The History Press set out to reconstruct the famous voyage of the "unsinkable" Titanic via Twitter to celebrate it's 100th anniversary. An account @TitanicRealTime was created so that people could experience the "live tweet" event that the Daily News talks about in more detail here. Through the use of personal messages from the captain, passengers and crew members this event engaged over 110,000 followers on Twitter. This article states that one reason why it was successful is that it "was an innovative experiment in leveraging social media for historical entertainment and education". I think the recreation of Titanic via Twitter was a wonderful idea because it was a innovative way of using social media that I had not come across before. In the future it has been discussed that The History Press might tweet more
historical events, but the question is what other events should be recreated?
As well as the History Press recreating Titanic through the use of twitter, the 100th anniversary was also celebrated through the re-release of Titanic the film but this time in 3D. The release of the film in 3D resulted in backlash on twitter because some people did not actually know that Titanic was real. Yes, that's right "Titanic wasn't just a movie?" How ignorant can you get? This article discusses the backlash in more detail. Some of the comments below give you an idea just how unbelievably uneducated some people are about the Titanic.
As a PR student it can be said that there is a disadvantage to using social media because it shows people's ignorance about everyday life and historical events just like this example of the Titanic. However if The History Press were to tweet other historical events this would be an advantage to social media because it would be educating users.
Personally for me, I found it an incredibly interesting use of the platform, far more interesting than the standard fare of “Eating my lunch #dank” that I get on my feed. However to go as far to say that some people (Who I certainly hope are the minority) and their ignorance act as a disadvantage to Public Relations is not entirely true. To the greater majority that feed was surely a great resource and fascinating to generations that aren’t aware of the event past the film.
ReplyDeleteOn the film itself being re-released, at it’s best it’s a money making spin based on a film’s previous popularity, at it’s worst I’d go as far as to say it’s almost disrespectful to pay ‘tribute’ by making even more money by adding post production 3D to it! The fact that people were willing to pay £10 and more to see a film that’s already broken box office records is unbelievable, but fair enough, James Cameron is the only director I can think of who can pull a stunt like that.