The one time I went viral

/ January 25, 2014

You may know me lately from my Mashable fame.  It’s all because I once sent a tweet that went viral in seconds.

I sent the tweet while I was on a conference call.  I honestly kept getting the image of Amy Poehler in my head every-time I heard Polar Vortex.  It wouldn’t go away.  So I thought it would be funny to take a weather graphic and put her face on it.  And then I thought, surely I’m not the first to think about it.  So I searched twitter and found nothing.  Then I searched tumblr and found it.

So I sent that out on twitter for a laugh.  I literally thought it would be like every-other tweet I send.  A few people would read it and think it was funny and that’s it.  So I sent it and a few of my friends instantly responded, loving it.  I totally blame Brett and Shawn for what happened next.  Both of them are kind of big twitter deals and they were the first to comment/retweet on the original tweet.

I started driving home from work and my phone started buzzing.  A lot.  And I look down (while at a stop light of course) and see:

And then this:

Uh oh.  By the time I got home, it had been retweeted hundreds of times.  Instantly, I felt terribly guilty.  It wasn’t mine.  So I tracked down what I thought was the original source of the photo and tweeted giving him credit.  He replied no problem.  Ok, so that was better.  As the night went on, it calmed down a bit.  Until NBC Parks & Recreation retweeted it and put it on their Tumblr.

So then my head exploded.  And again the next morning things died down again, until “The Fix” from the Washington Post retweeted it, and then it went crazy again.  During lunch, I got an email message from a Facebook friend freaking out over seeing my face in the Mashable article.

It was all such a whirlwind.  I wish I could take credit.  But it just shows you the power of social media and the power of your network.  Most things I tweet go nowhere.  And that’s just fine with me.  You need to be responsible with what you tweet and you need to give credit where credit is due.  I could have easily pretended it was mine.  I also got a glimpse into what it must be like for a celebrity on twitter.  There’s just no way to keep up with it all.  You have to hire someone if you’re going to keep up with all the comments and retweets!

So that’s the inside story of how I became “Mashable” famous.  Perhaps next time it will be for something I actually make myself.

What’s your big “I’m famous on social media moment?”

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