WBEZ, the Chicago affiliate of National Public Radio, ruffled a few feathers this week with the debut of its new membership drive campaign. The “2032 Membership Drive” encourages current NPR listeners to go forth and make future listeners, with provocative lines like:
- We want listeners tomorrow. Go make babies today.
- To anyone NOT currently running a virtual farm: GoMakeBabies.com.
- You’re an interesting person. Pass it on. Like, literally. Through your DNA.
We’ll leave commentary on the campaign’s sauciness to the rest of the blogosphere. Here, let’s focus on the campaign’s integral social components. The URL gomakebabies.com actually redirects to a Facebook application that works as a virtual matchmaker for NPR-types (we know who we are). A series of five questions assesses a person’s “interestingness,” and the data is used to select a batch of similar-minded humans for the aforementioned procreation.
It’s pretty darn creepy, so I imagine the idea here is not so much to make actual love connections, but to get users to try out a kitschy tool that automatically pushes the app’s comical updates out to each user’s network. According to the above dialogue box, 200 people have used the app in the few days since its release.
A second component of the Facebook app focuses on offspring. Proud parents can upload snapshots of their kids to be included in the “Future Members of the Curious Class” gallery on Facebook. To top off that virtual sense of pride, the station promises to send a free WBEZ onesie “so all the other kids at the playground know they’re dealing with a future member of the Curious Class.”
What do you think? What makes a Facebook application worth it for users? Will you try out either of the apps from WBEZ?
