我对于裙子究竟是什么颜色兴趣不大，我更感兴趣的，可能还是穿裙子的人，呵呵。我基本上认定，这是一起有计划有组织的病毒营销，策划者很可能就是 Buzzfeed。在看完CNN的几个相关的有趣但不明不白的报道后，更坚信这一点。以我的百科知识，到现在，我也闹不明白，这究竟是怎么回事。但是，在读完媒体采访BF当事编辑的报道之后，我改主意了。如果这是一场病毒实验的话，和BF无关。甚至，它可能真的不是一场营销，而是一个病毒性极强的新闻故事。如果是这样，那么，这个故事就更有趣了。也更有意义了。
下面这段对话，对于全面了解裙子的故事，大有帮助。虽然这篇文章是一个新闻专业网站 Digiday 发表的，但一点儿没有学术性，很好懂。贴在这里，一是因为它很酷，奇文共赏，二是日后写论文的时候，可以引用，以免届时无从查找。
顺便说一下，这位可爱的编辑，如今已是个名人了。
更多裙子的前因后果，点击这里
Meet Cates Holderness, the BuzzFeed employee behind #TheDress
Lucia Moses| February 27, 2015
The photo of The Dress originated from a woman in Scotland, who posted it on Tumblr with a simple question: What color is it?
But it wasn’t until Cates Holderness, the community growth manager at BuzzFeed,posted it onlineat around 6 pm ET Thursday night that it lit the Internet on fire. It was a seemingly benign question — surely we could all agree on what color a simple dress was.
But before long, the photo became a sensation — some saw white and gold, others blue and black, still other blue and gold. Friendships were soon called into question, families torn asunder.
Having unwittingly unleashed the#TheDress phenomenonon the world, Holderness watched in disbelief as her BuzzFeed post garnered 28 million views in just 24 hours.
Her employers were in a celebratory mood Friday night. While her BuzzFeed colleagues waited to fête her with food and drink at the office tonight, Holderness took a minute to give us the backstory about how it all happened.
Tell me everything.
I was in the office. It was around 5, 5:30. Around that time, I’m usually finishing up doing community post moderation. As community growth manager, part of my job is to run BuzzFeed’s Tumblr. We have an “Ask” box, and our users on Tumblr know the person who runs the blog responds to messages. Yesterday, we had a message from a Tumblr user saying, “Can you settle this argument for us?”
What tipped you off that there was something big here?
I got so confused, because it’s clearly a blue dress. So I’m looking at the comments, and people on Tumblr were freaking out and basically just yelling at each other. I called a couple people over and asked them, and half thought it was blue and half thought it was white. We started freaking out. There was a crowd of people looking at this photo and yelling at each other. One of the things we go by at BuzzFeed is, if it makes you feel something, you should post it. I realized if we were having this discussion, other people would, too.
Your postgot more than 28 million views. How long did it take for you to do it?
It took me five minutes. I just pasted the Tumblr embed code and put up a poll. Then it was 6:15 and my day was over. I went and bought some yarn. I was going to knit a scarf for my friend. I didn’t really think anything of it. I got off the subway and I had gotten 300 Twitter notifications and 20 text messages.
What did you do?
I go to my friend’s house because we were going to order pizza and watch Walking Dead. So I sign in and there are a ton of emails. My tweet stream is just out of control. I look and see it’s made it to the BuzzFeed Facebook page and it’s been tweeted by the main account. And this is in the span of like two hours. It’s so funny. I never expected it to do this. It shows this level of community engagement can have massive payoff.
So what happened next?
I watched Walking Dead and New Girl, and then I went home. There were so many email threads, I wanted to contribute. I basically sat up until 3 in the morning watching Twitter. Kim Kardashian was tweeting about the dress! The most fascinating part to me was watching it go from East Coast to West Coast to International twitter.
You’re a celebrity now.
Oh my God, I can’t believe all of this. I wouldn’t call myself a celebrity. I definitely got a round of applause when I walked in this morning and I got as red as the BuzzFeed logo. But my colleagues — they are the ones that turned it into a phenomenon. They reached out the woman in Scotland, they looked into the science. I had to apologize to my system administrator because I kind of broke the website.
How about today? Things must have been a little bit anticlimactic after yesterday.
I tweeted, “Good morning, y’all.” Someone said, go back to bed, you’ve done enough. But I had a job to do. It’s been a delightful day. Seeing the strife it’s caused worldwide is hilarious to me. I can’t believe I’ve been the source of so many arguments around the world.
A lot of people are also saying there are so many more important things we should be focusing on. How do you feel about that?
