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Mr Splashy Pants and Greenpeace

by Rachel on November 29th, 2007

Here’s a tale to make you smile. One of the major campaigns Greenpeace is running concerns the humpback whales, pushing to stop the Japanese ’scientific whaling’ that is planning to capture and kill 1000 minke whales, 50 humpback whales and 50 fin whales. One of the things they are doing is tracking a pod of humpback whales through the South Pacific. To get their members involved, they have been running a competition to name the whales in the pod; they received 11,000 name nominations and have whittled it down to 30 for public voting. Most of the names put forward mean something spiritual, such as Amal, ‘hope’ in Arabic or Kigai, ’string spirit’ in Japanese.

And then there’s Mr Splashy Pants. As the poll states, it’s just too funny to leave out. It certainly caught the imagination of somebody, who them proceeded to try and rig the vote, either through manual clicking or most likely through a script. As the Greenpeace blog writes:

Between 6:55pm and 7:33pm local time, the click rate went off the chart and didn’t fall below 120 clicks per minute for a full 38 minutes without pause. Four times the click rate peaked at a staggering 150 clicks per minute, that’s 1 click every 0.4 seconds. The fact that this limit was never breached despite some significant effort suggests the natural limit of human clicking may have been inadvertently discovered.

With one scientific discovery already under their belt, they set out to conquer another. Just 5 minutes after the 38 minute clicking marathon they stopped clicking….for just 1 minute. We can’t know for sure what happened during that 1 minute but we can postulate from the shape of the graph straight after the 1 minute break that in fact, they were busy attempting the impossible, drinking a dozen red bulls in 1 minute. After the ingestion of enough energy drink to make a whale tap dance, the clicking resumed at near full pace.

Then, sadly, as quickly as it started, at 7:52pm local time, it all ended…probably because his mother called him to dinner…or maybe South Park was about to start. Or maybe someone just wrote a script to do all their clicking automatically. Who knows? What is certain is that the Greenpeace - name-a-whale competition would never be the same again.

They’ve removed all of these votes (that came from a single IP in Arizona) but by then the word had got out. It was picked up by Boing Boing, 4chan and Reddit and the story was out there. Now everyone is voting on Mr Splashy Pants and encouraging others to do so. You can even buy a sticker at CafePress or join a Facebook group.

At the moment, Mr Spashy Pants has 71% of the votes and they have extended the voting for another week (I’m wondering if they hope there will be organised action for another name?). The challenge for Greenpeace now is what to do with all the new interest. Getting 11k nominations in the first place means there is a lot of interest but many of the voters may never have visited. So what to do to generate further interest? One of the mailing lists I’m on is currently discussing this, looking at things like reach out to groups, special sign up for emails, stronger calls to action to donate and merchandise (they have to do merchandise - I can see T-shirts with Mr Splashy Pants logos going well). But what would you do to turn the added interest into something beneficial for the organisation?

However, no matter what you would do to promote Greepeace further, the most important thing you can do now is go and vote for Mr Splashy Pants!

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POSTED IN: Buzz Marketing, Engaging the Customer