These past few months at work, I have become more involved in social media for clients. From helping develop social media strategies, to "tweeting" it's been an adventure. Lately, I've been enjoying updating my own personal vocabulary, which brings us to today's new term: Rickrolling.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, Rickrolling is an Internet bait and switch tactic where a person provides a web link that he or she claims is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd).
This most recent emergence of this trending term is shown here with promise of a wheelchair and escalator stunt – this time the user is “Rickrolled” into viewing a keyboarding cat halfway through.
Currently, this trend is taking media by storm – Stephen Colbert rickrolled his viewers and even Adam Sandberg rickrolled his captive audience during this year's MTV Awards.
Okay, so what's my point? Well as it turns out, shocking and sometimes outright silly humor is not only still appreciated but also effective in communication...not to mention, this particular version of humor earned Mr. Astley over 36 million youtube views with two viral campaigns.
So go ahead, give funny a try. You just may start a trend.
More to come,
Nicole
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I've fallen for the rickroll quite a few times but always manage to get a good laugh. It's a great way to show, in a roundabout way, the power of viral marketing.
Post a Comment