In the video, he talked about a movement where people didn’t want to see whales getting killed so they decided to put trackers on these whales and name them. One whale in particular, they named Mister Splashy Pants. Now Mister Splashy Pants got a lot of love and attention simply because of his name. He got voted up on reddit and the attention in the beginning of the movement only reached about 5%. After Mister Splashy Pants made a splash on other social medias, it boosted up to 70%. This was interesting to me because it just took one corny name to build a quick fanbase and bring attention to something. There were Facebook groups being created because people wanted Mister Splashy Pants to win this poll on best name (which he did). After the poll and voting was all done, the group of people who actually started all of this went on to make merchandise around Mister Splashy Pants. Of course people will buy it because it is a cute whale with a funny, corny name.
The best part of the whole thing was the expedition to kill whales was cancelled because of all of the attention that Mister Splashy Pants drew. He has many people on his back and many people wanted to see him live and if the expedition was to go on, I believe that would have really been an end to the company that wanted to do it in the first place.
Author’s name: Alexis Ohanian
URL: https://www.ted.com/talks/alexis_ohanian_how_to_make_a_splash_in_social_media
Date accessed: October 21, 2018
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