Washington DC

A while ago and recently, I began seriously pursuing a track of comedy in my life. I had always known that laughter was power, and beyond that I just wanted to flex my mental muscle in different ways – ways that would even surprise me. I signed up for improv classes and started to see so many parallels between my day job (international digital strategy) and my improv sketches.We know a few things about ‘going viral’ on the internets. Here are just two to focus on for now:#1: Things that are funny get passed along more
#2: Things that are cute (incorporating cats doing human activities specifically) are also highly popular.What do these two things have in common? They are genuine. They are sincere. The shares around them have no ulterior motive to sell you anything, or make you think differently about a movement. They are moments of pure internet joy for children and adults of all ages.

We hope to learn more in our social media week experiment: “I am your puppet: Social Media Infused Improv”  which will take a regular improv game like Freeze Tag and merge it with audience suggestions on what the characters do, where they are, and who they should be. It will be a fast paced experiment, a fun performance and also serve as an exercise in building more experimental audience interactions. Let’s see what happens!

In addition to that I’d like to share a great blog post I came across that takes Tina Fey’s rules of improv and breaks them down as rules of social media engagement:

http://www.ebakerysocialmedia.com/2011/04/20/how-improv-can-inform-your-social-media-strategy/

And also – here’s another very fun execution of social media with improv, from one of my favorite troupes: Improv Everywhere