Walter
I shall be taking a degree of “artistic license” with today’s Blaugust Promptapalooza writing prompt. The original question (as given by Rambling Redshirt over at Beyond Tannhauser Gate) is “If you had a mascot to represent you, what would it be?” but I’ve decided to adjust this slightly. I already have an unofficial mascot for Contains Moderate Peril and they have featured in several blog posts. Furthermore, as an experiment in marketing, they have also appeared in several social media campaigns. The idea was to see whether they could gain more traction with existing “followers” and provide a more effective means of promoting this site. I was initially surprised by the results but upon reflection, given what usually proves popular on social media (IE things that are deemed “cute”), it should have been obvious from the start. So without further ado, if you are not familiar with him already, allow me to introduce Walter.
Walter is a cuddly Panda soft toy or plushy as they call such things “across the pond”. He’s about 3 feet and has his own chair, which is positioned in the lounge, next to the TV. His origins are somewhat mysterious. Walter first appeared in my home roundabout Easter 2014. Mrs P saw him in a charity shop window for the bargain price of £3 and in a fit of generosity, bought him for £5. I woke up to find him looking at me and thus began a strange and interesting symbiotic relationship. I have often wondered about Walter’s previous life before he became part of the Peril household but he has remained uncommunicative about the subject. He likes to give the impression that his past is enigmatic but I suspect he was given his marching orders by his previous “owners” for taking up too much room. Walter doesn’t help out with household chores, preferring to “hold court” from his chair. He watches a lot of TV and has strong opinions on popular culture.
Now if you have a 3 foot cuddly Panda, knocking about your abode, it’s only a matter of time before you decide to take a photo of them in a comical situation or with some kind of droll caption. Hence Walter made his first appearance in a post I wrote about the perils of playing Mortal Kombat. NB This featured on a previous iteration of the Contains Moderate Peril website but the post was updated and republished here. Naturally, readers were curious about my new companion and he made further appearances both on the blog and Twitter. His dry sense of humour gained him a degree of traction with readers and followers alike and I started getting requests for him to feature more often. Hence I decided to try a small experiment and planned a series of tweets featuring Walter watching classic movies and TV and making informed pronouncements upon the proceeding. There are some very good online tools available for analysing social media traffic, so I created #WalterWatches as a means of tracking the experiment.
If I may quote Spandau Ballet, to cut a long story short Walter’s viewing commentary generated about four to five times more online activity than my regular tweets. Season 1 (for want of a better phrase) of #WalterWatches ran from March to May in 2019 and proved that if used properly, then social media can really “boost your signal”. Season 2 ran from January to February 2020 and stopped mainly due to the lockdown. Naturally, I have genuinely considered creating a separate Instagram and Twitter account for Walter. Mrs P even suggested making outfits for him (she’s a dab hand at sewing and dressmaking). However, all these ideas have withered on the vine. Walter’s popularity is due to him. I’m not sure if trying to crowbar his persona into promoting my work would be so well received. Plus making outfits, videos and setting up photos is time consuming and I struggle enough to write consistently. Plus now that Walter’s cousin Finwë has come to live with us, the pair of them are too busy and not especially fussed about becoming “influencers”.
There may well be a lesson to be learned in this tale, although I’m not quite sure what it is exactly. Certainly mascots are a great marketing tool but I suspect you have to have a clear idea of how to use them effectively to get the most out of them. And before I end this post I will share two further Walter related anecdotes. Firstly, Walter got his name because if you look at him from the right angle (and with the help of alcohol), he looks like the actor John Noble who played Walter Bishop in the TV show Fringe. Secondly, in late summer 2014, I was ill with Swine Flu. At one point I was running a very high temperature and beginning to slip in and out of consciousness. I awoke from a lengthy sleep to find a wet towel tied not around my own forehead but Walter’s. I’ve never quite got to the bottom of what happened and he’s never felt disposed to say anything. It’s just another of the many unanswered questions surrounding him. I’m still trying to figure out how come he’s got his own special chair and I haven’t?
