Vodafone Zoozoos on Facebook!
Ayeshea Perera -
Thursday, April 30, 2009 6:47 PM
Zoozoos these days it seems are everywhere. The antics of these egg headed strange white humanoids have been entertaining millions of IPL viewers during commercial breaks for some weeks now. And now, these new Vodafone ambassadors have their own facebook fanpage, which is growing (even by facebook standards) at amazing speed. At around 11 am, the page had roughly over 26,000 fans. Barely five hours later, that number was over 30,000.
The page creators are clearly facebook savvy. They have uploaded albums, shared links and even created innovative zoozoo type products based on popular trends on facebook. That ludicrous “tag your friends into this sheet of cartoons depicting personality stereotypes” craze for instance.
They have created two (admittedly very cute) pictures various zoozoos depicting personality stereotypes for people to tag. Hats off. Not only are the page managers homing in on a popular trend on the social networking site, they are also pulling off a clever piece of viral marketing.
As more and more people get tagged on these photos, they tag others in return, ensuring visibility of that particular photograph across thousands and thousands of profile pages. Now assuming that each of those profiles have at least 200 friends, that is a LOT of eyeballs for the zoozoos and vodafone.
The page itself is bustling with activity. The “wall” is full of fan comments ranging from “They are cho chweeet” to “what would happen if I boiled one?” Fans have also quickly come together to give each other (and the world at large) more information about zoozoos. They have posted links to interviews, put up any information that they may have read or heard and have even posted fan photos and discussion topics. Page admins (presumably) also keep jumping in, to either corroborate or contradict information and do a good job of keeping discussion going.
The one source of frustration for them seems to be however, the fact that some fans are trying to leave the “official fan page” nest and build other fan sites. There have been several attempts to dissuade, either by trying to discredit these sites by stating that they are not “official” or entreating people to stay within one page and not dilute the community. And this could be their undoing. In a community hypersensitive to anything they see as “protectionism” or “propriety behaviour”, the zoozoo creators might well be setting themselves up for an Internet backlash.