Join the Quest: Yim Gnome Is On the Prowl

This is a guest post from Lauren Cook and Lindsay Yaw, founding partners of the Swarm Collective, a digital media and PR company based in Denver, CO.

We at Swarm get pretty excited about out-of-the-box ideas. The more creative the better, we think. It’s the reason we fell in love with a garden gnome named Yim Gnome earlier this year—a foot-tall plastic Boston Red Sox gnome who travels the country with people who think he’s cool and post pictures about him on Facebook (he’s got a few hundred friends–so popular) and Twitter (#yimgnome).

How it got started:

When we took Yim with us to SXSW in Austin, TX in March, we found out that lots of  other people, like the Whrrl team out of Seattle, thought Yim Gnome was cool too. It got us thinking—what fuels the viral aspect of any good social media marketing campaign? If its something physical and tangible, what makes it a hit? On June 1st, we set out to find out.

In partnership with Whrrl, a web-based application that lets people share their real-world experiences as they happen from the web and mobile phone, we at Swarm have crafted a physical viral experiment using Yim Gnome as the catalyst that we launched on June 1st! Over a 90-day period, Yim will be hosted by savvy social media influencers in 12 different cities around the country starting with Brett Petersel (@brett) from Mashable at Internet Week in NYC. Yim’s goal is to find love and to see the most places and meet the most people along the way. The best story wins. Want in? Email us (lindsay@swarmcollective.com, lauren@swarmcollective.com) and we’ll see if we can get you on the schedule!

What are Swarm’s & Whrrl’s goals? So glad you asked. Here they are:

• To encourage as many people as possible in as many locations as possible, both nationally and internationally, to connect with and share stories about Yim Gnome using Whrrl platform.
• To document experiences with each person, in each place with uploaded images and story-driven content using Whrrl platform.
• To generate virality through physical human-to-human connection, capitalizing on herd mentality of people wanting to be part of a fun, quirky movement.
• Create and prove hypotheses that including a physical element to any marketing campaign will fuel its virality.
• But most importantly, our goal is to create laughter with people and let people enjoy the lighter side of life. There’s power in that.