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stephbgIn this post I'd like to deconstruct (and thus ruin) a joke, and as a bonus briefly (ha!) analyse a lesson learned about shamelessly exploiting harnessing social media for fun and you've got to be kidding profit.
UPDATE 2 Feb 2012: Vlad made the Very Demotivational home page! http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2012/02/02/demotivational-posters-vlad-the-impala/?utm_source=trans&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=transglobal
UPDATE 11 Feb 2012: Followup report.
I introduce to you VLAD THE IMPALA. Still a better vampire than Edward.
It's a joke you see, my joke, and after a handful of likes, comments and shares on Facebook I thought I'd take the opportunity to see what it takes to go viral (or at least mildly sniffly) on the Internet (or at least Facebook) and how this information might be useful for business. Because frankly I've yet to hear or read anything about the business use of social media worth a damn, and if I have to study this kind of thing I'll do it on my own terms thank you very much.
I plan to answer the following questions:
1. Who is Vlad?
2. What's an impala?
3. What is the origin of Vlad the Impala?
-- The vampire thing I'll take asread red. BoomTISH --
4. Who is Edward and why is he a bad vampire?
5. Why are we here?
1. Who is Vlad?
This is pretty easy really, because Vlad the Impaler was a historical figure named Dracula, used as the basis for the more traditionally gory vampire myths:
Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Vlad III, Dracula, Drakulya, or Tepes, was born in late 1431, the son of Vlad II or Dracul. The name Dracul can be interpreted in two ways, the first translation from Romanian would be "Dragon", but it sometimes also means "Devil". Vlad was not called Tepes, which means "spike" in Romanian, until after his death; instead, he was known as Vlad Dracula, the added "a" meaning "son of", so essentially, throughout his life, he was known as the "son of the Devil".
A truly nasty dude, he spent rather a lot of his hobby time on dismembering, burning, torturing and famously impaling anyone he decided was sufficiently annoying. Just the kind of guy you want in the Big Brother house. After death he became known as Spike (as per the Romanian translation), so we get an extra bonus layer of Buffyverse badass vampirism going down. Early Buffy at least. Before the chip. Right, moving on.
Summary: Vlad the Impaler = Bad guy. Model for Bram Stoker's Dracula and all other generally bloodthirsty nasty smelly vampires.
2. What's an impala?
An impala is a type of antelope native to the plains of Africa. In common with all antelope, impala share a certain lack of respect for the conventions of pluralism, and eat grass. They in turn are eaten by lions.
Boy impala like our pictured friend Vlad do sport an impressive pair of horns which are used in pissing contents with other boy impala during mating season. Girl impala then choose whether to do the nasty with them, or not. Girl Impala Power Woot!
At a pinch, a boy impala might use his horns to discourage one of the aforementioned lions from consuming it, and often puts up a good fight and gets in a scratch or two. This would be more helpful if lions hunted alone. Currently the lions (note sensible plural form) are winning.
In short, impala are lunch.
The horns are actually a comedic impediment, as for the purposes of this joke (I'm getting to it) it would have helped if impala were rather more helpless-looking. Something like this:
Girl impala don't have horns, but girl impala are not called Vlad. Please, let's not get distracted by gender politics.
Summary: Impala are lunch.
3. What is the origin of Vlad the Impala?
My personal original version of Vlad the Impala actually had bloody fangs, and adorned my office door, back when I had such a thing. We often hosted visitors from South African mines who knew what an impala was and thus found my little home-made cartoon hilarious. Either that or they wanted to get inside my projects.
A google search will reveal assorted variations on the theme, so I make no claim to actual originality.
For reasons that escape me, a couple of days ago I felt the urge to recreate that cartoon, largely as an excuse to practice my PaintShop Pro X3 skills. The last time I did this I struggled a bit with the text controls I wanted (as in, couldn't find them and suspect they weren't actually there), so as an exercise I thought to recreate the style of a Very Demotivational (Cheezburger) poster.
I swear I only visited the site to check out what fonts they used, but then I tripped and fell into a bucket of laziness and just used their image builder. What I hadn't done, however, was add fangs to my freshly-googled impala source image. But in a moment ofadditional laziness divine inspiration I realised that the whole thing would be more funny if furry Vlad looked entirely unvampire-like and generally harmless as further contrast to Vlad the Impaler (who you may recall was a Very Bad Boy Indeed, With Blood And Stuff Everywhere).
A great light dawned.
