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Mr Splashy Pants Update

by Rachel on December 21st, 2007

The vote has now closed and a whale has been named Mr Splashy Pants. It may be related or not, but Japan has also stated it will not be killing humpback whales in the Antarctic this year, for their ’scientific research’, but will still be going after 1000 other whales. The campaign pressure is still needed.

As a follow-up to my original post about Mr Splashy Pants voting, I asked the Greenpeace team about the campaign and how they reacted when it became bigger than they expected. I think a quote from Martin, Communications Manager, sums it up well:

Oh, and in the ’sentences we never thought we’d be writing at the start of the campaign’ category comes “Make the Japanese Fisheries Agency promise not to harpoon Mister Splashy Pants.” God knows what they’ll make of that in Tokyo.

Richard, who was heavily involved in the promotion provided the following.

So how did it start?

The original voting period for the name-a-whale competition was 2 weeks and we had the feeling going into the voting period that as 11,000 people had suggested a whale name, we might get two to three times that many voting. They would be mostly our ‘traditional’ audience and up until midway through the second week of voting, all was on track. Then a number of blogs picked up the Mister Splashy Pants (MSP) story as someone had written a script to vote many times, several thousand times actually, in favour of MSP. We had systems in place to stop multiple voting but not all were deployed at the time the voting started as it was a new web tool we were using and we rushed it into service a little early for the voting. The multiple votes were removed but it didn’t matter, we had a whole new audience now and they were all voting for MSP.

What did you do next?

The first thing we did was extend the voting. This was simply to give the competition as much time to be seen as possible. This worked well as the final week of voting had around 30% of the total votes cast.

By a quirk of fate, one of the biggest drivers of traffic to our site was a blog site called Reddit. The original poster of the story on Reddit copied the url incorrectly using only half of a google analytics tag at the end of the url. This allowed us to see who was picking the story up from Reddit and posting it on their site. It ended up being around two-fifths of sites and traffic.

Other ideas were a MSP online game but the time to develop would have been too long so it wasn’t acted upon. The MSP character and logo was in production before the final results were in and the e-card was also in production and came out around one week after voting finished. One of the problems with campaigning organisations is that we nearly always have over 100% of our time allocated at all points during the year. So when something like MSP happens, there isn’t any spare capacity to throw at the project to take advantage of the opportunity.

A surprising success, resulting in a lot of PR coverage, merchandise for sale and a little fun e-card made by Kerb.

What’s happening now?

Once the voting had finished, the story of MSP’s win wasn’t covered as much as the original competition. We still had very good traffic to our site for the results and a ’save splashy’ petition was put on the site as both an email collection tool as well as to give people something to do for MSP. The conversion rate however from page traffic to the petition wasn’t great (around 10%). This was partly due to the petition being another click away from the results page, not a problem for our usual audience who are used to an action being part of the web story but an extra hurdle for those who don’t regularly come to our site. Secondly, the audience that picked up the MSP story was different to the usual Greenpeace audience. They would probably be best described as ‘light’ green. Looking through the comments on Reddit and other sites, the people on those sites came across as being concerned and informed about the environment but not likely to be part of a green organisation.

So in the end due to MSP, the name-a-whale competition was bigger and better than we had hoped but its purpose was largely in awareness raising. It is hard to tell where the MSP meme will go and how long it will last for. The great thing about MSP was the way so many people who are not regular Greenpeace supporters felt a strong connection to MSP and wanted to help him…which was of course the whole point of having the naming competition in the first place.

Some Traffic Analysis

In a great move, that i wish more would do, Greenpeace have posted their stats and referrals, so you can see who was most instrumental in driving traffic. Out of the 119,327 votes, there was no one place that drove the majority of referrals. The winner was Reddit, the recommendation engine owned by Wired, which beat out the Greenpeace email for referrals and drove the most voters. A lot of the sites were claiming victory for getting the name at the top of the tree

Well, for the enlightenment of a few of you Spartacus wannabes out there, here’s your actual share of the 119,367 votes which Splashy Pants got…

B3ta: If Greenpeace were previously unaware of why Mr Splashy Pants proved to be such a popular choice, they will now understand that the glorious blame lies firmly at the door of B3TA.” (1,243 votes)

geenstijl.nl: Greenpeace PWNED! (12,760 votes)

Fark: “Behold the power of Fark” (660 votes)

Sorry, boys. We know you all want to do that chest pounding thing on top of the Empire State Building, but you weren’t the top apes.

But the real power comes from the sheer spread of mentions and referrals. lots and lots of sites sent traffic to the voting page. It’s a perfect example of the distributed power of the web, where the power is not held by the few, but by the many. A big effect is made from lots of small pieces.

I’m on the list and thanks to the 62 people who clicked through. I hoped you all voted. slightly fascinating to me is that boingboing, one of the biggest blogs on the web, only drove 10 more clicks than my mention. The biggest drivers were subject matter sites, ie treehugger, or community aggregation sites, forums etc.

As the post recommends, after the vote, it’s time for more action. Save him, send him and wear him. Write to the Japanese government, send the ecard, buy the merchandise, just don’t let this be a one off moment.

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POSTED IN: Buzz Marketing, Engaging the Customer, Metrics and Research, Viral Marketing