Thinking outside of the box
“Hey, why don’t we…?”
Cold winter morning, 2014, a morning class about laws in mining industry. A friend of mine and me, visibly hangovered and tired from the last night. We were playing cards obsessively. Nights of drinking, smoking and playing the most popular card game in Croatia — Bela. We weren’t paying attention to class at all and we were planning the following evening; who we are going to play with, when and where. Suddenly he told me me:
“Hey why don’t we make a Facebook meme page about the card game we are playing?”
We both look at each other for a brief second and without a doubt in my mind I said: “Yes let’s do it”. I instantly grabbed my cell phone, logged into Facebook and made a Facebook page called “Daily dose to an average Bela player”.
The “daily dose” pages on Facebook were very popular in that period and we took advantage of that to make our own page.
The plan was to post memes on daily basis about that card game. So, we found a funny photo off a player holding cards which will soon become our signature photo. Every joke will be written on that photo of that young man holding the worst possible card in his hand. We cracked a few jokes and posted on Facebook. We invited few of our friends to like our new page. After that we kind of forgot about it and continued with our boring lives; college, student canteen and playing cards.
In a few days we checked our page again and couldn’t believe what we have seen. There were around 100 likes on the page and dozens of comments and tags.
The thing had gone viral!
We posted every day a new meme with a funny description. Likes went through the roof. In a few months we had over 10,000 likes, all organic reach. We were in cloud 9. Whoever we played the cards with, he knew about our page. We were the most popular guys in the room.
In one year, we collected over 12,000 likes — organically.
After a year and a half, we fell into “a creativity crisis”.
We ran out of inspiration. The jokes were not that good, and we posted just once a month. A page that once was a daily dose of brilliant memes suddenly became a monthly dose of average memes.
Soon we stopped posting completely. We thought that it was it, every joke was already told. All that was left was 50 memes and 12,000 followers hungry for more.
The months went by and number of likes dropped below 10, 000. Finally, Facebook stopped showing our page due to inactivity. I was so devastated that I dropped out of college… I am joking, I dropped out because I was lazy and had no interest in mining. But a friend of mine actually deleted his Facebook account.
The year is 2019 and I am on the final year on my second college, digital marketing. It is a cold winter morning, a class about creativity. I’m 100% engaged because teacher inspires us. He said these 5 words:
“Thinking outside of the box”.
A flashback memory rushed through my head about an old college, friend of mine and our Facebook page. I told myself: “it’s not over, the page will live once again”.
Quickly, I made a meme and posted it. I was checking my phone nervously every 5 minutes.
100 likes, 200 likes 400 likes — 700 likes.
Not bad for the 1st meme after 5 years of break, not bad at all. I called my friend in disbelief and told him that I started our page again and we were laughing as crazy.
In the following days, I started making up memes again, but just with that simple thought in my mind “thinking outside the box”.
Soon, I regained 5000 likes.
From 10,000 to 15,000, which was even more than before the 5 years, even though Facebook popularity is dropping, I believe that where is a good content- there is a “buzz”.
Don’t be trapped in your mind box.
Creativity has no limits. It is only limited by the boundaries you defined in your head. Find your passion, stick to it and do not give up.
