How to Play Tennis Using Twitter

Perhaps taking a page out of Philadelphia ad agency Neiman's playbook, We Are Social Paris has created a "Tweet and Shoot" campaign for financial services firm BNP Paribas. The campaign is tied to the French Open and number one French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Tweet and Shoot will a use a Twitter-controlled robot that launches tennis balls at him live on a court.

How it works:

- Three days before this year's French Open on May 23, fans around the world can go to http://tweetandshoot.wearetennis.com/ and log-in via Twitter. They can then drag-and-drop a tennis ball on a virtual on-screen tennis court to adjust the positioning of their shot to challenge Tsonga. The user's shot is then encoded as a hashtag and placed into a Tweet from them, to which they can add a personal message to Tsonga before it is sent.

- The on-court robot, connected to the internet and Twitter via 3G, will then select users' Tweets at random and fire tennis balls at Tsonga, with each shot mapped precisely to the positioning of each user's choosing.

- On May 23 at 11:00 am EDT, Tsonga will be on the tennis court and take on the shots fired at him by the robot. Fans will be able view the event on a live-stream at http://tweetandshoot.wearetennis.com/.

How this advances BNP Paribas' cause or gains them new customers is beyond us but it sure looks like fun!