Brilliant eh? And the 150,000 figure is likely to double by May 15.
How would you take advantage of it? How would you take advantage of a HUGE online community forming around your product? How would you get involved with the thousands of people asking what to do with your product after they had bought it? How would you take advantage of people sharing photos of your product, and how would you capitalise upon the sudden media attention which came with it?
Well if you run the British Carrot Association, you issue a vaguely interested press snippet and go back to doing what you do best; talking about Beta-Carotene.
It’s one of these new Facebook-led stories. It began with a Facebook group titled “On May 15th 2008, everybody needs to go out and panic buy CARROTS” which had this mission statement:
“Basically, a few nights ago, when I was very very drunk, I came up with the idea that everybody should go out and panic buy a certain product on a specific day.
I’m not quite sure what the reason behind this is is, other than the fact that a global shortage of carrots would be quite a laugh. “
In short, this intriguing Facebook group has become popular with over 150,000 people (in less than a month – this is going to grow much higher) planning to go out and buy as many carrots as possible on May 15. They now even have a website and are generating a fair deal of mainstream media coverage.
It’s stupid, but we’ve all seen worse PR hits. However, as the group grew the attention turned to what to do with all the carrots after you’ve bought them? So the community began trading carrot-recipes and philanthropic ideas.
Now you can’t help noticing the carrot industry is missing a huge opportunity here. Or they’ve shocked everyone by engineering this entire social-media campaign from the beginning (Wispa style).