Who else is cuddly-ish, notoriously unvampire-like, and generally harmless? Even more so than a creature whose destiny is to end its harmless furry existence as lion poo? Edward Cullen, that's who.
Summary: Vlad the Impala is not a vampire.
Who is Edward Cullen and why is he a bad vampire?
Edward is the "hero" vampire from the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. He's a vegetarian vampire, meaning that he chooses not to dine on the blood of humans as is good and proper, but instead clears out all the top order predators from relatively small forrest areas, thus destroying large ecosystems. He's the good guy. He's also a virgin, impossibly pretty, sparkles in the sunlight, and oh god I can't go on.
Suffice to say Edward is an embarrassment to decent blood-sucking denizens of the grave everywhere. He's a disgrace. Ptooey.
Perhaps a metaphor is in order. A proper vampire is like rough peasant vodka:
Vodka's blood is torn with violence from earth and darkness.
Intoxicating yet traitorous;
Its promises of blood warmth spawn only cold and sorrow.
It will make you live forever, until you die alone.
By contrast the Twilight vampires are like sparkling apple juice:
Born in sunlight with sweetness and warmth.
A tingle on the tongue, a tickle up the nose.
Picnics and butterflies and puppies.
Hearts and flowers and moon June swoon etc etc.
Ugh.
Summary: Edward is such a bad vampire he even fails to suck.
Putting it all together
Vlad [vampire reference] the Impala [harmless furry animal with bonus pun] is still a better vampire than Edward [a disgrace to vampires everywhere]
Got that? Squeezed every last drop of fun out of it? Good.
So why are we here again?
Having created mymasterwork little folly I shared it on my Facebook Wall by linking to the Very Demotivational site via this link: http://cheezburger.com/View/5743775488.
Once there, it operated like any other link I share, and it gathered a few likes, comments and shares amongst friends and friends of friends. I could keep track of its progress by visiting the post on my Wall.
I grew bold and wondered if it would gain traction if I posted it elsewhere. I posted the same link on the Wall of the community It's OK to be Takai which frequently includes anti-Twilight material, so I didn't feel it was too off topic. What I really had in mind was George Takai himself, because a Share from George is pretty much a guarantee of ebola-like viral success. But that that point I wasn't thinking strategically. I just wanted love.
The post at It's OK to be Takai did well, collecting a handful of likes and shares, but to track these hits I had to relocate the post on their Wall, an increasingly difficult task as new material was added by the masses. I had two separate (and cumulative) measures of success, but they were both becoming more difficult to keep an eye on.
A third but possibly overlapping source of interest came from the Cheezeburger site which tracked the number of votes and Facebook shares that originated from there.
I reconsidered the task, and looked at some of the posts that I myself had shared. The ones that kept track of all their hits and shares in one spot (and which were handily located in semi-permanent homes in Facebook Galleries), were all links to Photos within Facebook.
I belatedly dowloaded my own copy of my image, then uploaded it once more to Facebook, as a Photo in one of my Galleries. For some reason I couldn't save the image when I tried it at first, or I might have saved myself a whole lot of time. But then I wouldn't have thought so much about using social media to spread messages. Unfortunately since Vlad the Impala was definitely old news this more permanent representation has only garnered a few sad scraps of attention. But I know that out there somewhere my little Vlad has been embraced by whole tens of people.
I frankly can't remember if I abandoned the last of my self respect and also shared the picture on George Takai's Wall, hoping for that elusive George Share worth exposure to some 712,981 of his fans. If I did it's certainly long lost in the archives by now. Next time I'll do that first.
Note to self: Don't do that next time. There is no next time. This is a thought experiment. Got it?
So what have we learned? If I were to style myself a Social Media Advisor and a client wanted to get an image out there as widely as possible I'd at least know what sort of questions to ask.
How important is it to use the image to drive traffic to a particular site (in this case Cheezeburger.com)? Yes you'll get some traffic, but a lot of people will be unwilling to visit a new site on the recommendation of a stranger. You might get hits within extended friend networks, but that seriously limits the numbers you might attract. A Facebook Page is more within people's comfort zones.
What's more important? The message in the image or the authorship? A perfectly good gag can be ruined by a poorly placed corporate logo, but it's never going to be separated from the message. Attaching the image to a specific Facebook profile (e.g. my Wall photo gallery) is a more subtle means of claiming authorship or responsibility than turning the image into a blatant advertisement and setting it completely free. You really want to avoid the stench of marketing as much as possible.
How important is it that you track its progress? I expect there are actual tools out there that do this properly, but the principle remains the same. Is it OK to let the image go free, or do you really want to know who and how many liked and shared it?
