The Champion
Earlier this year, a few of us who know each other from the Lehigh Valley Tweetups started seeing advertisements for auditions for this “2 Days in the Cube” contest to take place Memorial Day weekend at the Mayfair Festival in Allentown, PA in which 5 contestants would live inside a 2010 Nissan Cube for 2 days, compete in some silly competitions, and be allowed periodic bathroom breaks in hopes of winning a 2 year lease on the car in the end. We came to the conclusion that we had to put our heads together and pick one person we could all get behind, support, and make sure they won that car. That person was George Wacker.
After several days of online harassing, peer pressure, and other coercive measures, he agreed to do it. He went to the auditions with his now-infamous taped up guitar and wooed the judges. The strategy was sheer volume. Heavy hitters if you will. Get a little more than a handful of people to just pound away at the texting on their phones for 2 weeks. But it was more than that. We harnessed the power of social media. We started a Vote for Wacker in 2 Days in The Cube! Facebook fan page with many administrators to add content, we created crazy momentum on Twitter, and got a catch phrase to keep it in the front of the masses – “Wack the Vote”. Every time people saw it, it made them vote. We would text each other and just say “Vote”, and it happened. We even launched a Facebook Ad campaign for 20 miles around. It got nearly 340,000 impressions for the cost of one tank of gas. We didn’t care about click-thrus (linked to the Facebook fan page if they did), we just wanted visibility. We kept the campaign light, funny, but visible and in front of the audience.
We posted pictures from Mayfair, we made sure people knew the number to text and send WACKER to, we pointed them to the live feed on UStream. We made silly but clever motivational posters to vote. We leveraged social media to stay in front of the people throughout the 2 weeks to keep momentum, raise awareness, have some fun, and oh yea – win a car!
Congrats again to George. So – who’s next?
Create the Buzz... 
Honestly, social media won the car for me hands down. It was a collective effort that, while it sounds almost like work, turned into a game of sorts and ended with pretty satisfactory results for me 😛
Thanks again Mike!
This whole event, and movement if you will, was really cool and an obvious success. I have YET to make it to a tweetup, but just by local social media, I have connected with many LVtweeps. Wacker was the logical choice. I will be making it out this summer. Hope to meet all in person.
I’m gonna be the winning GIRL next year – since this year’s girls were STINKY. REPRESENT REPRESENT.
Obviously, the ‘power’ of the social media is one that promotes the following of a designated ‘popular’ idea, without permitting the public to challenge or question that idea without rebuff. Lemmings tend to follow the leader and fall off cliffs. Mindless drones are the byproduct of ‘social media’ in that the general public is, for the most part, impressionable, prone to peer-pressure, and partial to hopping on bandwagons without taking note of the driver operating the ‘crazy train.’ Social media…akin to a popularity contest thriving on the ignorance of its following.