Polar Ice Vodka launches innovative brand site with unique twitter “echoes” as part of site integration!

Today we launched our second major website in the last 3 months – this time for Polar Ice Vodka.

Although they are the top selling Canadian Vodka, up until today they haven’t had a robust presence online.

Our assignment? Create a brand site that goes beyond what the category has done traditionally by integrating social media extensions into the website experience.

We were inspired by the boldness of the Skittles launch a few months ago, but we didn’t want to lose control of the brand like they did and we wanted to make the experience two-way so that we could maintain buzz beyond the initial PR of the launch.  We were also inspired by the interactivity of twistori and came up with an idea to integrate the brand identity system we created for Polar Ice with an innovative interactive experience.

The result – introducing regional socialscapes with twitter “echoes”

After passing the age validation page (as mandated by Canadian law), your experience at polarice.ca begins with a “socialscape” indicative of the region you are from. You can change the socialscape by clicking on the forward or backwards arrows.

Next you’ll notice short phrases floating above the socialscape that look like sound echoes from the socialscape. They’re in fact tweets from the twitteroti that we are currently following through the twitter account we’ve setup (mia_at_polarice).  Every time the page loads, we ping twitter for the latest tweets from our followers and store them in a database table to scrub them for naughty words before publishing them as echoes in the socialscape.

Although neat & interesting in its own right (and unique for a brand site), the true interactivity begins when the user clicks on any of the echoes as the page expands and a new menu appears with 5 brand attributes (party, vodka, night, ice, Canadian). Clicking on any of those attributes will change the stream of echoes to match those that contain those words only.

Below the brand attributes is a search box – enter any word you wish and we’ll publish echoes right away. Try typing in a competitor Vodka brand and see what happens!

Toronto local producer Morgan David also created 4 sound loops for your experience – that may be available as ring tones in the future. Morgan has been involved in the underground and club scene for many years and has produced albums and tracks for some of the top labels out of Detroit and Toronto.

Other highlights include:

• Link to facebook public profile under “Friends” link
• Link to our Twitter page
• “Share this” social widget to allow word of mouth to other social media sites
• Contest to win a summer party up north with all your friends
• Product information
• Vodka recipe ideas

What do you think?

I may be biased because we built the site, but we believe this is a truly innovative way of integrating twitter into a brand site that goes well beyond what has been done in the past.

Special mention to Daniel Hill, Ryan Sood and Vladimir Hinic who were the core “A” team to bring to concept to life.