I'm running out of steam now so I'll finish here. Maybe next time I'll dissect the Twitter #MarketingFail. In the meantime I think all the proper experienced and well-qualified Social Media Advisors/Analysts out there are probably safe from me in their cutting edge corporate fortresses.
UPDATE 2 Feb 2012: Vlad made the Very Demotivational home page! http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2012/02/02/demotivational-posters-vlad-the-impala/?utm_source=trans&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=transglobal
UPDATE 11 Feb 2012: Followup report.
I introduce to you VLAD THE IMPALA. Still a better vampire than Edward.
It's a joke you see, my joke, and after a handful of likes, comments and shares on Facebook I thought I'd take the opportunity to see what it takes to go viral (or at least mildly sniffly) on the Internet (or at least Facebook) and how this information might be useful for business. Because frankly I've yet to hear or read anything about the business use of social media worth a damn, and if I have to study this kind of thing I'll do it on my own terms thank you very much.
I plan to answer the following questions:
1. Who is Vlad?
2. What's an impala?
3. What is the origin of Vlad the Impala?
-- The vampire thing I'll take as
4. Who is Edward and why is he a bad vampire?
5. Why are we here?
1. Who is Vlad?
This is pretty easy really, because Vlad the Impaler was a historical figure named Dracula, used as the basis for the more traditionally gory vampire myths:
Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Vlad III, Dracula, Drakulya, or Tepes, was born in late 1431, the son of Vlad II or Dracul. The name Dracul can be interpreted in two ways, the first translation from Romanian would be "Dragon", but it sometimes also means "Devil". Vlad was not called Tepes, which means "spike" in Romanian, until after his death; instead, he was known as Vlad Dracula, the added "a" meaning "son of", so essentially, throughout his life, he was known as the "son of the Devil".
A truly nasty dude, he spent rather a lot of his hobby time on dismembering, burning, torturing and famously impaling anyone he decided was sufficiently annoying. Just the kind of guy you want in the Big Brother house. After death he became known as Spike (as per the Romanian translation), so we get an extra bonus layer of Buffyverse badass vampirism going down. Early Buffy at least. Before the chip. Right, moving on.
Summary: Vlad the Impaler = Bad guy. Model for Bram Stoker's Dracula and all other generally bloodthirsty nasty smelly vampires.
2. What's an impala?
An impala is a type of antelope native to the plains of Africa. In common with all antelope, impala share a certain lack of respect for the conventions of pluralism, and eat grass. They in turn are eaten by lions.
Boy impala like our pictured friend Vlad do sport an impressive pair of horns which are used in pissing contents with other boy impala during mating season. Girl impala then choose whether to do the nasty with them, or not. Girl Impala Power Woot!
At a pinch, a boy impala might use his horns to discourage one of the aforementioned lions from consuming it, and often puts up a good fight and gets in a scratch or two. This would be more helpful if lions hunted alone. Currently the lions (note sensible plural form) are winning.
In short, impala are lunch.
The horns are actually a comedic impediment, as for the purposes of this joke (I'm getting to it) it would have helped if impala were rather more helpless-looking. Something like this:
Girl impala don't have horns, but girl impala are not called Vlad. Please, let's not get distracted by gender politics.
Summary: Impala are lunch.
3. What is the origin of Vlad the Impala?
My personal original version of Vlad the Impala actually had bloody fangs, and adorned my office door, back when I had such a thing. We often hosted visitors from South African mines who knew what an impala was and thus found my little home-made cartoon hilarious. Either that or they wanted to get inside my projects.
A google search will reveal assorted variations on the theme, so I make no claim to actual originality.
For reasons that escape me, a couple of days ago I felt the urge to recreate that cartoon, largely as an excuse to practice my PaintShop Pro X3 skills. The last time I did this I struggled a bit with the text controls I wanted (as in, couldn't find them and suspect they weren't actually there), so as an exercise I thought to recreate the style of a Very Demotivational (Cheezburger) poster.
I swear I only visited the site to check out what fonts they used, but then I tripped and fell into a bucket of laziness and just used their image builder. What I hadn't done, however, was add fangs to my freshly-googled impala source image. But in a moment of
A great light dawned.
Who else is cuddly-ish, notoriously unvampire-like, and generally harmless? Even more so than a creature whose destiny is to end its harmless furry existence as lion poo? Edward Cullen, that's who.
Summary: Vlad the Impala is not a vampire.
