Believing that the best way to appeal to people who think they're being funny is through people who actually are funny, we did the following. We created a Twitter-monitoring command central. We then secured the services of improv artists from New York's Upright Citizens Brigade (the group that brought you Amy Poehler, among others). For four hours, our volunteers monitored Twitter for uses of the r-word in real time and then made a deal with the offenders. If they dropped the r-word from their vocabulary, the UCB comedians would create for that person a brand-new, hot-off-the-press word in exchange.

In four short hours, we tapped on 235,000 shoulders, with a total potential reach of 2.4 million following the brief activation.