Bull Moose promo goes viral, brushes with George Takei of 'Star Trek' fame
The "Lego Firewalk," held as an in-store promotional event at Bull Moose's South Portland Mill Creek store, became an Internet sensation this week.
A clever in-store promotion by Bull Moose got star treatment this week when a photo of the “Lego Firewalk” became an Internet sensation and reached several social media websites, including the Facebook page of former “Star Trek” actor George Takei.
As of Friday morning, Takei's Facebook post has been “liked” over 244,000 times and shared by nearly 120,000 users. On popular image-sharing site imgur.com, the photo has been viewed over 1.2 million times. It also reached the front page of Reddit.com, a website owned by New Yorker publisher Conde Nast, with nearly 2,500 “upvotes.”
Lucas Comeau, a visual media buyer for the Maine retail chain, told Mainebiz that the “Lego Firewalk” was meant as a unique in-store promotion at the company's Mill Creek South Portland store for the release of “The Lego Movie.” He and other employees conceived of the idea when joking about the common and uncomfortable plight parents suffer when walking on stray Lego blocks left on the floor.
“We said we should have people walk on Lego bricks because people can all relate to that happening to them,” he said. “It could be like a Polynesian fire walk but we weren’t seriously thinking about it.”
Customers who were brave enough to walk across the 12-foot stretch of assorted Lego blocks on Tuesday could buy “The Lego Movie” for half off its regular price. Comeau said employees tested the fire walk to make sure it wouldn't seriously hurt anyone.
After the event wrapped up, Mill Creek store manager Mick Pratt posted a photo of the “Lego Firewalk” to his personal Tumblr blog, which was shortly re-posted to Bull Moose's own Tumblr. The photo was then posted to imgur, Reddit and eventually came to the attention of Takei, who has become a social media superstar with over 7 million “likes” on his Facebook page.
Though Bull Moose employees were thrilled to see the image go viral, it underlined one problem with the photo itself and relying on social media. For one, the photo didn't have the Bull Moose company logo on it, Comeau said, so the company lost an opportunity to raise awareness of its brand with thousands of users across the world.
“We’re kicking ourselves for not having the logo in there,” he said. “Had we known it would turn into this we would have put a banner up.”
Luckily for Bull Moose, Takei later appended his post to include a link to the company's own Facebook page. But that's where the other issue became apparent: It's tough to reach your targeted audience with just Facebook unless you happen to strike Internet gold or pay money for sponsored posts. That's why Bull Moose has begun to focus on promotion through other social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
“The new world order on Facebook is pretty tough,” Comeau said, referring to the social media site's changes that make it more difficult to reach a targeted audience without spending money. “If you don’t pony up the money, you don’t get views.”
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