Put Your Facebook Friends In A Horror Trailer!
Last year the Dutch Ministry of Justice released the award winning Stanislav campaign. This viral received many positive, but also negative publicity. The campaign, which was made to raise the awareness around privacy on the internet topic, used information from profiles of Dutch leading social network Hyves, that was set to private.
Nevertheless Stanislav was very successful, and perhaps inspired Swisscom to release a similar technical concept, using your Facebook profile and 9 of your preferred friends:
Lost in Val Sinestra
See the promotional video for the viral below
The viral is a great piece of technology, using the Facebook API. On this website, you can make a Facebook connection, the tool automatically connects to your profile and picks 9 random profiles from your friends. The result is a great trailer where information and pictures from the selected profiles are perfectly integrated.
My question is if this campaign will receive negative publicity again, especially as privacy is a hot topic around Facebook these days. What do you think?
A nice detail is that the hotel used in the viral, Val Sinestre, really exists, perhaps a great location for your seventieth birthday? 
Anyway, check out my version of the trailer here.
Some screenshots from the trailer:
Source: SocialMediaConsultancy.nl
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Thanks for posting this amazing viral. Good question you raise on the possibility of negative publicity. When you install the app on Facebook, the app collects and maintains personal information from your account such as your name, your friends names, email address and an ACCOUNT PASSWORD. Swisscom stores this information on servers in Switzerland, Germany and possibly other countries. In some cases, Swisscom may process personal information on behalf of a third party, such as advertising partners.
source: http://data.lost-in-val-sinestra.com/3/pdf/application-rtc.pdf
This goes further than common privacy protection rules allow, but untill now nobody seems to notice. It could turn out badly for Swisscom, that earlier had some very popular virals made.
After comments from 10com, Swisscom changed the privacy-policy on the lost in val sinestra website. Unclear is, if the data trafficking changed.
I like the film a lot. Ideas I think is okay.
But, I do hope to see some more mature big engagement ideas in social networks. Most of us have seen this kind of personalized “trics” already a few times.
In other words, joined these kind of promotions before, already got my “t-shirt” and hope to be inspired with something new or more engaging.
The big engagement idea of VW fun theory for example?
To be fair to Swisscom TV, lots of efforts, better than 80% of other social campaigns we see, so keep up the good work!
Cheers
[...] Zdroj: Viralblog [...]
I also like the idea, but I don’t find it really a ’360 concept’, more just ’180′.
It’s sponsored by Swisscom, as you can see at the end of the trailer, but it doesn’t have a clear to action: why is this made, what should it promote?
I think they miss a big opportunity here.
What I haven’t experienced (it had some bug when I used it), they post the trailer on the Facebook walls of your selected friends as well… could be perceived as spamming? What do you guys think?
Its a good idea to give a surprise to a friend. Its a pretty good post. I will try this idea at least once. Thanks you.
thank you for posting this article,and your question you had raised is just my question, I am expected the answer too.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
[...] this year we wrote about Swisscomm‘s Lost in Val Sinestra, an entertaining viral video which you could personalize using your Facebook account. Schweppes has [...]
[...] this year we wrote about Swisscomm‘s Lost in Val Sinestra, an entertaining viral video which you could personalize using your Facebook account. Schweppes has [...]
[...] Zdroj: Viralblog [...]
UPDATE OCTOBER 2011
2nd copycat of the idea, this time in the US
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/mysterious-site-creates-a-horror-movie-starring-you/
Jason Zada says he’s the creator – you bet