Every year churches and schools tell the Nativity story in various ways from plays to poems to songs. Now Excentric, a Portugal-based digital marketing company has hit on a brand new way of telling the story ... by using social media.
"The Digital Story of the Nativity" tells the familiar biblical story through Google searches, e-mails, tweets, Facebook "Likes" and Foursquare "check-ins," and has gone viral in the short period it has been up.
It all began a few weeks ago when Miguel Figueiredo, the president of Excentric, challenged his creative team to illustrate to traditional companies just how they could harness social media.
"This is something very powerful for brands. In Portugal, there is a lot of step back to this. People are afraid to do this sort of thing. So we decided to do this for our sake," Figueiredo told CNN.com.
It took the team around five weeks to go the first conception of the idea to the completion of the video. Its highlights include:
• Mary shopping online for a donkey, and Joseph acquiring a cow in FarmVille
• The three kings checking into the manger on Foursquare
• The wise men shopping on Amazon for gold, frankincense and myrrh
• Untold numbers of Facebook "Likes" after a status update announcing Jesus' birth
In just over a week, the Portuguese version of the video has 1.5 million page views, while the two English language versions have a combined for more than 1.4 million hits.
Figueiredo said the aim was to show his clients in Portugal exactly how social media tools can work and how seamlessly they can blend in with one's own story.
"We took the story that everyone knows and (our clients) could follow it to learn, especially for people who are pretty far from the usage of (social media) tools, and take them step-by-step through the benefits of each of these platforms," he said.
"We also chose a date where people start thinking about Christmas and sending post cards but they are not actually doing it yet. So we took that time when people are very sensitive to receive these type of things, so they think, 'Oh what a great idea for me to send as my own Christmas cards,' " Figueiredo added.
"The story for us is very familiar, even all the details. Of course we involved the people who are more connected to the religion on a more daily basis and they were very participative in the creative process," he said.
Excentric doesn’t normally focus on religious material, and doesn’t intend to repeat this sort of work.
"We are certainly not proposing turning religious stories into marketing tools. We picked this particular story for this video precisely because we are not promoting any commercial brand for the main audience," Figueriedo said.
(You can watch the video on Youtube by searching for ‘nativity story social media’).