Tasha Harrison

Royal Shakespeare Company Perform Romeo and Juliet on Twitter

The play started on Saturday, has a cast of six and will take place over the next five weeks. Being the first project of its kind, this is a tremendously exciting foray into social media for theatre.

The play is shaping up to be more of a soap opera as we are given an insight into each of the characters. We watch Juliet and her sister, Jess_Nurse, chat to each other about their dead mother, Juliet decrying, “It annoys me that i dont know as much about mum as you do I wish i could have got to know her better “.

We see Tybalt’s anger and hatred of the Montague’s, “Before I go just one more happy thought for the day – MONTAGUE SCUM!”

They’ve introduced a new character, Jago, who has his own Tumblr page. A classmate of Juliet, I suspect that he will become our chorus/commentator as events unfold.

We’ve also had a tour of Juliet’s bedroom, via a Youtube video:

As I’ve watched this unravel over the last couple of days I’m not sure that Shakepeare was the best choice for the first Twitter play. I was initially excited by the concept, but by taking such a well known story I’m more intrigued by how they’re going to do it, rather than what is going to happen. I already know the characters and they are all acting as expected.

There is also no detection of Shakespeare at all and out of all his plays, Romeo and Juliet is by far the most widely interpreted into other mediums.

Bring on the first play written just for Twitter!

You can follow the play via this Twitter list:
http://twitter.com/tashaharrison/r-and-j

A couple of other sources on the play:
Romeo and Juliet get Twitter Treatment
The Royal Shakespeare Company performs Romeo and Juliet via Twitter

There is a huge misconception that you can make a fun video, post it on Youtube and it will be watched by millions of people, possibly even making it onto a ‘Best Youtube Videos Ever’ programme. Sadly, it is extremely difficult to create a video that actually goes viral. There are an estimated 24 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, so it’s incredibly easy for your video to get lost.

Creating a Viral Campaign

However, it is still possible to create a viral campaign if you have a greater plan. Volkswagen have created a viral campaign called ‘The Fun Theory’. Run in Sweden, the campaign sought to prove that you can change people’s behaviour by making things fun. It then invited people to submit their own ideas as part of a competition. The competition took place at the end of last year, but today I stumbled across one of the videos on Youtube, using StumbleUpon (a social bookmarking site).

Below is the video I stumbled:

I came across the campaign by accident, which is the result of a viral campaign. This campaign was paid for by a large business. They put money into the videos, they built a site and, no doubt, spent a great deal of money on advertising. This gave the campaign the impetus to become viral, it was given a huge shove in the right direction.

It also doesn’t seek to explicitly sell cars, it appears to be done simply for the sake of doing something fun. It associates ‘fun’ with ‘Volkswagen’. This is a very effective brand building campaign!