Who's going to manage the social media? A tree..
Apparently most clients these days want some social media element to the campaigns they commission from their agencies. But who's going to run the blog and twitter feed and upload images to Flickr? In the case of the recently launched campaign for Eos magazine by Happiness Brussels, a tree (yes, that's right, a leafy thing covered in bark) in Brussels is the source of all the campaign's content which includes a twitter feed, a YouTube channel, a Soundcloud account, a Facebook fan page and a Flickr stream...
Yes, a tree in Brussels has been fitted with an on-board computer and a number of sensors including a fine dust metre, an ozone metre, a light metre a weather station and microphone - as well as a webcam, weather station and wi-fi centre. Bespoke software monitors the environment via these various sensors and outputs information in the form of videos on YouTube, sound recordings on Soundcloud, photographs on Flickr and data is translated into sentences which appear on the twitter feed and on a dedicated Facebook page - to give a tree-eye view of life in a busy city. All of these different feeds are brought together on talking-tree.com:
talking-tree.com is the homepage for the Eos campaign which sees information collected by a tree sent to various social media streams
The point of the campaign is to highlight scientific magazine Eos's forthcoming Low Impact Month - an initiative that looks to persuade the magazine's Dutch and French readers to cut down on their carbon emissions and decrease the size of their ecological footprint. The tree's activity is designed to give people a sense of their impact on nature, in a friendly, accessible, and upbeat way.
Whether or not the tree records any remarkable, entertaining, or simply behaviour-changing footage / sounds / data remains to be seen. But a tree (ok, and some very clever bespoke software) running a twitter feed has got to be a first.
Here's a short film that explains how the tree was equipped to produce the various streams of content that feed into the campaign site at talking-tree.com:
We walk by trees all the time, rarely recognizing them as living beings rather than static objects. But that’s what they are — complex, delicate organisms that respond to their environment, from the weather to pollution to noise level, in ways too subtle for us to notice. If they could speak, what would they say? To find out, Dutch science magazine 
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