Curious...
[Update 2010-03-11 10:03 - Conspiracy theorists will love to believe Groupon got caught with their hand in the cookie jar (by accidentally purchasing too many votes? because I my tweets about the purchased origins of their votes showed up on their twitter-feed?). Others might think they decided that the purchased tweet-votes (purchased by someone else?) were a no-no. In any case, Groupon has removed Robert's video from their site after just a day or so of the 15,000+ votes in question being up (video link below changed to original posting on youtube)]
I'm curious about this "Live Off Groupon" challenge. $100,000 to give up money for a year and live off of pre-paid vouchers. To skip to the intrigue part, scroll down to highly curious below.
I spent quite a bit of time on my video submissions for the competition:
Introducing myself to Groupon
A conversation with a local business
Judging by the winning finalists, I didn't show off my zany side enough. Oh well, at least my life is my own for the next year! Now that the finalists are out, I'd just like to meet the GrouPawn in San Diego for a drink, maybe chauffeur them around America's Finest (nearly public-transportationless) City.
A few of my other favorite submissions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFNVkawrFzY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A6nhBOTc8I
http://crazymotion.net/video/wM9SYGhhJda0jAy.html
And I saw some better ones, but don't feel like sifting through all the links at the moment to find them.
That said, something highly curious thing has happened.
Given the high quality of other submissions, how did the "WildCard" video (liveoffgroupon page, removed) make it? A search for "robert andrew lang" on google a few days before the end of the contest yielded almost nothing. A few days later, it yields 42,000 pages of twitter, facebook, and related content. Another of the winners, @groupawned on twitter, said "Andrew Mason (founder of groupon) loved the term "Groupins" and posted a link to the "Wildcard" video days ago. Not Random..just funny to the boss." Maybe his essays were great, too. Though it's curious that, in Robert's profile, there's no second video (which was a required field in the application).
OK, let's assume he's a real applicant and got the favor of the boss and that's all that was necessary. But how did that video get 15,000+ tweet-votes? http://identi.ca/notice/24255944 and http://bit.ly/b8RPEj make it seem that someone has paid for those tweets, many of which (I'm looking at the second link) being placed by empty accounts having only tweeted that one thing ever, and several of which having been "canceled due to strange activity." Curious! Who's web-savvy enough to hire social networking advertisers to promote a wildcard candidate with, in my opinion, the worst video of all that I saw? Is it just a matter of taste, or are the folks at Groupon looking to generate some buzz from this?
Also, if the finalists have already been sent invitations to interview in Chicago, what does it mean that our votes will "go straight to the super-finals!"? Perhaps making a game out of having us all twitter a link to a video with a description of thier contest is all part of ther publicity stunt.
Is Groupon that clever/sneaky/resourceful/whatever-you-want-to-call-it? Is someone else pulling the voting strings? Whatever the case, I'm curious to see how the whole thing turns out!
~George J.
I'm curious about this "Live Off Groupon" challenge. $100,000 to give up money for a year and live off of pre-paid vouchers. To skip to the intrigue part, scroll down to highly curious below.
I spent quite a bit of time on my video submissions for the competition:
Introducing myself to Groupon
A conversation with a local business
Judging by the winning finalists, I didn't show off my zany side enough. Oh well, at least my life is my own for the next year! Now that the finalists are out, I'd just like to meet the GrouPawn in San Diego for a drink, maybe chauffeur them around America's Finest (nearly public-transportationless) City.
A few of my other favorite submissions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFNVkawrFzY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A6nhBOTc8I
http://crazymotion.net/video/wM9SYGhhJda0jAy.html
And I saw some better ones, but don't feel like sifting through all the links at the moment to find them.
That said, something highly curious thing has happened.
Given the high quality of other submissions, how did the "WildCard" video (liveoffgroupon page, removed) make it? A search for "robert andrew lang" on google a few days before the end of the contest yielded almost nothing. A few days later, it yields 42,000 pages of twitter, facebook, and related content. Another of the winners, @groupawned on twitter, said "Andrew Mason (founder of groupon) loved the term "Groupins" and posted a link to the "Wildcard" video days ago. Not Random..just funny to the boss." Maybe his essays were great, too. Though it's curious that, in Robert's profile, there's no second video (which was a required field in the application).
OK, let's assume he's a real applicant and got the favor of the boss and that's all that was necessary. But how did that video get 15,000+ tweet-votes? http://identi.ca/notice/24255944 and http://bit.ly/b8RPEj make it seem that someone has paid for those tweets, many of which (I'm looking at the second link) being placed by empty accounts having only tweeted that one thing ever, and several of which having been "canceled due to strange activity." Curious! Who's web-savvy enough to hire social networking advertisers to promote a wildcard candidate with, in my opinion, the worst video of all that I saw? Is it just a matter of taste, or are the folks at Groupon looking to generate some buzz from this?
Also, if the finalists have already been sent invitations to interview in Chicago, what does it mean that our votes will "go straight to the super-finals!"? Perhaps making a game out of having us all twitter a link to a video with a description of thier contest is all part of ther publicity stunt.
Is Groupon that clever/sneaky/resourceful/whatever-you-want-to-call-it? Is someone else pulling the voting strings? Whatever the case, I'm curious to see how the whole thing turns out!
~George J.
Comments
Then, if googling, click
One example of the 40,000+ results that turns up is the following:
-----
Twitter / Isreal Piercey: I voted for Robert Andrew ...
- 4:24am
I voted for Robert Andrew Lang Bothell, WA http://is.gd/9ZFv6 for the Live Off Groupon Groupawn.
-----
The google-linked page is http://www.twitter.com/ipiercey, which currently forwards to http://twitter.com/suspended .
Man, 40,000+ pages automatically created in the span of a day or two. Wow.
In this case, I frankly don't know what happened and have so many variants of guesses (e.g. Robert Lang doesn't exist and his video is a creation of Groupon, or he exists and is being used as a Pawn in a publicity stunt, or everything on Groupon's site is by-the-book and some 4chan-like site or ticked-off contestant bought the votes) that none of them carries a majority of my opinion.
That said, the idea that Groupon themselves bought the votes to get us talking and told us to twitter "votes" just to get more free twitter publicity is in the lead with about a 15% estimated chance. Why? They seem "start-up" enough to come up with that sort of progressive advertising strategy, and more significantly, I guess I like conspiracy theories. :)
Thanks for the feedback!
:)