1. #SHRIMPALERT
THE BEAUTIFUL COLLISION OF A
SHRIMP ON A TREADMILL, YAKETY
SAKS, BASEBALL
& ONLINE COMMUNITY

2. LIFE IN DIGITAL MEDIA
Here’s how we’ll do this:
1) After a small amount of setup, we’ll walkthrough a
ridiculous, but hopefully helpful, example of one corner
of the digital media world
2) Mix in relative examples to you all in this classroom that
may not seem as crazy
3) Qualify it with broad media changes and the whatnot to
try to get from the granular to the big picture
4) Point out how this all affects my day job (as a Digital
PR/Media and blogger)

3. FIRST UP:
SHRIMP
WE’LL GET BACK TO THIS – AND WHY IT
RELATES TO BASEBALL – IN A BIT

4. UNRELATED:
LET’S PLAY A GAME
The probability of two
people out of a random
group of 57 having the same
birthday is over 99 percent.
What does this have to do
with digital media and
shrimp? Everything.
Source: Flickr user MangoPOPTART

5. POWER LAW
DISTRIBUTION
Source: Future Perfect Publishing

6. “THE LONG TAIL” IN MEDIA
You get VERY different audiences up here…
…and down here
Original Picture by Hay Kranen / PD

7. BACK TO BIRTHDAYS:
FORGET STATS
You are likely to find someone who shares a birthday
with you here because the room is so big. That’s
probability, it’s how we got by in media for years.
…but down here, you can find a room just for people
who share your birthday. The freedom to create rooms
at will changes the way you think about the issue.
Original Picture by Hay Kranen / PD

8. THE
DISTRIBUTION
DEMOCRACY
“…then came
broadband, which
essentially removed
any channel
scarcity. The
distribution, which had
been in the hands of a
few large media
conglomerates, was
suddenly available to
everyone…Just like
television, we have
seen the same drama
unfold in the music,
radio, newspaper and
magazine industries.
The gatekeepers of
attention have been
disrupted.”
Om Malik, May 11, 2011

9. JUST LIKE
BIRTHDAYS
…

10. WHEN MEDIA WAS
LIMITED BY TECH,
IT NEEDED TO
REPORT BROADLY
That’s why we have
box scores. They tell
us the score at the end
of the game. Most
people reading the
newspaper want to
know the basics of
who did what, and
that’s what broad
media tells them.
There’s no line in a
box score for when
those hits,
appearances, runs and
walks happened –
perhaps, say, to end a
game. It doesn’t make
sense to include that.

11. BUT BASEBALL GAMES DO END IN
DIFFERENT WAYS – SOMETIMES IN
DRAMATIC “WALKOFF” FASHION
Not all Walkoffs are built the same way, though:
Walkoff Samples from 1973-2011
2500
2000
1500
1000 Walk-Offs
500
0
Walk Home Run Triples HBPs

12. SOME PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THE
UBER-SPECIFIC WAYS THAT
GAMES END

13. THIS BRINGS US ALL BACK TO
SHRIMP
I’ll let Rob Iracane – founder of blog Walkoff Walk – explain it. As he
wrote in a Yahoo! Sports post* earlier this year:
In my previous stint as a co-founder of the baseball blog called, you
guessed it, "Walkoff Walk," we had a peculiar way of celebrating each time
a walkoff walk happened in the bigs. After then-Phillies outfielder Jayson
Werth(notes) drew one in April 2008, my co-blogger Kris Liakos
spontaneously posted a video of a shrimp running on a
treadmill accompanied by "Yakety Sax," the Benny Hill theme song.
It was a tradition that continued for the next two seasons. Even since we
have shuttered the blog, the shrimp video has taken to Twitter. Any time a
team gets close to winning a game on a bases-loaded walk, the hashtag
#shrimpalert starts appearing in the Twittersphere to alert fellow shrimp
devotees that a walkoff walk is nigh somewhere in baseball and the
treadmill video could get posted any second.
*Some of the other numbers in this presentation are also from that great post.

