This NYtimes article on Pharrell’s hat does a better job documenting the hat than me so it’s probably better if you just read it if you want to know about Pharrell’s hat.  What I want to examine is how a twitter handle dedicated to Pharrell’s hat, a few basic photoshops, and linking the @ at the right celebrities generated 365x more followers in 10 hours than I do in multiple years.  It’s so basic but powerful.

pharrellandsmokey

The first thing this twitter handle did was dedicate itself to one odd thing and named itself that.  Next it did a tremendous job in getting as many pictures of the hat as possible and uploaded them to Twitter.  Then the simple photoshopping of the hat on celebs and tweeting at Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, which then gets RETWEETED by them, makes the handle explode.  The hat looks ridiculous but who on Earth would think that creating a Twitter handle specifically for that would result in thousands of followers.  The only problem with this is that you have to always play into this shtick and there is a way better chance of losing followers instead of gaining them.  Plus your stuck with @Pharrellhat but maybe he wears stupid hats all the time. Nevertheless, I thought that this was pretty interesting how one stupid idea can blast off on Twitter compared to my tweets which are read by less than 10 people.