Alexis Ohanian, the founder of popular news aggregator site Reddit.com, has a great TED Talk concerning social media. It's not very long, you can watch it here, and I'll discuss it after.
The gist of the story is that Greenpeace began a campaign to stop Japanese whalers from killing animals by tracking a whale which they named. They (somewhat foolishly) allowed the Internet to vote on the name, listing options for several intellectual-sounding names. And, of course, Mr. Splashy Pants.
There are plenty of stories about internet communities rigging votes in order to create nonsensical results. However, this one was special, because it took hold on communities outside of the internet; people placed fliers in their local communities, and even when Greenpeace gave another week for the movement to lose steam and a proper name to be chosen, Mr. Splashy Pants still persevered with an even greater margin than before.
As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. And Greenpeace did. As Ohanian mentions, Greenpeace actually marketed Mr. Splashy Pants on t-shirts. Ultimately, Greenpeace won, and Japan placed a moratorium on whale hunting.
This is quite remarkable, because without the added publicity that Mr. Splashy Pants added to the group's cause, it would have likely failed. What is even more remarkable is that, most likely, ninety-nine percent of the people who were involved didn't care about Japanese whales. They just thought that Mr. Splashy Pants was a great name, and as Mr. Ohanian points out, wanted to see their local TV anchor repeat the phrase, "Mr. Splashy Pants".
With the social media revolution, companies and brands have lost control of the conversations that their consumers have about them. Consumers have gained the ability to talk back to marketers and they will never cede that power. What the Greenpeace case shows us is that one can often achieve a desired result simply by embracing this loss of control rather than trying to fight it.
--Taylor
pop the hatch and hit ignition
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