We worked alongside Artifact to create Social Republik, a visual environment that places threads of real-time dialogue within appropriate context — whether it be the reflection of a physical location or an imaginative virtual world.

OBJECTIVES:

The social application requirements based on six basic principles

Immersive: draw people immediately into ongoing conversations that matter using rich media and multiple means for exploration….vertically, horizontally… whatever direction for that matter.

Interactive: enable people to engage with the social objects people are talking about– like music, movie clips and maps.

Contextual: designed around conversations specific to specific subjects, brands or events.

Fun: make conversations more entertaining, encouraging greater participation.

modular: the application should allow for a dynamic expansion/control over the  user interface design, to allow the participation and ownership of multiple brands.

scalable: as the conversation topic grows so does the application traffic demand, both from input and output channels.

SOLUTION:

Utilizing traditional web crawling Technics in conjunction with web 2.0 social APIs (such as twitter), we create Social Republik as a social framework. The framework utilizes zend framework, and it allows to dynamically control the conversation input source, conversational topics, moderation tools, analytical tool and an open API for integration with user interface.

RESULT:

This resulted in the creation of 2 instances for this application:

Venables Bell & Partners

Venables Bell & Partners, recently named by Ad Age as one of the top 10 agencies in the country, had 3 spots in the 2010 Super Bowl and they wanted to extend a project created last year to track online conversation around its 2009 Super Bowl spot for Audi. We extended the water cooler metaphor by creating a fun and slightly surreal digital simulation of a typical typical American office. As chatter about the brands and the spots start popping up on Twitter, workers beam in and out of the space with tweets appearing in speech bubbles that float above their heads. In the name of whimsy we added a few Segway-mounted Green Police from the Audi spot, the robot waiter from the Intel spot and viral video celebrities Tay Zonday (Chocolate Rain) & Gary Brolsma (Numma Numma) from the Vizio spot. This all adds up to a tight story that demonstrates that beyond creating impressions, Super Bowl spots ignite conversations that keep brands relevant and top of mind in forums and media channels well beyond broadcast media.

TriBeCa Film Festival: 2010

When the TriBeCa Film Festival decided to get to grips with the inevitable social chatter that would be taking place on Twitter around the 2010 festival they took a look at Social Republik as a platform for twitter visualizer. It soon became clear that we would have to make something quite substantial to accommodate the hundreds of screenings and multiple locations of the Festival. In contrast to the office like environment in Social Republik’s first instance a more dramatic visual approach was taken to support the illustration of multiple locations and unique conversations that were taking place at each of those locations. Whenever anyone tweeted about a film screening at the venue their tweet appeared in the space along with a suitably TriBeCa-looking avatar to represent them!