Ever have one of those days where hanging out at your favorite gaming shop got you internet famous?
Let me tell you all a story. I'm a real estate agent with Remax, and we're always looking for new marketing ideas. One thing that's less common in real estate is finding agents with similar hobbies to mine. The last time I checked the stats the average age of a real estate agent in Ontario is 57, so finding other people in my field who like Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, or Warmachine is pretty uncommon. Actually, saying most of those words in a real estate office will generally cause people to back away slowly.
So when another geeky Realtor and I came up with the idea of an MtG business card what we expected was a few laughs and an inside joke.
What we did not expect was to land on the front page of Reddit.
I dropped off my cards over at Wizard's Tower on Fallowfield. I'm there pretty often for Warmachine and the occasional MtG game, so I figured why not? I was amazed at how many people would come up to me at the store and ask "Hey is this you?" . Apparently one of those folks took a picture of the card and put it up on Reddit, which then lead to the massacre of inbox. Turns out a lot of people I know are Redditors. It also turns out many of those people are very early risers since I woke up to my phone pretty much vibrating off the nightstand.
Reading the comments on the post was hilarious. Being a redditor myself I knew what I was going to be in for, so I figured what the hell, and jumped on in on the conversation. What I didn't expect was what my office manager calls "The most polite Doxxing in internet history" . Even before I'd posted a proof photo that had my business contact details on it, people were already figuring out who I was despite the original poster blurring out most of the information. When someone posts their photo and phone number on the internet, there is a general expectation that there will be some less than polite messages. What I got was floods of positive, polite, and heartwarming messages flooding in through my Remax.ca profile, my website, and Facebook. Even the Ottawa Citizen contacted me asking for an interview!
It took two days before my phone was usable again, after almost 600,000 page views on imgur and multiple other sites picking up the story and posting it. Needless to say, it's a lot more than I ever expected out of what we originally thought was just a fun business card. I'm planning on going to the Origin's pre-release for the 2-headed giant event at Wizard's Tower on July 12th. Here's hoping I can finally put some faces to some of the messages!