14. PEOPLE WHO STALK WALK-OFF
WALKS ARE NOT COMMON
But this is why I love the Internet – there is in fact an active
community of them online who have rallied around this video
and this gimmick.

15. IN ONE SENSE, IT’S JUST A SHRIMP
The shrimp had nothing to do with baseball, and was recently
brought into questions about the validity of government
spending and research into the habits of aquatic creatures.

16. IN ANOTHER SENSE, IT’S JUST
ANOTHER BENNY HILL MASH-UP
The video of our
friend Shrimp-on-a-
treadmill is far from
the first or last
video to get the
Benny Hill
treatment. In fact…

17. IT’S EASY TO DO (AND IT MAKES ME
FEEL BETTER ABOUT FOOTBALL)
I call it #YaketyShinskie, and absolutely no one will ever use it again.

18. BUT IT WAS WHEN THEY ALL CAME
TOGETHER THAT SOMETHING ELSE
HAPPENED

19. BOOOOOOOOO…
TIME TO BE
PRACTICAL
(KIND OF)

20. THESE THINGS MADE
#SHRIMPALERT POSSIBLE
1. Technology changes in the last decade have made it really easy
and cheap to create and consume media – video, blogs, etc.
2. So easy, in fact, that people are trying different stuff within their
own interests everyday:
• Instead of waiting for chance to bring them people with similar
interests, the opportunity cost to search for people with really
specific similarities is really low.
3. The cost of failure to connect would have been zero.
• That means that posting a ridiculous video – and using it for equally
ridiculous means – has no cost if it doesn’t catch on.
Amazing things can happen when you take away the barriers to create
and to connect.
• Amazing things like celebrating the rare occurrence of a walkoff
walk with 435 of your closest friends and a hashtag through a video
of a shrimp running on a treadmill set to Yakety Sax.

21. ENVIRONMENT
MATTERS
For every community
that latches on to
something, there are
myriad other ideas that
don’t work.
48 hours of video are
uploaded every minute to
YouTube – why did that
90-second video get 1.5
million views?

22. THERE’S ALSO THE CHANGING
WAYS WE GET OUR NEWS
Pew’s Journalism study looked at the different channels that
someone under 40 uses to get information:
• Internet: weather, politics, crime, arts/cultural events, local
businesses, schools, community
events, restaurants, traffic, taxes, housing, local
government, jobs, social services, and
zoning/development
• Newspapers: crime, arts/cultural events, community
events, taxes, local government, jobs, social
services, zoning/development
• TV stations: weather, breaking
news, politics, crime, traffic, local government, and social
services
• Radio: traffic
• Word of mouth: Community events

23. BUT THE CHANGE IS JUST AS MUCH
ABOUT THE FACT THAT WE CARE
ABOUT MORE THAN ONE THING –
AND AREN’T LIMITED BY SOURCE
ANY LONGER
That is to say, every single person reads the newspaper in a
different way – but if they read it all, no matter what
order, they end up with that perspective of the news.
When you open up the floodgates to consuming and creating
news, the ability to dive deep and use myriad sources
fundamentally changes how we get information.

24. SOME OF IT IS SPEED AND
CONVENIENCE

25. SELECTING SOURCE AND CONTENT
CREATES THE COMMUNITY
In selecting specific sources for
the content we seek, we get very
different approaches to the same
story.
I’d be lying if I said that Shrimp
Alert, the retired Walkoff Walk blog
and the Yahoo! blog are the only
places out there to find the exact
same information of how a
baseball game ended.
But in choosing to digest my
walkoff walk news via those
avenues, I get a very different
presentation of it (namely, you
guessed it, a shrimp on a treadmill
set to Yakety Saks).

26. XKCD's map of online communities
HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO WHAT I DO*
*as a PR pro who hangs around digital media and a blogger, nerd, etc.

