Lots of Fun and Great Loot This past weekend, the first-ever Smarticlist became a bit of a phenomenon in Austin, Texas, leading to #Smarticpro even becoming a trending Twitter hashtag. It all started on Friday morning, March 11th, when one of our team members, freshly landed at the Austin airport for SXSW Interactive, planted the first StumbleHunt card behind this statue and tweeted about it. The game was on! Fast forward a few days to present time, and people are still posting about StumbleHunt cards they keep finding in random places all over Austin. The contest ended on March 15, the last day you could claim a card you found, and here’s a recap of how it all went.
Photo clues were taken and uploaded instantly with Instagram. We left another card with The Oatmeal’s designer Matthew Inman during his book signing, and left another card inside Tim Ferris’s book The 4 Hour Body. We taped a card on the back of a Uber Pedicab and even had some people be living, card-holding targets at parties. In the image above you can see Alli, the winner of a Macbook Air, who followed clues about a red-haired woman holding the winning card at the StumbleUpon & Barbarian Group party at SXSW. An Austinite, Alli has been a Stumbler for 3 years now and she came to our party determined to win the Macbook Air. Her perseverance paid off!
Another great moment in the StumbleHunt quest was at the end of the panel on Recommendation Engines beyond the Social Graph, when our CEO, Garrett Camp, announced that under one of the seats in the room lay a winning card. The lucky winner happened to be Sabrina Caluori, Head of Social Media at HBO, who was hoping she won an iPad, but it was even better: her card nabbed her a Macbook Air!
If you were one of the winners in the Smarticpro and reading this, congratulations one more time! If you didn’t win, thanks for following and playing along and stay tuned for next year’s Smarticpro. We’ll do it again!
In an effort to bring SXSW-goers something fresh and exciting this year – and in line with StumbleUpon’s mission to provide serendipitous discovery of cool things – our team decided to throw a scavenger hunt during the Interactive portion of the festival. The plan was to hide 100 cards, each carrying a unique code, at various SXSW venues around Austin. Our team would then take a “clue” photo of the location and tweet the clue. The finder of the card would take a photo of it and tweet it to @Smarticpro with the now famous hashtag #smarticpro. The prizes included movie tickets, Amazon giftcards, Kindles, iPod Nanos, Nexus S phones, iPads, and 3 Macbooks! With such great prizes to win, no wonder people went crazy over solving clues to literally “discover” the StumbleHunt cards.
We had so much fun planting these cards, carefully making sure they would not be tossed away by cleaning people, and cleverly posting hints about the secret locations. We hid cards inside panels, during parties, at food joints under chairs and tables, and even taped them on the doors of convention center bathrooms and other nearby venues. We hid some inside books at the SX bookstore and we even hid one card with a person, giving it to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who got really excited about the idea and agreed to help us out with the hunt.
