How Did I Get Here
Page 9
Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now
Things have changed dramatically in recent years for 900 Films. Sales of DVDs and videos have begun to evaporate. Kids who want to see action-sports footage could pretty much get their fill on the Internet for free. When we distribute DVDs these days, it’s usually given away as an add-on with a retail purchase, like the time we arranged with Target stores to include a free Secret Skatepark Tour DVD with my video game.
As video moved online, the 900 Films crew began spending most of its time producing short pieces for various Internet sites. It helps to have a small and nimble crew that can get good footage with none of the overhead attached to most high-profile productions. My guys have slipped unseen into the restaurant at the legendary Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood to interview Christian Slater over lunch. They’ve made a string of online commercials for Activision (makers of my video game) in a matter of days. When we catch wind that a skater has pulled something amazing, Jared will rush out and get the scoop.
As a result, we’ve been able to create a nonstop stream of fresh footage for various websites, with several clips closing in on one million views. A substantial chunk of that traffic has been driven to the website by my tweets. If you don’t know what that means, go to the next chapter. In fact, even if you do know what that means, you should probably go to the next chapter.
9
HASHTAG IS NOT A DEATH-METAL BAND
Reaching out through tweets, apps, and satrad
Some tweets from 2010
Free versions of our iTunes apps have “dropped.” Trick Tips:http://j.mp/cCZGqd Faceplant: http://j.mp/aQe4f3 Hawkize:http://j.mp/d5imUI
9:10 AM Feb 25th via Twitter for iPhone
We will be live on Demolition Radio in one hour (4pm PST, 7pm EST) - on Faction: Sirius 28 / XM 52. Tune in now to get a good seat.
3:08 PM Jan 5th via web
We are live right now. And you aren’t tuned in…? WTF! Call us and tell us why - 1-877-HEY-HAWK
4:13 PM Jan 5th via txt
Sounds like a bunch of Tweeps got @thride under their trees this morning.
Thanks for all the props and well wishes (and support). Enjoy!
11:26 AM Dec 25th, 2009 via Twitter for iPhone
[From Chad Ochocinco, the professional football player]
Man Xmas is hard people, ,, my son wants. Mongoose bike, are any of those XGames guys on twitter, where can I get a good bike from
8:59 AM Dec 15th, 2009 via twidroid
@ogochocinco DM me your address and I’ll send you one of my Huckjam series for him.
9:45 AM Dec 15th, 2009 via txt
To those complaining only VIP’s get free gear: I get it. Tell me why you need a holiday gift in one Tweet (don’t lie). Top 5 get skateboards
11:07 AM Dec 15th, 2009 via txt
I couldn’t only pick 5 since it sounded like a rough year for too many. I chose more that will receive other gifts too. Will contact soon via DM.
8:11 AM Dec 16th, 2009 via Twitter for iPhone
I love Apple (the computer company, not the fruit). I got my first PowerBook when I could finally afford one, at age 24, and I’ve been first in line to buy pretty much every major product Apple has released since: Macintosh, iMac, PowerBook, G3, G4, iPod, iPhone, iPad—and whatever’s next. I think of myself as an early adopter; friends say I have a fetish. (By the way, this is not a paid plug for Apple. The company has never given me anything for free, and, believe me, I’d take it if they offered.)
Anyway, my house is full of Apple and other electronic gadgets, and I spend many hours creating things with them and sharing the results through the Internet. I’ve been shooting, editing, compressing, and uploading video clips since the earliest days of the Internet. I’ve kept an online blog and road journal since 2000. I got my first camera cell phone in 2001 and I’ve been e-mailing photos and video clips to family and friends ever since.
One advantage to all of this technological innovation is that it enables people like me to communicate directly with fans. We no longer have to depend on paid advertising (or the press) to get the word out about appearances or events or products, or just to let people know what we’re up to. Perhaps my favorite tool right now is Twitter—the microblogging service that lets users upload brief text messages.
I found Twitter because some of my friends and celebrity acquaintances, like Lance Armstrong, were sending out funny and engaging tweets, and I quickly realized I could use it to talk to my own friends and fans. The best part is that anyone with a mobile phone can get your tweets as soon as you send them. Before long, I had several thousand followers myself, largely thanks to a “follow referral” by Lance.