27. THIS WORKS BEYOND SPORTS
MEDIA – ACROSS CHANNEL
We can go down that path any way we
want – searching for different communities
about many, many different things.
The best way to understand these
communities is to participate and see how
each one reacts differently. The #WeAreBC
tag that has grown on Twitter over the last
few years talks about everything from
sports to activities on BC’s campus and
acts very differently than #ShrimpAlert.
These also change based on different
channels. Facebook relies more on a
handful of close connections even if you
have a ton of friends, YouTube users love
search and related videos, Tumblr is a
different beast all together and we could
spend days on traditional media news sites
(and their comment sections). We could
spend days on each of these. We won’t.

28. NOT ONLY IS THERE A COMMUNITY
BEHIND THIS LITTLE FELLA – BUT WE
CAN LEARN ABOUT THEM

29. A REALLY FAST STUDY…
The people following the @ShrimpAlert account are more active than most, and
many appear to be well-followed baseball bloggers and sportswriters, living
almost entirely the east coast of the US.

30. THERE ARE A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO OBSESS
OVER THE MINUTIAE OF BASEBALL TO THE POINT
THEY STALK WHEN GAMES END ON WALKS
These people have
something in common.
They stalk Shrimp
Alert. That’s one part of
their identity...they are
at once consuming the
media of Shrimp while
being media
themselves.

31. THAT AUDIENCE HAS A VALUE TO SOMEONE.
I mean, there has to be
a reason to talk to
active and well-
followed baseball
bloggers and
sportswriters, living
almost entirely the east
coast of the US.
Right?

32. MOVING FROM
SPORTS TO
HEALTH
…I promise the point
of this lecture is not
“watch how many
things we can connect
to sports.”
But this one is more
functional than
shrimp, I promise.

33. ONLINE COMMUNITIES FOR SPORTS TEAMS
OFFER THE FOLLOWING
• A group of like-minded individuals who share the joy of
victory or the agony of a tough season month day.
• A place to build out personal connections based on no
more than a single interest.
• A support group that already knows what it’s like to follow
the experience.
• Around the clock access to a communications channel to
stay up on what is happening in a world that matters to
them.
• A way to get involved in something that may seem
distant, and unique ways of communicating and bonding
within that shared experience.

34. ONLINE COMMUNITIES FOR PEOPLE WITH
SIMILAR HEALTH CONDITIONS OFFER THE
FOLLOWING
• A group of like-minded individuals who share the joy of
victory or the agony of a tough season month day.
• A place to build out personal connections based on no
more than a single interest.
• A support group that already knows what it’s like to follow
the experience.
• Around the clock access to a communications channel to
stay up on what is happening in a world that matters to
them.
• A way to get involved in something that may seem
distant, and unique ways of communicating and bonding
within that shared experience.

35. HOW THIS IMPACTS YOU
In the last five years, a few things changed:
• Sure, I work in PR, but because of how the digital medium
works, I ultimately have to be making things – writing
posts, creating videos, jotting tweets, you name it – that
gets my clients out there.
• We don’t necessarily wait for other people to tell their story
anymore. This is good and bad.
• My job and industry went pretty starkly from the idea
broadcast to narrowcast. Digging deep to tell your story to
the right people is how we can impact the people most
likely to continue that good will.

36. QUICK CASE STUDY
This YouTube video has 17,000 views in four days and went out to 152,109 subscribers.
The quality is the same as a TV commercial, it’s 34 seconds long, and it cost $0 to post.
Discussion question: is this an effective way to get people to go see a new movie?

37. …we are not driving a car, with
gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of
choice as to route. We are steering a
kayak, pushed rapidly and
monotonically down a route
determined by the environment. We
have a (very small) degree of control
over our course in this particular
stretch of river, and that control does
not extend to being able to
reverse, stop, or even significantly
alter the direction we're moving in.
-C. Shirky, Many to Many, Jan 22 2005
Photo: Flickr user visbeek

38. QUESTIONS?
DAVE LEVY (@LEVYDR/EMAIL)
OCTOBER 2011