I was half watching The Office a few nights ago whilst folding laundry, when I suddenly heard Michael (Steve Carrell’s character) say something about social networks.
Hooray for TiVo! I rewound and listened with full attention. In this particular episode, Ryan heads to the Dunder Mifflin branch in Scranton in an effort to launch a website called Dunder Mifflin Infinity. The site suffered a temporary setback when it was hacked by sexual predators and their customer base received lewd emails. Nevertheless, Ryan is hell bent on bring Dunder Mifflin into the digital world. At one point Ryan even mentioned he wanted to make the paper company more 2.0.
Here’s the best part – Dunder Mifflin Infinity really exists. NBC has done some very creative and clever marketing. You can actually become a DMI employee at a branch and engage with fellow workers to accomplish tasks for corporate. I think its brilliant. There’s even a pyramid schemeish component. Once you recruit 15 employees, you can become a Regional Manager.
Best of all – you are paid in ‘Schrutebucks’ – named after Rainn Wilson’s character Dwight Schrute.
I looked into it, and this episode is #54 in Season 4, and first aired back in October 2007. I’ve heard before that if you’re an actor that has been parodied on a popular sitcom, you know you’ve really ‘made it.’ To infiltrate popular culture, you must be well known and familiar to the public.
Looks like social networks have finally surpassed this threshold of adoption and can be construed as comedic material.
I actually signed up for DMI and produced the “launch party” for the Dundalk, MD branch. Which made it on the air during one of the episodes later in that season.
Each week they gave us a new task in order to earn schrute bucks. Unfortunately I abandoned the site a few tasks in because of the constant bugginess of the site. But I recently got a reminder email to come back to the company. So who knows, I might go back to work.
I was the “Angela”, head of the party planning committee.