One day in early 2009, I was driving home with an extra skateboard in my car, and decided to try a Twitter experiment. I stashed the board in some bushes beside the road and tweeted that I’d just hidden a skateboard, pinpointing its location. The feedback was almost scary in its immediacy and breadth. Apparently, people were re-tweeting my message to others in the area and anyone they thought might be nearby. Within 20 minutes, I got a response from a girl (including a picture), who wrote, “Thanks so much, I found it!”
Word spreads fast on the Internet—especially if there’s free stuff involved. That improvised one-off giveaway created a little online buzz, and my number of Twitter followers spiked to more than 250,000. So I made plans to try the same thing on a larger scale. That same year, with the help of friends in places like Seattle, Dallas, Detroit, and New York City, we staged a nationwide Easter–swag hunt. We shipped boards to my contacts in cities across the country, and they let me know exactly where (and when) they’d hidden a board in some public place—usually near a landmark. Then I’d forward that information to the masses through Twitter. The whole experiment was called the Tony Hawk Twitter Hunt, and we used the hashtag “#THTH” to mark each tweet related to it. That way, if someone wanted to search for any discussions or updates about the hunt, they simply had to do a Twitter search for #THTH to get the latest info.
I spent that Easter Sunday juggling texts, e-mails, phone calls, and tweets. The most stressful part was making sure I spread the word as soon as someone found a board, so other seekers wouldn’t waste time wandering around looking for a treasure that had already been found. It was a chore but also thrilling. I asked the winners to send pictures of themselves with their prizes. Most of them did, and they looked happy.
Two unanticipated things came out of that Easter hunt: First, it got mentioned by some mainstream news outlets and on hundreds of websites. “Well done Tony Hawk for unlocking the Easter Egg potential of Twitter,” one blogger from England wrote. “No matter how many followers someone has, they feel like they’re getting the inside skinny—information that is not widely available. Almost like being told a secret.”
Second, it sent my Twitter fan base through the roof. Within six months, I passed the million-follower mark. Eleven months after that, I was up over two million. Of course, the marketing potential of such a number is staggering—although I try not to abuse it. Mainly I look to entertain and engage by tweeting funny quotes I’ve overheard or links to photos and video clips I think people will like. I see and hear a lot of weird and hilarious stuff in my worldwide travels. I also have a crew of witty friends who send me links to some of the Internet’s best offerings, like twitter.com/shitmydadsays and peopleofwalmart.com.
I took the Twitter hunt worldwide in the fall of 2009, only this time, thanks to my sponsors, we sent out boxes of swag: skateboards, smart phones, video cameras, bicycles, backpacks, watches—enough to fill a UPS truck. We also scheduled the hunt to take place over several days, beginning in Europe and Australia. From there, we focused on the United States, starting on the East and West coasts, then moving in a big geographic spiral that ended in Columbus, Ohio, where I planned to put on a surprise demo with the Birdhouse team.
An Enigmatic Treasure Hunt
Here’s a blog posted by a person who found o
ne of the Easter packages we stashed in England in April 2010, from mediakinetic.co.uk/THTH.html:
What happens when you hit that in-between age when you’re technically too old to join an Easter egg hunt and don’t have children yet to use as a guise for running around like a loon chasing hidden chocolate treats?
You follow Tony Hawk, of course! For those who aren’t in the know—he’s only the most famous skateboarder in the world who does an Easter treasure hunt each year!
I’m a bit of a tweeting novice, and my fiance Alex rolls his eyes every time I ask, “What’s a ‘Follow Friday?’” or, “How do I do that hashtag thing?” I needed some cool people to follow and after we heard about the Tony Hawk Twitter Hunt (THTH) phenomenon last year, we decided Mr. Hawk would be a cool person to follow.
