#PABlazers: Leveraging and bridging communities

Twitter is the fastest growing network on the inter-tube-web today, and we are still developing an understanding of its potential.  I like that Southwest Airlines could help me out if I miss my flight, or that I may find Shaq in my town handing out free tickets-but what more could be done? Could you bridge the activity of Twitter with the activity of a brand for an experiment in interactive marketing? Well, we figured out a way to do just that.

The Portland Trailblazers’ victories this season, and their momentum going into the playoffs, electrified the whole town. Simultaneously, Twitter was ablaze with Trailblazer hypes, hopes, disses and dissent. Do those two worlds have to be so far apart? We thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if we bridged the electricity happening on the street, with the action happening online. Hey, we have prime real estate here on Broadway and Alder in downtown Portland, so why not set up a couple of projectors to display the Blazer activity on Twitter for the fans on the street? So out of a sense of civic duty, we did.

It took me one day to build the prototype software because, well, I only had one day to do it.  The idea popped up a day before the first playoff game, and to be honest, it wasn’t very difficult to do if you are familiar with Actionscript 3 interfacing with API’s. I used Tweetr’s API to perform a search for the most recent 20 tweets containing “blazers,” “trailblazers”, or “uprise.” Flash took those tweets, and fed them into a hopper which displayed a new tweet every 5 seconds.

But wait, there’s more. We set up a special hash-tag, #PABlazers, so that people on the street could tweet from their phones and see it right here on our windows. Now that’s interactivity- and that’s how we do it here at Pop Art.