How To Curate the Most Creative and Unique Viral Wedding of All Time
Weddings are no longer about two people celebrating their true and everlasting love. They’re highly-expensive one-shot photo-ops to capture content that represents your uniqueness and originality, which you will meticulously edit, curate and self-publish as an expression of your personal brand/digidentity at its most beautiful.
Nobody wants to suffer the embarrassment of having an aspect of their wedding that is “normal” or “been done before”. Luckily, there are a lot of killer sites and social media services out there who understand this, and will make it easier than ever for you to turn your wedding day into a highly individual life advertisement, no matter what kind of budget you’re on.
Now that “Wedding Season” is over (which is when “normies” get married) and “Alt Wedding Season” has just begun, here are some more helpful tips on how to stand out from the crowd:
An Engaging Engagement — You can’t just get on a knee somewhere special and quietly ask the person you’re in love with to marry you anymore. If you really want to show that person you love them, you’ll come up with something “noisy” that will get linked all over the Internet. Nothing says love like “hits”. Try proposing in a viral video, or a Twitter feed, or if you’re the position to do so, hijack an entire social network and make everyone on it your personal proposal hostage. If you manage to get any aspect of your wedding onto BuzzFeed, you’re going to have a long and happy marriage — so the proposal is a pretty good place to start.
Wedding Domain Registration — You have to stake your claim for URLs, Twitter nicknames, vanity Facebook pages, and all the other places where people will be celebrating your wedding online. The good ones go fast, so I would recommend doing this before you’re even engaged. These are also great ways to drive traffic to your eRegistries. Don’t forget to check latest SEO best practices.
IRL Wedding Domain — Where you actually have the wedding in real life isn’t as important as the domain name, but still probably worth thinking about. Just try to do it in a place that will look nice in photographs, and has plenty of room for your coordinated Animal Collective Dance Routine. Also: make sure there is a strong and reliable wi-fi connection. This latter point is, far and away, the most important thing to consider. If people can’t upload content/access the Internet during your wedding, you might as well not even get married.
The Official Wedding Flickr Feed — This one is huge. This will be the primary visual record of your specialness, so it must be taken very seriously. The first thing you should do after getting engaged is get some Engagement Photos taken. These should be playful, showing you and your fiancee doing something whimsical and creative, like pretending to be old-timey Steampunk farmers, or dressing up as characters from “Mad Men”, or standing in front of some graffiti.
Target Alt-Wedding Sites and Blogs — The best way to be as unique and individual as possible is to get great ideas from other people who are doing the same thing. See what kind of clever little touches other people are putting on their weddings by checking out sites like Brooklyn Bride, Offbeat Bride, or Style Me Pretty. Using the original ideas you find there, create lots of “inspiration boards” with photo examples of the kinds of artistic/old-timey touches you’d like your wedding to have, then post them all over your social network. Become a lively part of these communities, because this will increase the chances of getting YOUR wedding featured on one of these sites, which is pretty much the only way you’ll know if you had a successful wedding.
Pick the Right Wedding Brand — You have to give your wedding a clear brand messaging, otherwise it will be more difficult to promote/drive traffic to it online. If you’re having trouble coming up with something cool and clever on your own, try just putting any of these words together in way that best describes You: “Gypsy” “Punk” “Farm” “Circus” “1930’s” “Beach” “Summer” “Victorian” “Geek Chic” “Vintage” “Eco-Friendly” “Star Wars” “Castle” “Asian” “Woods” “Villa” “Hipster” “Mansion” “On A Boat” “Fusion” “NomNom” “Country”.
Clever eVitations - Printed invitations are so Weddings 1.0. Think about doing something different, like a making a charming stop-motion video invitation set to a Vampire Weekend song, then just sending the Vimeo link to whoever you want to invite. Or create a password-protencted Tumblrvitation. DO NOT, under any circumstances, use eVite. eVite is so lame. If you want to do written online invites, use PaperlessPost. It’s got a more cool-looking design.
Buy All of Etsy — Okay, so maybe you can’t buy EVERYTHING on Etsy, but you should definitely try to purchase as much adorably indie artisan-crafted stuff as you can get your hands on. Wedding dresses, alt tuxes, cute knick-knacks and accessories — it’s all on Etsy. If you’re on a budget, think about making your wedding registry just cute stuff for your wedding from Etsy (and Anthropologie, obviously).
Establish Your Official Wedding Hashtag — Having a social media hashtag, such as #OurRadWedding, allows you to create a consolidated feed of all your content. This way you could even set up monitors around the venue so everyone can see the guests’ reaction to your wedding (impressed), in real time. MAKE SURE everyone knows in advance what the Official Wedding Hashtag is so you don’t lose any potential content to other streams.
Create Custom Foursquare Venues For Your Special Weekend — A few days before the wedding, go to wherever you’re going to be having your Rehearsal Dinner, Pre-Wedding Karaoke Party, Wedding Day Croquet, Wedding Ceremony, Wedding Reception, and Wedding Reception Speakeasy After-Party, and give those places special designations on Foursquare, so people can check-in throughout the weekend and let their network know what fun they’re having at your amazing wedding. Also, make sure you and your fiancee check in to these places a bunch beforehand to secure your joint Mayorship in all of them because this is your day.
Get Great GGC (Guest-Generated Content) — Your wedding guests aren’t just friends and family. They’re an army of potential content creators, so don’t forget to have on hand lots of Flipcams, Polaroid cameras, Hipstamatic stations, iPod iDJ jacks, blog docks and other content capturing/uploading stations.
Put Out a Press Release — At the end of your special weekend, once you’re happily married, don’t forget to blast out a digital press release letting other relevant wedding blogs/social networking sites/Tumblr friends know where they can find all the content you created at your wedding. I would recommend setting aside a couple of days to do all your content editing and curating BEFORE your honeymoon so you can get the press release out while your wedding buzz is still high. Because despite the painstaking efforts you’ve taken to show them how special and unique you are, people can forget so fast.