So here’s our messy THTH story…
Easter Sunday we woke up with the blissful “lie-in” feeling. We’re big iPhone fans, so most mornings start with checking the Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, and breaking news. We’d forgotten about the THTH the night before, but then we got a tweet about a UK clue: “A yellow envelope under an Enigma, near a Listening Post contains directions to the prize.” Hmmm…
We figured that Mr. Hawk would want to hide the prize somewhere accessible and free in London, so that’s where our thought process began. As a bit of a film buff, the “enigma” clue conjured up images of the movie by the same name—of Kate Winslet and Bletchley Park and the WW2 code-breaking machines, called Enigmas. But Bletchley Park is in Milton Keynes, not London, so we ruled that out. The tricky bit was “the listening post.”
Still curled up in the comfort of our duvet, we googled “listening post” to find an exhibit by that name (a “modern portrait of online communication”) at the Science Museum. It then dawned on me that this was a likely place to also find an Enigma machine.
So that was that. Well done. We had solved the clue and we could now go back to sleep, read the papers, have a cooked breakfast, and generally chill out and meet our friends for our Easter walk with the dogs. Ten minutes passed, and then the discussion began:
“What if we’re actually right?”
“But it’ll take us two hours to get into London.”
“No. Let’s just stay in bed.”
“Oh my God! We’re not resigning ourselves to old age just yet. How often do you get to do an adult treasure hunt?”
We literally tossed a coin: Heads we go, tails we stay.
Heads! We were up, running around the bedroom scrabbling for clothes. No showers, no breakfast, just get on the road. Archie, the poor dog, must have thought the world was about to end, the way we ran around, threw his breakfast at him, and left the house in a whirlwind, promising a long walk later.
Alex was driver and I was tweeter/iPhone direction girl in this double act. SatNav said 58 minutes to get into London (and probably another 30 to find a parking space). As soon as we had the Science Museum in sight, the gods looked down on us, as a parking space appeared a couple of streets away. The calm stroll turned into a semi-run—or speedwalk, because adults don’t run in treasure hunts. Yeah, right. In through the main doors. Alex was looking around like a big kid, saying, “I can’t believe I’ve never been here before.” I could see he was losing focus as he picked up a guide to the museum.
“Come on!”
With a sense of urgency, as if I had lost my child, I grabbed the nearest Science Museum person: “Quickest way to the Listening Post?”
We had our directions and after an agonizing wait for the lift (we would have taken the stairs, but couldn’t find them), we finally made it to the correct floor. Enigma—where is it? While every other sane person was gently strolling through the exhibit, here were two random adults looking under all the exhibits like they had escaped the asylum for the day. This really felt like we’re part of The Da Vinci Code now. So exciting. We found the Enigma. I looked underneath the cabinet. Nothing.
Alex now got onto his belly and crawled underneath. If people didn’t think we were nuts before, they did now. He appeared with a yellow envelope.… OH MY GOD! We were right—we’d found the clue! We opened the envelope, which included an Easter card, a map to the next location, and instructions of what to say. This was seriously cool stuff. Our next instructions were to get across town to Brick Lane, East London.
All the way back to the car we were tweeting our progress, while googling the next location. Thank God for the iPhone!
If you haven’t been to Brick Lane, it’s like a medley of cultures, famous for curry houses, pearly kings and queens, and cool little retro clothes shops. On Easter Sunday, it’s packed, of course.
We parked what seemed like a mile away, but thanks to the cool maps app we were able to track our way to the next location. We were looking for Oh Baby, a small baby-wear store. When I say small, I mean the size of our kitchen small. So small we nearly missed it … twice.
The poor bloke behind the counter must have thought we were a bit nuts as we headed for the counter, faces beaming, as we uttered the code words: “The Suggmeister sent us.” I was just hoping he wouldn’t call the police.
Bingo, the box appeared. We had done it! We were the UK London THTH winners!
We cracked open the box and checked out the cool prizes: a signed Tony Hawk board, Quiksilver cap and T-shirt, Tech Decks, a belt, a Birdhouse rucksack, sweet Nixon headphones, some Kicker headphones, and Cadbury Creme Eggs. After celebrating with the candy, we headed back to tweet our story to our very patient friends.
