Nativity Story via YouTube: Miracles of Social Media?

The birth of Jesus is to date, one of the most magical and interesting stories we have been brought up with. Being of Muslim faith, we are also taught to believe in the miracle of Christ's birth and revere him as a prophet. The story of Nativity lives on and a simple YouTube video presents it, not through art or divine text, but through social media.



This popular new video brings to you their version of the Immaculate Conception in the 21st century. According to CNN, the video is designed by Excentric, a Lisbon, Portugal-based digital marketing company, "The Digital Story of the Nativity" narrates the familiar biblical story through Google Map searches, e-mails through Gmail, tweets, Facebook "Likes" and Foursquare "check-ins" giving it the very quality we cannot attribute to it- realism. Is that good though?

The very fact that we associate the miracle of Jesus' birth with the unattainable; where art forms of Mary- a beautiful ethereal creature looking demure whilst holding her baby in her arms has now been translated into the ordinary. An email she supposedly sends to Joseph employs vocabulary some might consider irreverent or think it brings her down from that higher place.

Apparently, Miguel Figueiredo who is president of Excentric, "challenged his creative team a few weeks ago to show traditional companies 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.

Accordingly, it took the team about five weeks to create and upload the video. The Story of Nativity which has been told in several other ways has now been given a whole new dimension via social media. It may be easier to relate to since most people communicate in this manner nowadays and are familiar with the social networking tools used.

Some 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

So far, the Portuguese version of this video has 1.5 million page views. Two of the English language versions have a total of over 1.4 million hits- both huge numbers for videos which are barely a week old.

It is projected that American audiences might be seeing more of the video this Christmas season and that a number of American churches have called to ask if they can show the video in their services.

"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," Figueiredo said.

It is a clever rendition of the story nonetheless, due to the fact that most people are familiar with the details in the first place. Whether it is a good idea to give an extraordinary message an ordinary treatment is debatable; and yet to be decided. How do you feel about this?

Photo Credit: Chema Foces