It has been an arduous journey these last 6 months in DEWlabs. An unruly pack of titan Mountain Dew fans has created three new sodas hand in hand with big corporate marketers and brand people. We have all played a part. I personally have been included on conference calls with the designers of the label, the makers of Mtn Dew White Out's commercial, and Pepsi PR. We have worked with Jamie Wilkinson and all his internet famousness. The White Out team, of which I am a leader, drove over 2,500 new followers to our flavor's Twitter account @MtnDewWhiteOut in just over a week, we grew a following on our Tumblr blog, and have created loads of media. Next Monday (April 19th) the sodas we made will be released into the market, the commercials we helped shape will play on the air, and our flavors will be at the mercy of the nation.
It has been a long time. We have all spent hours debating and picking apart each decision that was ours. Now we are a bit tired.
As a DEWlabs community, we have been participating in a little friendly competition amongst ourselves for extra advertising money for our flavor. All of this has been coordinated by Jamie Dubbs and his team. What was meant to be an entertaining internet skill and buzz builder, turned into - I think - something that just required too much effort on the part of regular DEWlabs members. People started to get worn out and complain, and this last challenge things turned a bit viscous when the Typhoon flavor nation thought Distortion was stealing content from their site. They asked Distortion politely to remove the content, and then sent "a wave" of comments to their Facebook page demanding the content be removed... some of the comments by Typhoon fans turned hateful. Distortion got upset. Suddenly, this wasn't that fun anymore.
So what do you do when your crowd that you have been sourcing degenerates to this? Stir up the mud!
There is a brand new DEWlabs site for us to play in, and a boat load of new members. Using the new site requires renewing your profile. I think this is so that the burned out people (who probably wont renew their profile) can be separated from the motivated ones. It is exciting to have fresh blood in the system. That last competition, all but just a few of my team had gotten burnt out out... in the end there were only three of us that really contributed. The new members will be anxious to prove themselves, and us old members will get to play the part of experienced insider. The new site has been up for 3 days... of the over 4,000 original DEWlabs members only about 450 have logged in and renewed their profile. The shipment of fresh blood begins to arrive today.
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