Creativity on Twitter boosts communication in Brazil

February 5th, 2011 / 4:01 am

Guest post by Rodrigo Capella of São Paulo, Brazil

If there is something we always think about in the communications world, it is: How can we do something really different? This question is as wide as the possible answers. However, it may be – oddly enough – answered in one word: creativity.

In Brazil, there is a dispute between the public relations firms and the digital agencies concerning who is best able to build programs and create content for social media. To explain that, I am going to present two Brazilian examples.

To promote the sale of Xbox, the virtual shop Saraiva announced on Twitter an interactive campaign with its followers, developed by digital agency iThink. The followers’ participation was the key distinction of this effort. To be part of it, you had to follow @saraivaonline (so far, nothing original) and tweet an image simulating a scene or a character from any Xbox game (this is the insight of the campaign). The twenty best pictures went to a popular vote and the author of the most voted image won an Xbox. To see the best photos of the campaign, visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/saraivaxbox

Another interesting campaign was undertaken by public relations agency LVBA for Nokia. To make it known that a mobile application had been developed to access digital channels (social networks, sites, blogs, etc.), LVBA raffled – via Twitter – a Nokia 5235 with the ‘Comes With Music’ embedded app.

The initiative itself was simple. Just follow the profile of the agency (@lvba), Re-Tweet (‘RT’) a specific phrase, and you are already participating. The originality was in raffling a cell phone with an application, offering a user experience for the Twitter followers.

These two actions – creative in certain aspects – have helped to consolidate Twitter as an innovative, agile and intelligent tool in communications programs.

In the past, communication campaigns in Brazil were limited to the RT of some messages on Twitter to get discounts or win some products; nowadays, we’re seeing an additional dimension to these new programs: real interactivity, either through the imitation of an Xbox character, or through a mobile application experience.

It is a new kind of communication being created by digital and PR agencies. It doesn’t matter who does it. The initiative is becoming increasingly more social, more fun and certainly not predictable.

What is coming next?

Rodrigo Capella is a Brazilian public relations professional. A lecturer and writer, he edits the blog PR Interview and has more than twenty books published. E-mail: capella.rodrigo@gmail.com Twitter: @rodrigo_capella

Categories: guest post
comments(1) Tags: brazil, digital, latin america, microsoft, PR, xbox