When it comes to the federal sequester, have you been nodding your head, pretending you know what’s going on when secretly you have no idea? Well, friends, you are not alone! Only 18 percent of respondents in a Washington Post-Pew poll last week said they understood “very well” what would happen when the sequester strikes.
As part of the majority of Americans who can’t rattle off fun facts about the sequester, I fault the federal government (darn you, Washington do-nothings; I’m looking at you, Bo Obama) for my failure to understand it. Maybe, just maybe, if the government had used more fun, creative marketing strategies to make me want to learn just how “disastrous” the consequences of a federal sequester could be, I would be able to formulate an intelligent opinion about this all-mighty… thing.
For one, how are we supposed to want to care about the sequester if it doesn’t even have a human name like it rightly should? The good folks at the Weather Channel showed they understand what I’m talking about. They give winter storms—what exactly is a winter storm, anyhow?—fun names like “Iago” and “Xerxes.” Ergo, I’m much more inclined to follow what’s happening with Winter Storm Xerxes than something unbranded and generic like “The Two Inches of Snow that Fell in Ohio.”
I propose we follow the Weather Channel’s lead and name the sequester something catchy. We could do something snappy, maybe with alliteration. How about “Sequester Steve?” Let’s go with that.
Not only will a name make Sequester Steve more recognizable (and cuter!), it will also make it/him easier to follow on Twitter. Right now #ILikeMyPancakesWith and #BieberFever are trending. Soon to join them? #SequesterSteve. But you know, that’s a lot of characters. Let’s shorten it to #SQSteve. A name like this will work for politicians on both sides of the aisle. They could come up with phrase hashtags like #SQSteveProblemz.
But it’ll take more than a hashtag to make this thing blow up. There will have to be incentives to make people really want to spread to word. As we all know, the easiest way to make anything popular is to associate it with free pizza. So, to encourage intelligent tweets, the government should give away pizza to people who help #SQSteve dominate the Twitterverse.
Obviously, to get this done right, the government would have to partner with a major pizza chain like Dominos or Pizza Hut. From what I can gather, some pretty big government contractors are gonna lose out when #SQSteve goes into effect anyhow, so why not invest in smarter partnerships? Who needs Lockheed when you can dole out Cinna Stix? #MakeBreadstixNotWar.
Now, everyone has that friend who doesn’t like pizza, but never fear; the government can partner with fast-food restaurants like Subway too. The chain could include information about #SQSteve in one of the 10 layers of packaging used to cover a Five-Dollar Footlong.
Hmmm… now that I look at The Washington Post’s website it looks like there’s some pretty good information about #SQSteve (the Post still calls it “the sequester”). There’s also an article on The Daily Cardinal’s website about it. Maybe there’s more info out there about this thing than I thought. Well, I’ll check that out and see what I can gather. But in the meantime, friends, see if you can help me convince the government to market #SQSteve the way it should have from the start.
You can spread the word about #SQSteve by starting a stand that gives away free pizza on East Campus Mall. Send Rachel an invite at rmschulze@dailycardinal.com.