Churchill beats Spiderman to world record
Article originally posted by Duncan McLauchlan in the blog of WCRS, where I worked as a Creative Technologist
Note: I contributed with my work building the Facebook app for this Churchill campaign.
Churchill has beaten Spiderman to claim the Guinness World Records Record Title for the ‘Most Contributions to a Greeting Card’. Oh Yes!
To celebrate Churchill’s birthday, Facebook fans were asked to sign the nodding dog’s online birthday card, encouraged by Churchill to break the World Record attempt with a pledge to donate £2,000 to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, if successful.
An enormous physical card also toured the country collecting birthday messages and signatures at Churchill’s contact centers.
The thousands of online signatures were then manually transferred (we have the sore arms to prove it!) into the gigantic birthday card which, with a total of 4,347 signatures (compared to Spidey’s mere 2,707), was crowned this week as a Guinness World Records record-breaker.
As an added thank you to his fans for their support, Churchill upped his donation to Battersea to £4,347 – that’s £1 for every birthday message Churchill received.
The World Record attempt tops off Churchill’s very busy year which has seen him star in films to celebrate The Oscars and The Proms, and make a celebratory Jubilee mug for which he received a personalized letter from Buckingham Palace.
We could even build a program that captures data at regular intervals from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google+, and Google reviews and store it in our database. This program could also crawl the web searching blog comments and other interesting brand data like logos, awards, statistics, etc.
I believe open data is not enough. We must collect and store brand data to be able to process and deliver great artistic, informative and rich multimedia applications.