Tag Archives: christine yang

Degree Men taking advantage of Bear Grylls meme? Better drink my own piss.

Even though I’ll always cheer for Team Survivorman, I will admit that Bear Grylls has some impressive credentials and can be quite entertaining. What has been the most entertaining was watching the “Better drink my own piss” meme grow in popularity. The meme consists of captioning a picture of Bear Grylls with a random statement followed by “Better drink my own piss,” which is a reference to Episode 13 of Man vs. Wild where he actually drank his own piss. Ick.

There have been many hilarious iterations, and Bear even got in on the fun last spring when he was visiting LA. He posted a tweet that said, “In honour of all your @replies about pee drinking. am on vacation in LA. Looks like I’ll have to drink my own pee!” accompanied with a picture of himself grimacing while sipping from a teacup. Completely enamored by his shout out, Reddit users tried to get him to do an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) thread, which is when an individual answers (almost) any question asked by the Reddit community. The AMA Request had gone unanswered… until one fateful Tuesday afternoon in September.

As the current face of Degree Men, this proved to be a perfect opportunity to cash in on Bear’s internet notoriety. A little over 4 months after the original AMA Request was submitted, Bear answered Redditors’ questions via videos posted to Degree Men’s YouTube channel. While it’s not as creatively impressive as the Old Spice Guy’s video responses, Degree Men is getting eyes on their branded channel and reinforcing Bear’s connection to the brand. By keeping the branding out of the actual videos, I’m sure other viewers, like me, are much more likely to keep coming back to watch his responses. In fact, I even found myself feeling grateful to Degree Men for getting Bear to do an AMA.

While Bear’s videos probably won’t hit the millions of views that the Old Spice Guy got, the campaign has managed to captivate the reddit audience. And I’m willing to bet that a majority of the Reddit audience falls right into the target demographic for Degree Men. I think this is a great example of an agency understanding the delicate balance between providing entertainment and reinforcing brand recognition. And it’s nice to see a side of Bear that isn’t so EXTREME.

On a side note, he did not mention his own piss when answering the question, “What is the least favorite thing you’ve eaten?” *shudder*

Unintentional Participation in Social Media

An aspect of social media that I find valuable and intriguing is the creation of communities in which the contributors of content may never know they’re a part of it. FOUND Magazine catalogs lost & found notes, birthday cards, to-do lists, doodles, etc. AnthroPosts is founded on a similar concept but only documents discarded Post-it® Notes that have been found on streets around the world.

The creator of AnthroPosts draws a parallel between the short, gramatically-compromising notes written on these tiny pieces of paper and the equally terse messages written via email, text message, Twitter, Facebook update, etc. But what I think is great about these sites is that the community is made up of people who play two distinct roles: those who have lost something, and those who have found it.

Those who have lost something will probably go their whole lives without knowing their note has been found and posted on some website, and the people knowingly contributing to these projects will not be the ones who have created the content that is being aggregated. And of course we can’t forget the third role of those who like to read things that have been lost and then found, then displayed with little or no context.

I will admit that there’s a voyeuristic side of me that reads the barely legible notes and tries to figure out what they were thinking, why they were going there, if they had meant to toss the note or if they accidentally dropped it and panicked some time later. Then it makes me wonder: Is something I created part of someone’s design project and being displayed in the form of beautiful infographics for the passing internet-voyeur to ponder? It’s kind of like wondering how often I’m that random stranger in the background of someone’s picture.

I guess I’ll never know…

The Creative and Functional Applications of Crowdsourcing

There are many different roles that crowdsourcing can play. Before I get into the four examples below, I want to clarify that I’m talking about crowdsourcing in the sense of getting a community to collaborate around a specific project and goal. This does not include crowd funding efforts, nor does this include an open call for entries to some contest. I’m talking about people contributing their ideas and intelligence towards a singular effort and influencing the outcome. As you will see in the examples below, this can be highly successful.

MIT’s Balloon Hunt Contest
This example highlights how crowdsourcing can be used in a purely functional way. MIT came up with an ingenious incentive structure to get people to pitch in to find 10 weather balloons scattered across the US. The real-world applications of this process to situations such as natural disaster relief and combat are still yet to be determined, but the fact that all 10 balloons were found within 9 hours is truly remarkable. I’m sure the monetary incentive didn’t hurt in getting people to help, but there is definite potential for a system like this to be beneficial in a time of crisis.

Quirky
With Quirky, we start getting into crowdsourcing that is creative, but leads to more functional outcomes. I don’t think all of the things they’ve come up with are the most innovative or useful things, but they have created a community of real-time focus groups that can help you make your idea better and ultimately make you some money. I think that this kind of a process has its place in product innovation and can lead to some really cool concepts, but in most cases I can’t help but feel that someone like Fred could take their ideas to the next level.

One Frame of Fame
The people who are submitting a frame of themselves for this music video have the creative liberty of filling the frame with whatever and whoever they want as long as they hit their pose. The outcome of this collective effort is pretty entertaining to watch, and it’s so easy to be a part of it. These people aren’t coming up with life-changing ideas, but as a creative endeavor and a social media campaign, I think it was executed successfully except that the video player doesn’t have a frame-by-frame scrubber. If you can spot me let me know :)

A Swarm of Angels
This was a much more complicated creative project that involved crowd funding as well as allowing the “investors” have a say in the script. It’s been over 3 years since its inception, and it doesn’t show any sign of being completed any time soon. Since I was never a member of the community and don’t know what happened behind closed doors, I can only guess that there wasn’t enough focused whip-cracking to keep the project moving forward. I don’t doubt that they had genuinely talented people involved, but without a clear direction, all you really have is too many cooks in the kitchen.

All in all, I think the idea of tapping into the collective brainpower of the online community can lead to some powerful stuff if there is enough of a focused driving force. However, I’m not convinced that seeking a crowdsourced solution is necessarily better than going to the experts and professionals who are in that position for a reason. It makes me wonder if we’ll start seeing a trend of closed communities that exclude the “Average Joe”, and if this is any better than the completely open crowdsourcing that I’ve mentioned. Does the very nature of exclusive crowdsourcing go against what crowdsourcing stands for or is it just speeding up the process by eliminating the white noise?