360DigitalInfluence

Tomorrow, as part of Virgin Blue’s 4320SYD campaign, three explorers are setting out across Sydney and Tweeting their experiences minute by minute. Fans can follow their Tweets via a “Twitter Wall” on www.4320syd.com.

A quick recap of the project via an outreach email that we received:

It’s called 4320SYD. The premise is that three participants are flown from Los Angeles to Sydney with the goal of exploring the city over 72 hours before a camera crew, while using Twitter to update their progress every minute – all 4,320 of them. If they succeed, they each win round-the-world plane tickets.

The participants’ tweets are fed through to http://4320syd.com/, which features a ‘tweet wall’ of text and images that acts as a visual depiction of their Australian odyssey.

The three winning friends – Jade, Rob and Bobby – were chosen after they submitted an entry through http://4320syd.com/ describing why they deserved a three-day Australian holiday. In the spirit of Twitter, the entry had to contain 140 characters or less, and participants’ responses fed through to http://twitter.com/4320syd.

The @4320SYD (http://twitter.com/4320syd) account will follow the trio’s Sydney adventure, which begins at 4pm Wed 09 Sep (PDT) / 9am Thu 10 Sep (Sydney local time). The contestants’ individual Twitter accounts are located at @4320SYD_Jade, and @4320SYD_Rob and @4320SYD_Bobby. 

While the campaign willl succeed in creating nearly 13,000 pieces of content – Tweets – as of right now, each of the three contestants (Jade, Rob, and Bobby) has less than ten followers.  True, few people would want to follow the firehose of 4,320 Tweets in 3 days, yet Virgin Blue might have gotten more awareness of the programme had Jade, Rob, and Bobby been Tweeting about gearing up for the trip beforehand, following other Virgin Blue fans, and growing their network of followers before setting out into the city. 

In short, following our approach to developing a presence in Twitter:

Is Virgin Blue missing an opportunity to build up the number of their followers before pushing the go-button on their Sydney adventures?  We will find out in 72 hours!