Is there enough electricity and kindness to reach the White House?
ShockingBarack.com is a labor of love. Hopefully all of your labors in life are filled with love although sometimes they’re filled with money, too. But Brammo is still a very small company and their advertising budget is essentially zero. What they offer instead is brilliant minds and progressive thinking that’s just amazing to be around and that’s worth a lot.
About three weeks ago, Dave Schiff and his partner Alex Burnard came in and told me they thought we should give a Brammo to the President because he needed to know that America's most energy efficient vehicle was being made in Oregon by a scrappy bunch of electric vehicle visionaries. I bounced the idea off of Craig at Brammo who loved it and suggested we retrace the path that the American car company CEOs took when they recently visited DC. This was exciting because now I had the chance to break the news to Dave that he would be putting his money where his mouth was and so he’d be making the journey with Brian, the head designer from Brammo. If you look at the site Dave is the guy in the impossibly dorky brown helmet. He actually rides to work in that helmet most days.
With a budget of zero we knew the only way to make the journey would be to rely on the kindness of Americans along the way to get us there. So the guys will be using couchsurfing.com to recharge their bodies at night and asking for donations of electricity to charge up their bikes. (Each charge is about 35 cents so we’ll actually pay folks if we don’t have donors ready at a given stop.)
We’ll also be looking for help in meeting President Obama. We figure somebody must know him or know somebody who knows him so we can schedule a good time to present him with the Brammo. We don’t want to surprise him since that kind of thing probably gets you face down and spread eagle with a secret service agent kneeling on your back. But we want to shock him with the fact that without any bailout money these enterprising and innovative dudes at Brammo have a homegrown solution to our country’s transportation crisis. And it’s not theory. It’s for sale.
The guys leave in a couple of days from Detroit, and they’ll be shooting video along the way to post each night. They’ll be tweeting and blogging from the road. Although I think a lot of what happens is going to be weird and hilarious, I can’t help but be very curious if there is a possibility that social media can actually get these guys and this company an audience at the White House. There is no doubt social media is helping a new breed of politician get elected, but does it go the other way when we need their attention? We shall see.
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