November In Manchester: Twitter As A Reality Show
Sam Phillips, December 2nd, 2009 12:04 am
November In Manchester, the brainchild of my good friend Tom Mason, is a social media love story. What does this mean? It means that the eight characters have played out their story in real time, over social media. But what is ’social media’? Well, for this project, it meant Flickr, Blogger, and, fundamentally, Twitter.
Twitter is the stage on which this story was played out. What is Twitter? The best explanation I’ve heard so far is ‘one-to-many text messaging’. You send a text – 140 characters – and instead of it being sent to just one friend, it’s sent to all of your ‘followers’. They receive the text on their phones, through the Twitter website, or through Twitter software installed on their computers.
The story is not set in stone, and it happens in real time. In this way, it’s almost more of a reality show than a fictional work with a predetermined path. The characters – Persephone, James, Leonie, Darren, Regina, Paul, Melody and Lee – live in our reality. When we put together the main site, we even gave it a feel of a Big Brother microsite. This is a reality show like no other.
Persephone and Leonie went to the christmas lights being turned on in Manchester city centre, for example. It was quite the live drama! Paul and James went to a football match at Old Trafford. Leonie’s in PR, so if there’s a party or networking event going on, she’s there.
The characters also respond to other people’s tweets – meaning that, just by tweeting them and getting a reply, anybody can become a character in the story. It’s been fascinating to watch people get involved with the story.
But what is most striking about these characters is that they are very almost real people, very believably existing on Twitter – in a way that, in reality, most people don’t. Although Facebook is a mass phenomenon, and MySpace/Bebo remain a modernised version of Geocities, Twitter isn’t quite there yet. It’s the domain of geeks, marketeers and companies doing innovative customer engagement. The November In Manchester characters aren’t any of these types – they’re normal mancunians trying to get from the start to the end of a day unscathed. You can believe that they are real, and reading their tweets you can believe that other, real, people could use Twitter in this way as well.
November In Manchester is now my first example when I explain to a client, colleague, friend or grandparent what Twitter is, what it does, and what it’s for. What is Twitter for? It’s for telling your story to the rest of us.
Interested in how the November In Manchester site works? Check out November In Manchester: Joining those technical dots.
