EngageMentality.com

As you may or may not know, I am the creator of a website related to the Snuggie which became a viral hit earlier this year. The site is called SnuggieSightings.com, and here’s a list of many of the places the site has been featured Internationally.

It was just before Christmas, 2008, when I first encountered the Snuggie commercial.

I was feeding my newborn baby a bottle at the time and the ad for the fleece ‘Blanket with Sleeves’ struck me as a Saturday Night Live skit. I almost put the baby down in order to update my Facebook Status.

I wanted to write something brilliant for my status, such as, “Let me get this straight. If I call in the next twenty minutes I’ll get TWO Snuggies and TWO Booklights?!” I quickly dismissed that notion, rendering my Facebook status stale and my child fed.

The holidays came and went, and I witnessed the Snuggie commercial dozens of times. I could not believe their audacity — they showed men, women and children wearing Snuggies to sporting events and cookouts. I was convinced that no one would wear a Snuggie in public. But, what if someone did?

It was early January, 2009, when I realized that someone might dare wear a Snuggie in public. The commercial struck me that the advertisers were almost daring the American Public to wear a Snuggie outdoors. The more I watched, the more I thought that many people would wear these in public, in an attempt to rebel against the status quo, or simply to get an easy laugh.

I had to go all Boy Scout and prepare for the eventuality of a personal Snuggie Sighting. I wanted to know what website I could submit a cell phone picture, if I did happen by a fleeced stranger. I performed a Google search for ‘Snuggie Sightings’ on January 10, 2009 and found zero matching results.

If there was to be such a website, it was up to me to fill this glaring void. I registered the SnuggieSightings.com domain name that same day and was off to the races. I spent the next two or three days leaving comments in Snuggie-related blog posts, requesting photos of Snuggie wearers. I eventually installed a WordPress blog and the look of the site was in place by January 13, 2009.

It was two weeks later that I received an email from a reporter with the USA Today. She wanted to interview me regarding the Snuggie craze. The next day, January 28, 2009, my Snuggie Sightings website was mentioned in this article in USA Today. That same morning, Robin Meade discussed my warm and cozy website on her Headline News Morning Express Show.

SnuggieSightings.com on Headline News Morning Express from Snuggie Sightings on Vimeo.

Both the article and the mention on Headline News highlighted the “Snuggie Drinking Game”…a precursor to the Snuggie Pub Crawl phenomenon that has swept through the country in a matter of months.

As an aside, I am also the creator of SnuggiePubCrawls.com as well as SnuggieBook.com – the Social Network with Sleeves. Both of these sites have garnered a fair amount of attention as well.

By January 29, 2009, the term “Snuggie Sightings” reached the top of Google Trends (meaning that it was the most searched term on Google for that time). Here’s a Tweet from an astonished bystander who noticed this. My website had gone from concept and zero matching results to the top of Google Trends in less than three weeks.

This photo encapsulates what SnuggieSightings.com is all about. It originally appeared under the title 'OSHA Hearts the Snuggie in the Workplace'.

Through these experiences, I have learned that when you discover a glaring void, you must fill it immediately…or someone else will. I have also learned that humor works online, and everyone wants to smile and laugh. These are universal needs that we all share.

We live in a time and place where any online idea you have can be launched upon the masses in a matter of hours. Rather than looking for affirmation from friends, or talking your ideas to death, sit down and do it. Make history or be history.
We are all without excuse, now that free online platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, etc. are readily available. The tools have reached the masses. We each now have a plethora of blank canvases at our disposal, begging for our own identities to be stamped upon them.

What are you going to create today? Whatever it is, make it your Mona Lisa.