Technology rules our world. And to continue pushing boundaries, we need future generations to embrace technology’s foundation — science. This pursuit, to get today’s youth to admire scientists the way they admire athletes and actors, is IBM’s mission. So to help IBM spread the word about science, we created the world’s smallest movie, literally made by moving atoms at IBM’s research facility in California. The movie is now the Guinness World Records ™ record holder for World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.

Our objective was to spread the word about science within the world of social media, encouraging people to engage with our content and share it themselves. This meant reaching beyond our B2B target audience to present IBM in a way that connected with everyone.

Results for just one month (launched last week of April): IBM loved this simple, shareable way to spread the word about science and data storage, and the film was accepted into the Tribeca Online Film Festival and shown at the New York Tech Meet-up and the World Science Festival. The film, now in the top 1% of all most-watched YouTube videos, surpassed 1 million views in 24 hours, and 2 million views in 48 hours, with more than 27,000 likes. It was trending on twitter on its release day and totaled more than 21,000 social media mentions with 96% positive sentiment, increasing IBM social mentions by 137%. As of submission, the film garnered 2.4 million news impressions (not including television coverage) and 23.6 million impressions overall, effectively reaching all targets — the science, tech, film, education and entertainment communities — with a strong global reach (33% of online activity from Europe, 10% from China and 8% from India, Australia and Japan).

We made the world’s smallest movie – a piece of content we knew would be incredibly shareable and tell a story about science in a fun and engaging way. Each frame is made of hundreds of atoms (yes, real atoms), moved to their exact placements by the scientists at IBM Research — Almaden. The frames are combined into an animation, which is now the Guinness World Records ™ record holder for World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.

Buzz was generated by word of mouth — we premiered the film live in the Tribeca Online Film Festival, then we prepared a whole science class (materials and movies) that was streamed to schools all over the country. This educational program is still ongoing.

Technology rules our world. And to continue pushing boundaries, we need future generations to embrace technology’s foundation — science. This pursuit, to get today’s youth to admire scientists the way they admire athletes and actors, became IBM’s mission. So they asked us: How do we spread the word about science?

Our strategy was to make science fun again, for adults and kids. And the movie was just the beginning. The whole project was documented and this content kept IBM Research present in technology and educational online conversations. After conducting influencer research to identify groups of interested audiences, we seeded this content to these specific audiences who would then share it onward with a mass audience.