Oh Myyy! (14 page)

Fast-forward nearly two years later, and what a difference the numbers make. It’s true, I’m mostly about Facebook these days, though I do have an account on Tumblr and the picture-sharing site Pinterest where I keep more of my favorite photos, and occasionally I’ll check in with the geeks over at Google+ or with my followers on Twitter. But on Facebook, with over three million fans as I write this, it’s hard to even compare those early days with the frenzy a single post can create today.

Facebook has gotten into the metrics game, too, encouraging pages like mine to “bring our game” by providing daily statistics on fan growth, virality, and reach. I also receive a weekly email update of how many new fans I have, and how many have been “talking about” me during the week — meaning people who clicked “like” on my page or one of my posts, commented on or wrote something on my page, or shared content. Lately, that number has actually been exceeding the total number of fans I have, indicating there are folks out there who are participating on the page without even becoming actual fans.

I’ve come to understand that it’s not the total number of fans that matters so much as how “engaged” they are with my page. Justin Bieber may have many more fans than I do, but on the question of engagement, I’ve got the Biebs beat hands down most weeks. In fact, my Webmaster told me the other day that my page often rises to hold the title of second most popular “personal” page on Facebook. “Well, what’s the first?” I heard my Asian parents asking in my head. Turns out it’s something called “Jesus Daily” — a collection of affirmatory and inspirational posts that, you guessed it, come out daily about our Savior. I suppose I’m just fine playing second fiddle to Jesus.

© Mila Petkova - Fotolia.com - Used with Permission

Beyond the “talking about” number, which measures fan engagement, there’s also something called the “weekly total reach” (which is an incomprehensible 30 million as I write this). That refers to how many other people, meaning presumably friends of fans, actually saw something I posted. Then there’s the more nebulous “friends of friends” stat, which is way up in some stratospheric number of 226 million. I’m not exactly sure what Facebook wishes to convey with that number, other than that there really are only six degrees to Kevin Bacon, but the gist is that a lot of potential people can now see the same post through viral sharing.

I was most delighted to learn that when Facebook wanted to create a graphical representation of how a post goes viral, they selected some of my own posts to use as examples. I’ll describe one of them. Around the time of the landing of
Curiosity
on Mars, a fan left this on my wall as the first picture taken from the rover:

I shared it right away, and when I checked it the next day, it had received over 100,000 likes (timing, I’ve found, is the key to breaking six figures). Facebook went back and actually mapped how the post went viral. I’m represented in the center of this fractal-like image:

You can see an
animated version of this
at
vimeo.com/50730773

You can see that “my” virality depends also in large part on certain other unspecified centers, where much later activity occurs. I imagine these might be other blogs or pages that follow my page, who have thousands or even millions of their own fans. It’s truly remarkable to contemplate how connected we all are, and how quickly a thought or image can now spread.

Using Facebook “Insights” I can delve deeper and see where my fans are located, not only by country, but even by city. It’s no surprise that my biggest fan base is my hometown of Los Angeles. I can also see how old they are, what gender they are, and, principally, what languages they speak. Looking at those numbers is a heady experience, and I’m especially grateful for all of the overseas fans who participate in English on my page.

Having relatively high numbers also means that I get to play all sorts of fun games on friends. I particularly enjoy dropping what I call “Facebombs” on my colleagues. One example was the actor Telly Leung, who stars alongside me in
Allegiance
. I play the older version of Telly’s character, Sam Kimura, in the present day; he plays the younger version of me in the 1940s. On Telly’s birthday, I wanted to surprise him by sending fans over to his page. At the time, he had some 2,000 Facebook fans — a respectable number for a young up-and-coming actor. Then came the Facebomb. I asked my fan base to do me the honor of clicking “Like” on Telly’s page, and to see whether we could double his number to 4,000. Within half an hour, he had jumped to over 5x the original number, and his wall was filled with well-wishers, saying that George had sent them. I was delighted that fans were willing to play along, and Telly was astonished to now have over 10,000 fans.

I played a similar game with the producers of
Allegiance
, who had painstakingly built their fan page from zero to around 140,000 fans. During our run, they had hoped that fan interest would push their numbers higher, so I bet them a round of drinks that I could get them past 200,000. They were admittedly skeptical. But with just two nudges to my very loyal fans, the numbers jumped almost 25,000 in a single day.

So I doubled down: “I’ll bet you another round of drinks you’ll have 250,000 by Opening Night.” We started the bet at around 165,000 fans and, at first, it seemed I had bitten off more than I could comfortably chew. Fans who had been willing to go to bat for me appeared to have already signed up as
Allegiance
fans, and it seemed the rest couldn’t be bothered. We were hovering around 180,000 fans but had stalled out. So I did what I had to do. I begged.

“I don’t like to lose,” I told fans. “But I bet the producers another round of drinks that I could get us to 250,000 by Opening Night.” Well, that shameless plea did the trick, and we soared past 250,000 before the curtain rose on Opening Night. And I got a free round of drinks, something they were more than happy to spring for.

There is certainly a more serious side to having an ever-growing number of fans. Every day, I am asked by dozens of people to lend my help or influence to any number of incredibly worthy causes. But because of my busy schedule, I have to turn down nearly every invitation to speak, and there aren’t enough posts in the day to be able to even accommodate one-tenth of the requests I receive. I hope that fans and activists understand that, when it comes down to it, I now have to pick my battles or risk losing both credibility and effectiveness should I support too many causes.

These causes go far beyond LGBT rights or reminding fans about the injustices of the Japanese American internment. Almost daily, I’m asked by fans to publicize events, groups or campaigns, to help find lost children by putting out a nationwide Amber alert, or even send well-wishers by the thousands to the page of someone terminally ill, in the hopes that positive support will make the difference. I did this once, and it had a tremendous positive effect, but it opened the door to dozens and dozens of similar requests. I have had many long discussions with Brad about how much of my page should be devoted to causes I’d like to champion, knowing full well that to continue to reach a lot of people, I can’t make this my own soap box all the time.

On the other hand, the numbers of engaged fans willing to help out with my pet projects could result in some powerful results. I launched my first crowd-funded initiative on a site called Indiegogo. The producers of
Allegiance
and I hoped to raise $50,000 to help fund the show. I had no idea whether fans would respond, and they told me privately that if we raised even $20,000 they’d consider it a win. In fact, they picked Indiegogo over Kickstarter precisely because with Indiegogo, you don’t have to raise your goal completely before any actual funds are collected.

All of us underestimated the enthusiasm and generosity of the fans. Within a week we sailed past our $50,000 goal, with some fans even donating $1,000 or even $5,000 to help make
Allegiance
happen. As we approached $100,000 I told the fans that I would do something special if we got there: my “Happy Dance” — something normally Brad only gets the privilege of seeing. Lo' and behold, in six shakes of a lamb’s tail, we wound up raising over $158,000 for the show. I could hardly believe it. While this was still only enough to cover a small portion of what we would need, it helped tremendously, and perhaps more importantly, I proved that crowd-sourced funding really worked with my fans. Oh, and I did do my Happy Dance. Here’s a shot from that:

You can see the whole dance at
youtube.com/watch?v=cSjO-rWMuJo

Amazingly, even this video now has something on the order of 870,000 views, which I’m pleased to note means even more people have heard about our show.