I think being happy and excited about one thing does not mean you’re not upset about others. I don’t see a cognitive dissonance about those things. And BuzzFeed does that. We do in-depth reporting from Ukraine, Liberia. We also do cat GIFs. And those things can live side by side.
On a deeper level, why do you think this particular post took off?
There’s the whole argument about the perception of reality being objective or subjective. There’s definitely an objective reality of this color being this color. And that disconnect really triggered that debate.
So what color do you think it is?
Oh, it’s definitely blue. I’ve never been able to see it as white. One of the fascinating things is, most of the traffic has been from the mobile site. I don’t know if it has something to do with the screen or the lighting. People far smarter than me I’m sure have weighed in and will continue to weigh in. I just think it’s cool.
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Meet the man behind the blue-and-black, white-and-gold dress
Washington Post
By J.D. Harrison February 27 at 4:40 PM
It was a completely normal morning. Peter Christodoulou was doing yoga at his house in the United Kingdom when his phone rang at around 6 a.m. Friday. It was the director of his company’s warehouse operations.
“Have you heard what happened!?” the voice on the other end exclaimed. Christodoulou’s mind immediately jumped to worst-case scenarios.
“I froze,” he recalls. “I thought our building had burned down.”
Not exactly.
Overnight, a worldwide debatehad eruptedover the color of a $77 dress designed and sold by Christodoulou’s clothing company, Roman Originals. It started witha singer’s poston microblogging site Tumblr, was fueled bya storyon Buzzfeed, and in the end, it had split the Internet into two fiercely divided camps: “White-and-Gold” vs. “Blue-and-Black.” Couples weresplitting up,celebritiesandcongressmenwere weighing in, and scientistswere searchingfor answers.
All while the man behind the dress slept.
In an interview, Christodoulou shared the story behind his company, walked us through his wild day and set the record straight once and for all onthe colorof the dress. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity.
Harrison:Most important question: What color is the infamous dress?
Christodoulou: That particular dress is green. I’m only joking, that dress is blue.
Harrison:But is that what you see in the photo?
Christodoulou: I’ll tell you, to put it into perspective, we had 20 people in our office looking at the photo this morning. Three out of 20 see it as white and gold and 17 see it as blue and black. However, included in those 17 people was the managing director (Peter himself). Consequently, there is no longer any dispute.
Harrison:Can you take me through today? What has it been like?
Christodoulou: After I got that call this morning, I rushed in to the office as soon as possible. Social media was going nuts, we started getting phone calls from every news channel in England, and we’re still doing interviews, particularly our fashion director. It has been absolutely nuts all day. Our site normally has about 10,000 people a day visit, which we’re quite proud of. It looks like we’re going to go in excess of a million today alone.
Harrison:Have you sold out of that dress yet?
Christodoulou: No, we have been replenishing them all day. We have been getting a few back from our stores and putting them online. I believe we are out of a couple sizes right now, but – wait – I’m getting the thumbs up right now that we’ll soon have size 12 back up for sale online. We’re working to keep them all in stock.
Harrison:Can you tell me a little about your company?
Christodoulou: Well, I founded the company with my brother, Rick, and my sister, Angela, in 1978. We had eight people at the time, and we were essentially a small garment manufacturer supplying local chain stores, making around 150 garments a week. That was our story for about two decades. We got up to about 150,000 units a year.
Around 2000, we started thinking, “we’re making it for all of these retailers, why don’t we start making it and selling it ourselves?” So we started our own lines and opened our first store in 2000. By 2007, we had 20 stores and we have ramped up since then. Today, we employ 1,000 people in the United Kingdom and our annual sales for last year were 48 million pounds (about $74 million).
Harrison: What do you hope will be the result of this wild day?
Christodoulou: So far, we have been very low-key, keeping ourselves under the radar and expanding gradually. Before today, I think we were England’s best-kept secret with regards to retail. Obviously, I think that may change now. I’m hoping that what this really gives us is brand awareness and global recognition.
Harrison: The Internet has been buzzing about a possible white-and-gold version. Do you plan to deliver?
Christodoulou: There are plans, because we have received so many requests for a white-and-gold version. It takes about five months to do such a thing, but we’re not going to disappoint our fans. I expect the white-and-gold dress to come out later this year.
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The Dress
I sent this email to the BuzzFeed editorial staff this afternoon.
posted on Feb. 28, 2015, at 5:57 a.m.
Ben Smith BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief
BuzzFeed sprouted from the depths of web culture, and began its life as a place to find delightful things on the internet. The explosion of Cates Holderness’post about The Dress(white and gold, by the way) is a reminder that while we now do so many more things, we’ve never moved away from our roots. Indeed, we launched theCute or Not appyesterday.
