripped down format. As of October 2008, there are over 2 million registered accounts.  

Specifically ~ Twitter is a social and efficient way of staying in touch with friends and contacts (who also use Twitter, of course) and meeting new folks. It is also provides an outlet to life-stream your thoughts, however short or random they may be, in a public or private (protected) web profile.

Q: How do you "see" or gain access to what people are talking or tweeting about and how do you tie that to the Tropicana brand?

A: There are a couple of ways you can do this, depending on your end goal. If you are a general reader and consumer, just interested in finding others talking about a subject in which you are interested, we recommend ,http://search.twitter.com/. If you are a developer, or an organization, wanting to tap into the data and build a site like we did with Tropicana ("An Orange America"), you would want to connect to the Application Programming Interface (API), which gives you access to the raw data (in this case, the short messages, aka: "tweets") and allows you to perform whatever analysis you would like.

Q: Could this technology be easily targeted to other conversations?

A: Absolutely. You can target conversations through the search engine I listed above and through the general API data I also just mentioned. The key is to make it both useful and authentic -- it is important to understand and participate in the space before just diving in. That is why working with the New Media Strategies Public Affairs team, all of whom are on Twitter; Tropicana was able to further leverage their ingenious idea.

Q: What implications might this have for branding efforts and what would one have to do to make sure it is not intrusive but rather something that advances the conversation or the dialog?

A: The great thing about Tropicana is that when they came to us, they really wanted to find a way to help add value to the social media community and larger political dialog going on around Election Day. As you can see in their An Orange America video, they have a non-partisan, 100% orange approach ("We're not red. We're not blue. We're 100% orange."), which allows the data to speak for itself. Not to overdo it on the juice puns here, but as a political blogger myself, it is refreshing :)  Overall, they felt that building a Twitter application would help make sense by "freshly squeezing" the massive amounts of data (aka: tweets) that would be posted this week.

Q: What else should we know about this technology?

A: At a workshop over the summer at the Online News Association, we shared something then that I would like to share again: Twitter is a natural extension of short-form communication that humans have always used to get their points across, like psalms, Haiku, hieroglyphics, graffiti, slang and text messaging. It is just the most recent - and technologically evolved - carnation of communicating. I want to challenge people to see it as a natural medium and tool, not something highly technical or alienating.
 
Q: What type of brands authentically lend themselves to this type of alignment to conversations on twitter?

A: I would say news brands lend themselves the most to twitter -- Fox News, C-SPAN, Huffington Post -- because they naturally generate a lot of discussion as it is. Twitter is a good way to create a conversation about those stories to make them much more interactive.

Thanks for the story behind the campaign. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this type of advertising in the future.