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We began by Tweeting the way a befuddled social media manager might have in the nascent days of Twitter, confused by mechanisms like tagging, hashtags, and the 140-character count. Remember Bill. He'll come back later.
Then came the memes. We did weeks of investigative research on meme history, putting together a timeline of the most popular memes in chronological order (down to the day) in order to recreate it as accurately as possible.
We also referenced things going on in pop culture that people would have been Tweeting about at the time: the release of the iPhone in June 2007, "Pimp My Ride," and so on.
At this point, we pretended that our present-day IT department (led by the fictional Bill, still fictionally working there 15 years later) had been alerted that our Twitter account was going haywire. We created a whole separate Twitter account just for the fake IT guys so they could reassure the public that everything was under control.
We were careful to stick to the Twitter mechanics that would have been available to us at the time. For example, we didn't introduce polls until we got to fall 2015 in the timeline. And we made sure all Tweets were under 140 characters until we reached November 2017, when the limit was expanded to 280 characters.
We knew that tagging or retweeting celebrities' recent Tweets would be unlikely to catch their eye in their sea of mentions. So we focused on retweeting their old Tweets, figuring it would stand out in their notifications. Our plan worked: Ja Rule retweeted and followed us.
Here are some highlights from the rest of the day. Our social media team sat in a war room for a total of 8 hours, manually Tweeting each of these every two minutes on the dot to simulate the feel of an actual technical glitch. The final memes finally caught up to the present day (at the time of this stunt), like Bernie mittens.
So how did this crazy shit end? With the most ironic epilogue of all time: Elon Musk, of all people, Tweeted about our stunt two days later. At the time, we were like, woah, cool!, because no one knew he was crazy yet. A year later, he went on to buy Twitter and ruin it so epically that the brand stopped using the platform.
Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted. In conclusion:
The Original Donut Shop Coffee
Twitter Launch
The Original Donut Shop Coffee, a Keurig K-Cup pod brand, had been around for over a decade, but had never Tweeted. And yet, they still wanted to seem authentic and relevant to a genzennial audience. But, like, wouldn't an authentically authentic brand already have Twitter?
And more importantly, how do you launch a Twitter account 15 years late without looking like a total loser?
With a straight face, we made it seem like the brand *had* actually been Tweeting the whole time, but that our hundreds of Tweets from the past 15 years had gotten clogged on the backend due to a technical snafu that was causing them to all come out at once.
By the end of the day, we got 82.4K organic impressions, 2.2K engagements, 54.3K profile visits, the #1 search ranking for "coffee" (above Dunkin') and tons of new followers, including rapper JaRule. Yes, the Fyre Fest guy.
All without spending a dollar on media.
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