Get a mop or hire a maid because what I’m about to explain to you is going to make it messy up there. Thomas and I were flown down to LA last Sunday to be trained on the “Fiesta Movement,” the online competition Ford is hosting in which 100 people win cars for 6 months. We knew the campaign was a pretty good idea from the beginning:

1. Send in a video about why you should be a Fiesta agent: Check!
2. Wait a little while and find out if you won. 4,000 people applied, 100 were chosen, we were chosen. That takes us to last weekend.

Next, Ford, along with Action Marketing and Undercurent, flew all the West Coast winners down to LA for what they called “agent training.” In LA we met several of the Fiesta Agents who will be playing along with us in this advertising adventure, one of whom was MoonCricket who is big in the Justin TV community. For those of you who don’t know, Justin.tv is one of those sites where you can live broadcast pretty much 24/7 and people can just watch your life. MoonCricket at any particular time during our trip in LA would have 800+ people watching and chatting to him live. (Crazy!) This is when it dawned on me that Ford had hit on something huge.

What I quickly learned is that we seemed to have two types of people here. The first were Internet celebs that have their own global micro-brands. Examples of this type were MoonCricket and his followers on Justin.Tv; Olga Kay who has over 8,000 followers on Twitter and 26,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel; Alison Haislip who hosts Attack of the Show on G4; and Danny with gradualreport who has 44,000 subscribers on YouTube and seems to just be an all around hilarious guy with a decent online presence.

The second type of person comes with more traditional media skills. For example, Jonathan 360 has a master of photography and over 62,000 twitter followers; Menace is a DJ in SF with Live 105; and Thomas and I are not web celebrities but have connections all around the web and in the Valley, as well as decent editing, filming and writing skills.

What we all seemed to have in common was a relatively large online ego. I’m asked almost daily why I would care at all about winning a car that I don’t get to keep. This isn’t a crazy question—I live in San Francisco where you don’t need a car to get around and, on top of that, I own a car. I’m not a car fanatic, and if I was it would be for ultra fuel efficient hybrids – which the fiesta is not. Now I should state that some people who won did really want a car. Chris Thompson, who is another YouTube star, lives in LA and doesn’t own a car (which seems impossible to me). My point is that Ford has chose their agents very wisely. All of us seem to have an agenda, and for the most part it has little to do with Ford and a whole lot to do with ourselves.

Why all of us want so much attention online is a whole different blog post, or maybe a conversation I’ll have with you over coffee, beer or boffee (coffee brewed with beer instead of water). What I want to elaborate on here is how well Ford honed in on this idea of the online ego. OK, so we won a car, big deal what’s next? We spend the next 6 months having our brand pimped online by Ford and 99 other Internet-famous Fiesta Agents. Why would we do this for Ford? Because it gives us easier access to exposure—plus we get to win stuff! This brings me to the brilliant master plan: whoever came up with this part of the idea gets a slow clap started by me.

Each Fiesta Agent (or team of agents) gets an Agent page at fiestamovement.com. Check us out, we’re agents #89. On top of being given a car, we were also given a little Sony camera to take video with. Now comes the genius. For every Twitter post you do with the hash tag (#) Fiestamovement, you get a point. For every YouTube video you post, you get 5 points and for every view, comment and rating you get on YouTube, you get a point. For every photo posted, you get a point. I think you get the picture. Points put you on the board, the leader on the board wins a prize. What the prize is… we just don’t know.

And, as if this isn’t enough, we are given missions. We don’t really know what a mission looks like yet, but we know they’ll happen once a month, and it’s our one single responsibility to accomplish a mission, and post a video about it. Points aside, missions must be accomplished. We find out our first mission in about 4 days—we’ll keep you posted.

So needless to say the Ford Fiesta went from having nearly nothing about it online in the United States to having 100 x Web Ego + points x 6 months. Brilliant idea.

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