If you’re reading this and you’re a friend of mine, you already know who Dracu-Pig is. For those of you who don’t, first let me say welcome to my blog. (I wonder if you were searching for vampire/pig hybrids or something “social media-y”…) I thought I would share the origin story of Dracu-Pig because I think it’s a cool example of how real relationships are formed through social media, and how a social object (defined as anything two people have common) is born.
During a conversation one morning on Twitter, my friend Sarah Cooper and I were discussing the muppets, which led to me sharing a picture of a puppet I own (made Michael Earl, a former muppeteer who taught a great puppeteering class I took. Thanks to that class, I memorized “Mahna Mahna”. For real.). About a month later I got to spend some face-to-face time with Sarah at ReBarCamp Ohio, and she immediately presented me with a gift of three hand-crafted finger puppets: a dog, a bat and a pig. She offhandedly remarked that when you put the pig in front of the bat, you get Dracu-Pig!
I started taking pictures with my Blackberry that night and uploading them to my newly minted Posterous blog. By the end of the weekend, I had taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 pics, bought a domain name, secured a twitter account and a fan page on Facebook. Yes, I am THAT kind of crazy.
There are two things that amaze me about all of this. First, Sarah is just an amazing person who just cemented for me that online relationships are not only “real”, but translate smoothly into the physical world. Second, I post silly pictures of finger puppets because I think they’re funny, but some of the feedback I’ve received lets me know that other people think it’s funny too, and he’s become a little mascot of sorts (he’s even hobnobbed with celebrities and social media superstars!). People ask for him when he hasn’t been around in a while, and a few stories I’ve heard about how the Dracu-Pig blog has helped people laugh when they needed it makes me feel like I’ve done a little bit to make the world better, and whether 10 people or 10,000 people look at it, I’ve got all the fuel I need to keep it going.
That’s how easy Social Media is. Listen up, business people! Heed the tale of Dracu-Pig! If you start a relationship online, you can extend it offline! Sometimes the thing that brings us together is a small thing (or two small things, one positioned in front of the other to create a new animal). You can expand a relationship from there, two. We meet people and start talking to them because we might have something in common, but we keep talking to them because the conversation heads elsewhere, we learn more about each other and the next thing you know, the relationship has staying power. Why should it be any different for a business? Is your product your social object? Maybe. Maybe it’s church, or your kid’s school, or a community organization, or a love of chocolate (in my case, a love of Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream. You know you love it…). Whatever it is, that’s just the launching point for a deeper relationship that can build customer loyalty, interest and can ultimately result in business being done!
I want you to ask yourself: What’s my Dracu-Pig?
OK, you don’t have to (although it would be funny if you did).
Tags: Dracu-Pig, Social Media, Twitter