What has happened instead is that the world has moved toward us. What might, a few years ago, have been a web culture phenomenon is today a cultural phenomenon, and the distinction between the two isn’t really intelligible. Last night, we talked to each other on Twitter and also handed phones around in bars and bedrooms. Mindy Kaling’s writersfought about it, Kim and Kanyedisagreed, and Taylor Swiftwas wittily confused. The president of Estoniaalso weighed in. And we covered it as a web phenomenon and a piece of fabric in the world. First Cates shared the image itself, and as it became news, Claudia Koerner in Los Angeles and Ryan Broderick in Londongot the storybehind it; Brian Galindo and Kristin Chiricofound it online; and Ginny Hughes roused a couple of neurologists to explainthe cognitive workings behind the different perceptions of the dress.
Some of the muscles we used in our, er, comprehensive dress coverage were the ones we’ve had for years; others, like rigorous science writing, were very new ones. And indeed, we have many new muscles at BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed News has dispatches up today fromMike Giglioin Kirkuk, Iraq;Sheera Frenkelin Jerusalem; andKarla Zabludovskyin Durango, Mexico; in the last several days we’ve published Aram Roston’ssearing exposéof for-profit foster care and Joel Anderson’srich profileof a revered black icon’s risky presidential campaign; onstage at CPAC today, Sean Hannity asked Jeb Bush aboutMcKay Coppins’ storyon his LGBT views. These, too, are all part of a culture and conversation that lives on the web, and they benefit from the roots and distribution and tools that grew with us out of the web.
They also share with Cates’ post something more abstract about how we think about content: We are interested most of all in what a story does — not just in how many people read it, but in what effect it has on their lives and on the world. Cates’ post delighted people and connected them. To steal an idea from Ze Frank, its power was less in the encapsulated item itself than in the network around it. That’s true of a brilliant piece of entertainment; it’s true of a recipe or a DIY suggestion; and it’s true of a news article that forces the resignation of an allegedly corrupt official or changes a government policy.
And finally, I’m so glad that Cates is the new wearer of thegolden BuzzFeed crown(which, in point of fact, Kaye Toal made for her this morning). Cates predates me slightly at BuzzFeed, and started here as a community user who loved animals and loved the internet. She embodies a key element of the spirit that we’ve always had: She lives inside the internet and loves the internet without any cynicism or any particular illusion about it.
So thank you, Cates, for following a tip from aBuzzFeed Tumblrfollower to The Dress.
Thanks are due too to our tech team forkeeping the site up— Cates’ post alone has had more than 28 million views so far, 79% from mobile and 94% from social sources — so I could spend last night arguing with my kids about The Dress. And thanks, of course, to the many writers who were up late and early with smart and creative angles (some of which we’ve adapted intoSpanish,French,Portuguese, andGerman) — among them, Katie Notopoulos’devastating smackdownof the delusional white-and-golders;Ginny’s explorationof how autistic people see themselves in this moment; andDaniel Dalton’s codato the whole strange and wonderful affair.
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BuzzFeed Says Its Dress Post Proves It Owns You. And It’s Right.
February 28, 2015, 2:21 PM PST
By Edmund Lee Recode
BuzzFeed is having a moment, and it is taking advantage. After itsdress postsucked in the Internet for a day, editor in chief Ben Smith sent afeel-good emailto staff that served as a sort of updated mission statement: Web culture is now just culture and BuzzFeed owns it.
You can’t blame the company for marketing the hell out of an article that was essentially a re-blog of a Tumblr post and which wouldn’t have had the same mind-bogglingly global impact without BuzzFeed’s involvement. The timing of this viral explosion is especially interesting consideringFacebook’s recent proposal to Web publishers(including BuzzFeed): Give us your content and we’ll make it go viral.
That’s kind of what BuzzFeed is saying by trumpeting that dress post: We make content go viral, even if we didn’t create it. That’s an important skill if it or any other Web publisher with visions of mass appeal ultimately wants to survive the whims of Facebook.
BuzzFeed used to have its own publisher network that sent traffic to other sites — they shut it down once BuzzFeed got really big — but it may start up a partner network for video soon. They already have a successful native ads program that generates the bulk of its $100 million in annual sales.
After the 36-million-plus views the single dress post generated, you have to figure that’s marketing enough for the site. But there’s always something new to peddle, and BuzzFeed’s latest gambit is nothing less than a new app called Cute or Not, basically a Tinder for animals.
And don’t think you won’t click, because BuzzFeed owns you. Just admit that truth to yourselves, and next time you won’t have to agonize over jumping into whatever “culture” vortex the site has just opened up.