Lazydork Case Study

How does a person or a company rank their Public Relation success over the Internet? This evaluation is extremely hard because the definition of success differs from person to person. Darren Rowse explains in his blog that as a blog creator you are not going to be found immediately. In order to succeed Rowse suggests that being a consistent writer with a frequent blog is key in not only creating, but keeping your fan base. He also suggests to use any Internet advertising, like adsense for example, in order to make your name known. In addition, he explains that a creative URL can go a long way because it will help search engine users stumble upon your blog. Domain names and titles such as abcCommunication.com and xyzTechnology.com will be generated in searches more often than joesmith.com.

With this in mind, the case study I have put together is about my roommate’s 30 year old brother, Richard Stern aka Lazydork. During the day Richard is a Miami-Dade County prosecutor in Florida. This young professional has two jobs. He is a lawyer by day and an Internet sensation by night. Richard created his blog/movie website as a way to communicate his passion for movies and goes by the alias Lazydork. The original purpose of the site was to review movies, but he later added movie-drinking games. Nevertheless, he knew that the small success he was having could skyrocket if he could find another channel through which to communicate.

With the growth of youtube.com he saw an opportunity of a new social network in which he could reach an audience with the use of videos. He stated in an interview on CNN that if young teenagers were getting half a million hits for their videos, then why couldn’t he and his girlfriend do the same? What began as movie reviews flourished into funny shorts, including rap videos which are parodies based on random topics, other youtubers, and even celebrities.
Here is an example of one of his famous videos:



Richard has entertained over 1.5 million people over the Internet. His success can be monitored from a various array of sources including his main homepage and his youtube videos. On several occasions his videos have been featured as the film of the day on youtube and/or referred to by many bloggers for awards. One example is from http://theutubeblog.com/ which featured this video as their video of the week:



Unfortunately, internet success has a negative side too. According to Scoutblogging there are many ways to prepare oneself. You can either ignore the comments or you can address them. Richard does have many fans, but he also has a following of people who hate him and supply negative feedback. Even so, he studies both the positive and the negative comments and strikes back to his critiques with either strands of internet conversation and/or video responses. Negative comments in my opinion do help in terms of constructive criticism because you find areas you need to improve upon, but what do you think?

In the end Richard is a perfect example of a young professional who had a communication objective of getting popularity on the Internet. He has done so by utilizing his Internet connections and developing a growing fan club while doing so. His success is documented in several written publications and media outlets such as CNN, FoxNews, the NYtimes, The Miami Herald, Wikipedia, and blogs. He is classified as a youtube star. You can go to his webpage and participate in his online radio broadcast and find out what he is up to next. Do you know anyone who has had success like Richard?

Richard youtube link to all his videos