On March 2015, social media buzzed with photos of a tourist who went to Puerto Rico, but had a miserable time. It turns out the images were uploaded to Reddit by a user named Widget Dude, claiming that he “didn’t have a single second of fun” because he won a trip to the island but couldn’t bring his wife along. Even though the headlines made the story sound worse than it actually was, pretty much everyone on the Internet found it hilarious. That is, everyone except Puerto Rico. Even though it resulted from an unexpected and unplanned situation, this event presented both the necessity and the opportunity for a social media real-time/response brand activation. We spontaneously turned around the misfortunes of a single user to invite the entire world to Puerto Rico.

For the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, articles of a tourist having a miserable time in the island spreading like wildfire are not good news. And while it wasn’t the country’s fault that Widget Dude didn’t have a great vacation, Puerto Rico wanted to make things right. But instead of employing costly public relations issue management tactics, we took a cue from Widget Dude himself. While inadvertently, Widget Dude’s choice of content and media channel was very successful. So all we had to do was give that content a slight twist. Otherwise, we did exactly what Widget Dude did.

For an entire day, the photos dominated Reddit, a viral content catalyst that’s been notoriously tough for brands to crack. The story was covered by over 15 online media outlets and by major TV stations in the United States, including The Huffington Post, Good Morning America, ABC, FOX, CBS, Headline News, The Daily Mail, Mirror, INSIDE Edition, Cosmopolitan, PopSugar, Elite Daily, and SomeEcards. With an $8,000 investment and zero media buys, 14 photos generated over $5 million in earned media, sparked millions of conversations on social networks, and have helped the country increase its hotel occupancy rate by 5.5%. As most articles linked to the Tourism Company’s social platforms, followers and engagement skyrocketed. In times when a single social media post can set off an image crisis, the country turned Widget Dude’s story into a guarantee. It’s impossible to “not have a single second of fun” in Puerto Rico.

Two weeks after the original post, we made up a prize on the spot and awarded Widget Dude another trip to Puerto Rico, but this time along his wife and his daughter. We took them all back to the places he had to visit by himself, and retook all of his pictures, making new memories that were significantly less miserable. Wigdet Dude then uploaded the new pictures back to Reddit, when in a matter of hours they went up all the way up to the top of the front page and received all sorts of organic media coverage, online and on national TV, this time with much better headlines.