Tweeting Twankey

To create a unique promotional activity around Christmastide that will both engage and benefit others, and stand out from other agencies’ yuletide efforts.

The solution? The Tweeting Twankey— a technology rich online-to-mobile-to-offline social media ‘game’ with a good heart.

Every day from December 14th to the 18th we took an-estrogen starved bloke from skive, put him in a Pantomime Dame costume, shoved £100 into his handbag, before kicking him out onto Oxford Street during the busiest hour of shopping.

He then had to prance around the crowds until someone found him and whispered the day’s secret password into his ringed ears, allowing him to fork over the prize money and exit stage left.

To enhance the game experience we implemented some nifty technology to catch all the action. During live performances, users could track down the Twankey on TweetingTwankey.com via real time map and live streaming video footage.

Cryptic clues were also transmitted over Twitter to help those on foot (she is the Tweeting Twankey, after all)

A light mobile site enabled competitors to stalk the Twankey on foot via map and Twitter aggregator.

When the Twankey wasn’t broadcasting live, the site acted as a video archive of the dame’s previous weekly performances.

To generate awareness, an integrated approach was used to get the word out about our lady. Instead of starting from scratch to recruit followers on Twitter, we leveraged the hundreds of @skive followers by temporarily rebranding to @TweetingTwankey for the week.

Much to the bewilderment of our followers we then proceeded to tweet in character throughout the campaign. We lost a few followers as anticipated, but gained many more.

We also set up a Facebook fan page, produced some print ads for the Metro who kindly ran them for three of the five days, and even did some guerrilla stuff on the changing room mirrors in certain stores along Oxford Street.

It was important the Tweeting Twankey was not just another frivolous, self-aggrandising agency stunt around Christmas. It needed to capture the true holiday spirit by providing a real benefit to those less fortunate.

So we aligned with the Shelter’s Christmas Appeal through Twitter and donated £1 every time someone mentioned @TweetingTwankey

This way whenever someone engaged with our activity, the homeless of England benefitted.

The whole campaign was turned around incredibly quickly – from its inception in the pub, to the social media mechanic, costume and web design The game picked-up steam and accrued awareness as the week wore on.