Are you Lost?
March 19, 2007
My mate Rachel found Lost and sent it my way. Lost.eu wants to sign up 7 million players to become the "largest online game ever" and it all started with a URL left on a napkin in a cafe in Oxford.
It works like a kind of social pyramid scheme - you find an invite and then join the game. Once you join you then invite people yourself - the more people that join via your invitation - a unique URL - the more points you get.
It's an interesting experiment - challenging individuals to find ways to actively spread the idea, which has led to urls being scrawled in the sand on beaches in Puerto Rico, written on balloons released over Chicago and slightly disturbing pictures like the one above.
It taps into the transmedia strand we're calling propagation planning - creating ideas that contain their own mechanism for peer to peer transmission. Its creator says "it is not about content but about spreading an idea" which, when married to Heath's new thinking on the impact of message content being negligible, begins to suggest how brand communication might successfully utilise the power of peer transmission.
As Jenkins has pointed out, you don't need to control the conversation to reap the benefits of the exposure.
I've signed up so if you want to have a look feel free to use this invite: www.lost.eu/31e12
If I get loads of points and win the grand prize of $5000 I'll buy the drinks at BeerSphere until the money runs out.