NescaFail & 9gag

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A really interesting thing happened yesterday morning. I had the advantageous position to follow the case of Janos Szolnoki, a Hungarian guy, who entered to a competition on the official site of Nescafé Hungary. What’s so peculiar about this? Well, he asked for some help from 9gag .

9gag is a popular website filled with funny pictures and well known stick figure like rage comics and other stuff like that. The new upcoming generation created this site and this “culture”. I say culture, because it has some really interesting details to it. I am not a professor in this field, and I really don’t know too much about psychology or sociology, or the effects of the crowds, but what happened made me think.

What happened?
The world is changing rapidly, and we don’t really know the effects of it yet. Janos posted a picture to 9gag asking the community to help him win a contest and win $5000, so he can help his little brother who is disabled. He wanted a Christmas that he’ll never forget. He seemed like a nice fellow and he had good intentions and he needed 3000 likes on Facebook so 9gag came to the rescue: with over 47 thousand likes. That is just simply impressive, and in the light of later events this was only the beginning and nothing compared to what this online community achieved.

Janos was banned from the competition. A really bad choice from Nescafé: the rage of the whole Internet came down from the heavens – the great fear happened: the sky fell on them, even a little magic potion couldn’t help on the situation. So Janos was not in the final 30 – from whom 5 competitors would win each $5000. I won’t discuss the contest in depth here. Let’s just say that the jury had every right not to select Janos as a finalist, but they should’ve done something with a contestant that had over 40 thousand people behind him. And Nescafé had a pretty misleading slogen: “the two contestant with the most likes will certainly win”. They left out: if they are selected as a finalist by our own jury.

But what did 9gag do?
And here comes the important, scary, glorious part – or call it what you will. The 9gag Army came, saw and conquered. In just one day Janos gained 25 thousand likes on Facebook for this new group. Not to mention the birth of the Facebook page: Occupy unfairNes-cafe . People were outraged: they posted on the page of Nescafé Hungary, in just minutes all hell broke lose, the page was spammed by the second, it was like they hit it with a heavy machine gun and a few tanks, bombs, cannons, everything they had and they did it continuously for 24 hours and still counting. But this is not all: They posted the same thing over and over again to the official Nescafé page, to CNN and other pages all over the world, making everybody know about what happened, and demanding the $5000 to Janos.

They reached their goal, slowly everything is returning back to normal. Nescafé reassured everybody that they are working on the situation. They contacted Janos and offered him 3 things, from which he did not yet choose anything. Also 9gag offered Janos money as well, suggesting to him to open a Paypal account to gather the $5000 for charity. Everything turned out great.