The Request

UPDATE 11/14/12:  We’ve finally managed to find an embedded copy of the video from GMA on Monday, so, here it is folks! Behold, Hairietta L. Pawturr!

In case you haven’t heard, we here at Mimoco are dealing with a little bit of in-house virality phenom’. The story, like all things in the internet age, has happened very quickly. The chronology has gone down like this:

November 5th @ 9:30AM
Teamoco has just settled in to the start of our day. In comes our Operations Manager Dan to yammer about work, but at the end what caught my attention was overhearing, “…if their post can get 1000 likes/ comments, they can get a cat.”

November 5th @ 6PM
Posted by Dan’s wife with the headline “Dan thinks there is NO way we can do this. I say there is. Help us out. We really want a cat named Hairy Pawturrr. If you can’t like, share. Shares count too! Thanks so much everyone!!”

Hairy Pawturr … HAIRY PAWTURR! If those little kiddies weren’t enough, how can you pass up on having a small kitten in this world named Hairy Pawturr!! (not to mention the HA HA to the face of the man who belittles social media). Of course, I did my part to ‘like’ and ‘share’. I didn’t think much about it until 10PM that night when I checked the photo again. It was just under 900 shares and 400 likes. I snickered and anticipated the look on Dan’s face in the morning.

November 6th @ 9:30AM
The post had gone viral and it exploded to over 20,000 shares and likes—not to mention a following on the Ellen DeGeneres Facebook page. It was total insanity, but also total hilarity to hear Dan say, “Maybe I under shot it”.

November 9th @ 11:30AM
There are 71,695 Likes and 69,888 Shares. Comments from around the world inquiring if they are getting one kitty for every thousand like/shares (141 kitties by now if you were wondering).

It’s been a wild couple days so to get a little insight we asked Dan, the man here behind all things Mimobot Production, a few questions to hear his so far unheard perspective.

Q: Where did the idea come from?
A: It came out of my head in an attempt to postpone getting a cat. I thought that Remi would forget all about it by the time it hit 1000 likes.

Q: Did you think it would hit 1K likes/shares?
A: I knew it was going to hit 1k at some point—I thought it would take longer than 2 hrs. I thought it would take a week or so. I knew I was screwed when within an hour we had 400 likes and Marisa was still trying to figure out how to make the picture “public” once she figured that out that’s when things started going nuts.

Q: How did you find out it & what did you feel when it started going viral?
A: I knew something was up when we got a phone call from Good Morning America and when we started getting friend requests and comments on the post from other countries where we don’t know the people like Japan and Germany.

Q: What do the kids think about all of this?
A: My son is excited to prove me wrong.

Q: How do you feel about cats?
They are ok, out of all the pets we could have gotten, a cat is the best i could think of—but we’re getting rid of all our fish now.

Q: Did you get the cat? What’s next?
A: We’re getting the cat tomorrow—going to pick it up with the camera crew from Good Morning America and then you’ll be able to see the pictures of the cat on our tumblr page. One of the conditions, originally, was that I would pick out the cat and get to name it but i didn’t get to do either of those things.

This has been an insanely sweet ride that all of us at Teamoco will be able to give Dan a knowing look and laugh for years to come. Want to see the original post on Facebook that started it all? Just click here!

 

Pin It