I've been working for a couple of weeks on a project in my hometown of Bakersfield, CA. There's a zoo there that is having a contest to name their new bear and I thought it would be fun to try to get the bear named "Stephen Coal Bear". It's now two weeks later so I'm posting up all that has happened so far.
First, a little about the zoo. The zoo is the California Living Museum (CALM). They're distinguished in my my because they are dedicated to preserving native species of California. They're great people with a great mission.
Like a lot of these types of things, they don't get the attention they deserve. When I saw they were having a contest to name a bear, well, what do you do? First was to blog about it on the website of my hometown paper, where I've been blogging for about a year. I don't just talk about politics there, though I do a lot of that as well. After talking to those folks and getting a bit of encouragement, I came here and put out some ideas.
Next, I put together a website (FriendsofStephenCoalBear.org) and a MySpace page. I made announcements from the MySpace page and on the newspaper's blog and tapped my existing friends to join up.
I spent a lot of time searching MySpace for new friends. Things like "Colbert Bakersfield". It's impressive how many people you can find in Bakersfield who list him on their profile. I also found as many local media people as I could on MySpace and added them as well.
The big break came over the Labor Day Weekend, when a local TV station contacted me and asked if I had anyone local that could do an interview. I didn't. That day, I emailed an old friend of mine and the next morning, she agreed to meet with them and do an interview. She was great and made it on the 6 O'Clock News on KGET Channel 17.
After a very hectic Tuesday, I was trying to get it to the next level. I posted on a few of the Colbert Fan Sites (and big thanks to TiaRachel for tipping me off to a couple more).
I got a good response there, though people were wondering how the drama of ego vs. hatred of bears might play out with Colbert himself.
Well, it looks like we're finally breaking through. The story was posted this morning on NoFactZone.net.
Now I know we're not supposed to call out other users, but since Stephen Colbert would never post here (even under a very clever username) I feel like I can say this:
IM IN UR WIKI, TALKIN UP MY BEAR!
Now, what you going to do about it?