Who is Edward Cullen and why is he a bad vampire?
Edward is the "hero" vampire from the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. He's a vegetarian vampire, meaning that he chooses not to dine on the blood of humans as is good and proper, but instead clears out all the top order predators from relatively small forrest areas, thus destroying large ecosystems. He's the good guy. He's also a virgin, impossibly pretty, sparkles in the sunlight, and oh god I can't go on.
Suffice to say Edward is an embarrassment to decent blood-sucking denizens of the grave everywhere. He's a disgrace. Ptooey.
Perhaps a metaphor is in order. A proper vampire is like rough peasant vodka:
Vodka's blood is torn with violence from earth and darkness.
Intoxicating yet traitorous;
Its promises of blood warmth spawn only cold and sorrow.
It will make you live forever, until you die alone.
By contrast the Twilight vampires are like sparkling apple juice:
Born in sunlight with sweetness and warmth.
A tingle on the tongue, a tickle up the nose.
Picnics and butterflies and puppies.
Hearts and flowers and moon June swoon etc etc.
Ugh.
Summary: Edward is such a bad vampire he even fails to suck.
Putting it all together
Vlad [vampire reference] the Impala [harmless furry animal with bonus pun] is still a better vampire than Edward [a disgrace to vampires everywhere]
Got that? Squeezed every last drop of fun out of it? Good.
So why are we here again?
Having created my
Once there, it operated like any other link I share, and it gathered a few likes, comments and shares amongst friends and friends of friends. I could keep track of its progress by visiting the post on my Wall.
I grew bold and wondered if it would gain traction if I posted it elsewhere. I posted the same link on the Wall of the community It's OK to be Takai which frequently includes anti-Twilight material, so I didn't feel it was too off topic. What I really had in mind was George Takai himself, because a Share from George is pretty much a guarantee of ebola-like viral success. But that that point I wasn't thinking strategically. I just wanted love.
The post at It's OK to be Takai did well, collecting a handful of likes and shares, but to track these hits I had to relocate the post on their Wall, an increasingly difficult task as new material was added by the masses. I had two separate (and cumulative) measures of success, but they were both becoming more difficult to keep an eye on.
A third but possibly overlapping source of interest came from the Cheezeburger site which tracked the number of votes and Facebook shares that originated from there.
I reconsidered the task, and looked at some of the posts that I myself had shared. The ones that kept track of all their hits and shares in one spot (and which were handily located in semi-permanent homes in Facebook Galleries), were all links to Photos within Facebook.
I belatedly dowloaded my own copy of my image, then uploaded it once more to Facebook, as a Photo in one of my Galleries. For some reason I couldn't save the image when I tried it at first, or I might have saved myself a whole lot of time. But then I wouldn't have thought so much about using social media to spread messages. Unfortunately since Vlad the Impala was definitely old news this more permanent representation has only garnered a few sad scraps of attention. But I know that out there somewhere my little Vlad has been embraced by whole tens of people.
I frankly can't remember if I abandoned the last of my self respect and also shared the picture on George Takai's Wall, hoping for that elusive George Share worth exposure to some 712,981 of his fans. If I did it's certainly long lost in the archives by now. Next time I'll do that first.
Note to self: Don't do that next time. There is no next time. This is a thought experiment. Got it?
So what have we learned? If I were to style myself a Social Media Advisor and a client wanted to get an image out there as widely as possible I'd at least know what sort of questions to ask.
How important is it to use the image to drive traffic to a particular site (in this case Cheezeburger.com)? Yes you'll get some traffic, but a lot of people will be unwilling to visit a new site on the recommendation of a stranger. You might get hits within extended friend networks, but that seriously limits the numbers you might attract. A Facebook Page is more within people's comfort zones.
What's more important? The message in the image or the authorship? A perfectly good gag can be ruined by a poorly placed corporate logo, but it's never going to be separated from the message. Attaching the image to a specific Facebook profile (e.g. my Wall photo gallery) is a more subtle means of claiming authorship or responsibility than turning the image into a blatant advertisement and setting it completely free. You really want to avoid the stench of marketing as much as possible.
How important is it that you track its progress? I expect there are actual tools out there that do this properly, but the principle remains the same. Is it OK to let the image go free, or do you really want to know who and how many liked and shared it?
I'm running out of steam now so I'll finish here. Maybe next time I'll dissect the Twitter #MarketingFail. In the meantime I think all the proper experienced and well-qualified Social Media Advisors/Analysts out there are probably safe from me in their cutting edge corporate fortresses.
