Twitmas Tree

Background

3Sixty wanted to send out an electronic Christmas card but wanted it to be interactive and fun. If you’re a digital agency, well, you have to use the medium, don’t you?

Idea

The agency took the traditional Christmas wishing tree and moved it online, inviting friends, clients and colleagues to contribute their wish by using Twitter.

Anyone could post a message (or a ‘wish’) on the tree, where everyone else could read it. All you had to do was tag a tweet with the hashtag #twitmastree.  To send a wish to a friend, simply include an @somebody tag. After posting your wish, it showed up on the big digital Christmas tree for everyone to see.

A Facebook application helped you personalize and share the Twitmas Tree. Any time a friend sent you a Twitmas Tree wish on Twitter, it would appear in your Facebook stream for all your friends to see as well.

Results

Still pending.

Our Thoughts

Jon Waring, the creative director at 3Sixty, called this idea a ‘flopcess’. It was rather less successful than the agency had hoped in that it didn’t go viral, nor did it get blogged up as a cool Christmassy thing. On the other hand, it did get just about everyone in the agency both involved and enthusiastic, thus sending out an important message internally about creativity. It was also received warmly by those clients the agency most wanted to impress.

That said, the real reason the editorial team accepted this idea for Directory 14 is for the honesty of the submission. All creative people need their flopcesses. They are what happens when you fail, but you fail bravely.