I first want to give a shout out a congrats to Cafepress for winning the Retail category's People's Voice Award, just announced today.
Secondly, I want to congratulate Lonelygirl15. I got the announcement email, and visited the Webby Awards site to see the winners and noticed a familiar name come up (besides Cafepress): it was Lonelygirl15, who I had blogged about back in Aug. 2006. She has won the Webby Film & Video Awards for Best Actress. And her name is Jessica Lee Rose.
If you're not familiar with Lonelygirl15, she was the actress in well-orchestrated video blog hoax...or teen drama series, depending on how you look at it, that took place over several weeks on YouTube and her MySpace page.
Lonelygirl15, known as "Bree" in her video diary, claimed to be a home-schooled teen who's parents were super strict and rarely let her out of the house. Her innocent (no really, they were entirely decent and innocent!), silly videos, usually of her and sometimes her friend Daniel talking in her room, drew in hundreds of thousands of viewers, fans and critics. It was quite a spectacle to watch at the time. People were analyzing the lighting, editing techniques and background props in her videos, trying to expose her as a hoax. Some people were even making their own knock-off satire videos.
I couldn't help but get wrapped up in it myself. Because I had heard of her through one of the Intelligence Group's Trend Central trend forecasting emails, I thought that maybe they were in on it. Others thought maybe a studio was doing this as an intro to an upcoming television series. But real or fake, she drew us all in, waiting for more.
So what does this have to do with your cafepress store?
Well, we can not only create some Lonelygirl15 T-shirt designs at Cafepress, but we can also all learn from how powerful a smart viral maketing campaign can be when done right. Hats off to the Lonelygirl15 team & congrats on your award.