This had been the most fun we had been privileged to be part of in a long time—a real adventure. Yes, the prizes are cool, but the whole experience made it for us: the thrill of the clue, chase to the location, all of it.
So what do thirtysomethings do at Easter? I don’t know about you, but I know which Easter Bunny we’ll be following next year.
For the demo, I wanted to do another Twitter test, so after Steven Perelman, my event coordinator, scouted a good skatepark and got approval from city officials, we asked them to keep it quiet until we got there. We trucked out my big vert ramp. I waited until I got to town to send out a tweet announcing that my team and I were going to put on a performance, but I had sent out location clues the week leading up to it. About 5,000 people showed up. When the Birdhouse team and I left Columbus to tour the East Coast, we did very little advance publicity. The day before each demo, I’d tweet the locale and invariably we’d have a big crowd.
That proved to me that tweets could draw a crowd. I also knew from our Secret Skatepark Tours in 2006 and 2007 that you didn’t need a lot of advance notice to get kids to a skatepark to see pros perform. Back then, before Twitter got big, when our crew of famous skaters would show up at a park, the handful of locals on hand would get on their cell phones to call or text friends. The impromptu communication chain would grow exponentially, and within an hour there’d be hundreds of people pouring in.
My most memorable tweets came in June 2009, when I got invited to the White House to attend a Father’s Day ceremony with other pro athletes known for working on behalf of children. I got to meet President Obama, and moments later tweeted a photo of myself doing a manual on my skateboard down a White House hallway. That generated some press—not all of it complimentary. Some right-wing bloggers opined that I’d desecrated a sacred national monument. There were high school kids throwing a football around and tearing up the White House lawn, so football was okay but skateboarding wasn’t? Moments before I hopped on my board, I saw workers wheeling heavy metal carts down the very same hallway, so I knew my skateboard wasn’t going to do any damage. The bloggers also apparently forgot, or conveniently ignored, the fact that President George W. Bush used to go bowling in the same building.
www.talktofans.com
In 1998, before the word blog was born, I started posting an online diary/journal on my website tonyhawk.com. The journal eventually got compiled into the book Between Boardslides and Burnout, but once I started tweeting, the blog went the way o
f rotary-dial telephones. The website is now mainly a place to aggregate and connect my various ventures, sponsors, and projects, each of which has its own site: Birdhouse skateboards, Hawk Clothing, the Boom Boom HuckJam tour, and the Tony Hawk Foundation.
After meeting President Obama, I celebrated with a nose manual on the front driveway of the White House.
My main webmaster for several years was one of my best friends, Ray Underhill. Ray had been a great vert skater back in the day, and a fellow member of the Bones Brigade. Although he had moved back east to start a family, we had a great relationship. He designed the original tonyhawk.com and tonyhawkfoundation.org websites, and I trusted him to always represent the heart of skateboarding in anything he created and updated for us. He was smart, witty, and intuitive. Tragically, he passed away in 2008 from brain cancer. I miss him dearly.
In 2007, we met with the venture capitalists who financed the successful comedy website funnyordie.com, which was co-owned by such Hollywood heavyweights as CAA, Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, and Adam McKay. It’s the site that blew up after producing and posting the hilarious short video titled The Landlord starring Ferrell and Adam’s toddler daughter as Ferrell’s ruthless, alcoholic rent collector.
In fact, funnyordie.com was so successful that the financiers decided to create a network of related “Or Die” video websites. One was to be aimed at blue-collar comedy fans, another at foodies, and still another at video game geeks. Most of the footage on the sites was to be user-generated, as with YouTube, except in each case the owners also partnered with celebrities who would shoot and cut professional grade video clips exclusively for the site.
By coincidence, we’d been shopping around the idea of launching an action-sports website, and even were at the point of possibly financing it ourselves, when the people behind funnyordie.com came calling. We decided to team up with them and create a site called shredordie.com. They’d build the site (using the same content-management system as funnyordie.com) and sell ads. We’d provide content from our existing library of skate videos, as well as shoot and deliver fresh clips. They also wanted us to ferret out and license footage from the best filmmakers in the other major action sports: surfing, snowboarding, BMX, and motocross. I liked the idea, so we partnered up.