Emotional Tweets Make This Sculpture Leak Colorful Paint

Imagine if the the marble statues of Ancient Rome spurted out paint like a fountain, but the colors reflected the general mood of the empire's populace. MONOLITT, an interactive installation created by Syver Lauritzen and Eirik Haugen Murvol at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, experiments with a similar idea, as a miniature pedestal takes crowdsourced "sentiment analytics" and turns them into physical paint data visualizations.

In a video detailing the project, above, we see users tweet messages like "Annoyed" or "Feeling good," which triggers certain paint colors that then dribble out of the top of a white statue to make a "procedurally generated three-dimensional painting." Though the clip doesn't explain the technology, we'd guess that MONOLITT is equipped with Raspberry Pi and an API that turns the social media data into physical manifestations. 

Though the Oslo-based MONOLITT sculpture trickled out vibrant globs of pink and blue (presumably associated with positive tweets), we wonder what an NYC rendition of the installation would look like. If we had to guess, there'd be so many opinionated, impatient tweets that a Manhattan MONOLITT would look like a messy spray of bleak goop.

33,000 Twitter Followers in a Month

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A stealth campaign for Wendy’s brought on 33,000 Twitter followers in about a month with minimal ad support, a feat that many brands haven’t been able to match over several years’ time.

The effort, which promotes a new mid-size burger called the W, revolved around a game show on Twitter using the handle@GirlBehindSix. (The six referred to the open slot on Wendy’s menu, which would be filled by the new burger.) Although Wendy’s bought a Promoted Trend for one day on Twitter to publicize the account, the only other paid promotion was an ad that ran a few places on Sixth Avenue in New York and on the 6 subway line that described @GirlBehindSix as a “140-character game show.”

Wendy’s introduced the account on Oct. 6 without any outright affiliation to the fast food chain. The game show launched on Oct. 31. The first round awarded a $1,000 prize to six followers who retweeted the rules of the contest. Prizes after that included mopeds, a shark sleeping bag and a bobblehead based on your pet. The challenges ranged from taking a Twitpic of your old headphones to win new ones to coming up with a name for a moped gang to win a moped.

Danny Flamberg, managing director of strategy and CRM for the Kaplan Thaler Group, the ad agency behind the campaign, says the idea with the prizes was to provide “things you wanted, but would never buy for yourself.”

The response to the game show — including a Klout score that went from zero to 72 — outpaced a 2009 Twitter campaign for Wendy’s Baconator, which netted 16,000 followers in about eight weeks. The 33,000 followers also compare favorably to the 3,500 followers for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, a brand used TV advertising and a Twitter campaign also providing prizes to enhance its Twitter presence.

It’s also a bigger following than some well-known brands on Twitter, like Honda and Puma have gotten in a much longer period of time. However, to put things in perspective, it’s nowhere near the record 1 million followers in 25 hours that Charlie Sheen got in March.

On Monday, Wendy’s revealed its association with @GirlBehindSix. Now the brand is trying to herd those followers over to the Wendy’s account, which has about 47,000 followers. Flamberg says that Wendy’s and Kaplan Thaler are still assessing the results, but believe they have built up enough buzz for the W to set the stage for a TV campaign later this month. Says Flamberg: “The goal was to surprise and delight and give [consumers] a picture of Wendy’s they hadn’t seen before.”