The Beardpocalypse is Upon Us!

With all of the recent talk we've had about Twitter and hashtags, I felt it was only appropriate to talk about something else that I'm a huge fan of: Conan O'Brien. Sometime last week I happened to tune in to one of my usual programs on USA as a commercial for Conan on TBS. Now in this commercial, you see Will Ferrell in a vlog threatening to shave Conan's beard in various ways that only Will Ferrell would know how, as can be seen here. I laughed but didn't really understand what it was all about despite the commercials being an entertaining form of promotion for both comedians and the talk show. However, at the end of the latest commercial I happened to see "Twitter: #beardpocalypse" and decided I was much more interested to find out about this than I thought.

When Conan O'Brien hit the Twitter scene back in February of 2010, he gained a couple thousand followers, according to The Huffington Post after ten minutes of his first tweet. After merely half an hour, he had 15,000 and an hour and a half after his first tweet, he had about 50,000 followers. Currently, his follower count remains at almost three million. I think it would be safe to say that Conan and Team Coco has a good grip on Twitter and the team behind his show definitely know what they're doing. But what exactly, is the Beardpocalypse? I decided it was time to investigate. The name is exactly what it sounds like, Will Ferrell is set to appear on Conan Monday May 2 and for the last couple of weeks has been threatening to shave Conan's glorious ginger beard during his appearance on the show. On behalf of Ferrell and his new movie Everything Must Go and Conan's show, this is a great promotional idea to spread the word about both. Conan's site, teamcoco.com even has an entire section dedicated to the "beardpocalypse" where contests have been held for the best photo shopped movie poster and frequent updates on the countdown to the event, including Twitpics from Conan himself and various videos streaming all over the Internet and broadcasted on television.

Very clever if you ask me and I expect nothing less from Conan O'Brien, who I believe is one of the more entertaining late night hosts that are on TV right now. And I like how the majority of the "beardpocalypse" has been maintained around social media. For instance, Conan's latest tweet reads "Was up all night building a small shark cage to protect my beard. Your move, Ferrell" and as mentioned before, the hashtag #beardpocalypse has been associated with everything Team Coco has done through Twitter and in all promotional updates and videos. Now, anyone who's interested in finding out more about it can head on over to Twitter and search that hashtag to find out what it is and what everyone else is saying about to. A job well done Team Coco, I'll be sure to tune in tomorrow night to find out what happens.