Cindy

Droog

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April 21, 2008

As a Once-Prized Project Dies, the Hamster Manifesto is Created

This week, a colleague and I brainstormed and wrote The Hamster Manifesto.

The idea stemmed from a project we’d spent the last year working on, researching, creating, socializing with our audiences and promoting. We got to talking about the fact that since it launched in April, no one seems excited about it anymore. No one attends the meetings about making it live on, grow in its success and reach critical mass.

They’re treating the project like hamsters treat their babies.

I’ll never forget my own disappearing hamster baby story. I was away at college, and my eight-year-old brother called my dorm room. He’d never done that on his own before, and I didn’t even realize he knew how to dial long distance.

Me, in slight shock: “Joey, is everything OK?”

Joey, as casual as can be: “Everything’s fine, sis. I’m just sitting here watching Wuzzles eat her babies.”

Me, grossed out: “Well, did you go get Mom?”

Joey: “Yeah, but it was too late.”

So, here we are, nary four weeks after launch, effectively causing the demise of our own product by neglecting it. It’s not as bad as eating it (besides, the cardboard container would taste pretty gross), but it’s really the same concept.

We went from not wanting to be hamsters to deciding exactly what we did want to be. I’ve had cats, and watched them essentially raise their kittens for a year or less, then give them the, “hey, you’re on your own now” treatment.

So, a year is a step in the right direction. We could spend the next year re-promoting it, using input from those who purchased it to make it even better, create viral excitement around it by giving it its own web page. I figure if Ashley Dupré has her own site, we deserve one.

A year would be better, but it’s still not ideal.

I’m neither a zoologist nor a veterinarian, so I probably can’t come up with the perfect animal for us to be. But I am a fairly new mom and a businesswoman, and I vote for acting a little more like your normal human. We have baby showers, and decorate nurseries, preparing with excitement for birth. And we certainly don’t stop showering our new “product” with love and attention after it’s born.

Such was the same with this project. In the beginning, we had a big group of very excited people. Our family. As the project got a little more complex, and a lot more time consuming, we lost a few people along the way. I had my moments, in fact, when I couldn’t look at it for one more minute without needing a rubber room.

But a core group of folks hung in there. They truly parented the project, and it’s killing them to watch it die. They’re good parents, but in this case, it may take a village. 

My oldest son is almost two, and I feel like he needs me more today than he did back then. Who else will teach him to eat ice cream off the cone, take him to see bats and giraffes at the zoo instead of reading about them in a book, or give him the same information for no less than two hours a day about airplanes, trucks, cars and school buses, and not mind a bit?  

My colleague and Manifesto co-creator has a 14-year-old daughter. Every day, she helps her with everything from homework to self-esteem building to developing athletic prowess to figuring out the puzzle of how she’s getting home from school in a snowstorm.

I’m 35, and I have days when I still need my mom.

All the Hamster Manifesto asks is that our project stay on the radar. On the priority list. On the strategic plan. On the charter. On whatever document the company decides to publish this year. And the next. And the next.

And if we can’t do that, all we ask is that upper management tell us now, so we don’t put human-like resources and emotion behind the corporate equivalent of a fruit fly.  

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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