Nissan tries to engage the Twitter-gen

Sandy Avvari wants to introduce you to the 2009 Nissan Cube, but she doesn't wear a company name badge or even drive a Nissan.

She's one of 500 Canadians handpicked to Tweet, blog and text about the Cube as a contestant in Hypercube, a social media campaign designed to promote Nissan's all-new vehicle online.

Hypercube challenges social-media users and talented individuals across the country to demonstrate their "social creativity" for a chance to win one of 50 Cubes valued at $20,000.

Avvari, 30, believes she was recruited by Nissan at the Toronto auto show in February, where she was spotted at the Cube display peppering company reps with questions about the car.

"I gave them my email address and about a month later they sent me an invitation to enter their contest," she recalls.

Last week, Avvari was chosen as one of the 500 finalists after proving she was an active and motivated campaigner, spending her free time Twittering on mobile phones and the Internet, and participating in discussions about the Cube on Facebook. (Twitter is an Internet conduit for sending short messages, up to 140 characters, via mobile phones or Internet.)

"I think they were measuring my level of activity," Avvari surmises of the selection criteria.

As a finalist, she has a personal "canvas" on the contest site, hypercube.ca, where she posts inspired thoughts about the car.

Avvari has taken to writing daily poems and haikus, and is experimenting with videos.

"I'm not the most technically savvy person," she shrugs. "There are a lot of multimedia artists and designers who have entered. I want to be the normal person who wins."

Other "hypercubists" have been posting videos – one Montreal man torments a plasticine cube with a chef's knife and a drill – and links to original music.

"Tswizz" from East York shows off her Cube-inspired haircut on her popular canvas, currently ranked ninth in the voting.

For Nissan, giving away $1 million worth of cars is a small price to pay to have the contestants create a buzz about the Cube in hyperspace, where many 20-somethings congregate.

"The target market for Cube consumes media in a manner very different than our traditional consumers," explains Didier Marsaud, Nissan Canada's senior corporate communications manager. "They are inundated with mass-media messages and are very selective of which ones they choose to engage with."

The winners will be determined not just by the number of eyeballs they've attracted – the universal advertising yardstick – but the judges will also look for uniqueness, creativity, personality, enthusiasm and votes by peers.

Avvari, who ironically works for a printing company, likes to remind her online friends to vote for her daily, and she says they don't seem to mind.

"When I started email blasting my friends, they told me they hadn't heard of the Cube and were quite interested in it."

Marsaud says Nissan is surprised by the level of talent the participants have shown in a contest that hasn't been attempted by an automaker before.

"These aren't typical `car guys' that are participating," he says. "We've really engaged the creative class – graphic artists, painters, musicians, designers – as we've given them the opportunity to showcase their creativity in a national forum."

Jeromy Lloyd, who reports on social media for Marketing magazine, says online meeting places such as Facebook are popular with advertisers because costs are low – $1 million worth of cars is cheaper than a normal model launch – and the medium offers other benefits.

"Advertisers are going to social media because it potentially offers more than just one-way communication with consumers. You're conversing with them and getting them more engaged in your brand."

"Doritos did the same thing with its recent Guru campaign," Lloyd adds. "They asked people to come up with a product name and create an ad for it. These people have basically signed up to be walking advertisements for these brands for free."

But the introduction of new services such as Magpie, where Twitter users are paid to carry advertising messages, raises the prospect social media will evolve into another disingenuous marketing vehicle.

In the meantime, judging of Avvari's hypercube canvas and those of 499 other influencers will begin on May 20, with the winners announced by mid-June.