MoFarahRunningAwayFromThings: The Story – looking back

So its been 10 months now since the success of the Mofarahrunningawayfromthings Tumblr blog. and i have yet to really comment on it trough my official blog, 

The whole success of mofarahrunningawayfromthings was almost quite accidental, starting out as an idea conjured up in a smoky room on a Saturday evening, watching the final moments of the London 2012 Olympic games, i had the week off work that week and most of it had been spent beer in hand with Lee Welch a friend of mine in front of the 20 something BBC Olympic channels. While watching the final moments of that 5000m race late on a Saturday night Mo’ crossed the line taking a gold for Great Britain and a roaring cheer erupted out of the room followed by a howl of laughter at the repeated slow motion shots of Mo Farah looking petrified as he won, as if he were being chased by a hoard of stampeding rhinoceros.

Source: dailymail.co.uk

The idea was tossed around of creating a video edit of that moment, pasting  the slow motion screaming Mo’ in front of the dinosaur from Jurassic park or some horrific explosion. we joked around that the idea could be all over the news and the biggest Olympic meme (little did we know).
Finally we decided to sign up for a Tumblr blog and paste some static images that were photoshopped just to test the reaction from the web, I agreed to make a few pictures of Mo Farah running away from some dinosaurs and wild animals we would post them on-line and come back in a week to see how many people had checked them out.

The following night I created the first 5 images for the blog choosing some of the most popular scenes i could think of from classic films and television:
Jurrassic Park scene: Jeff Goldhum runs away from dinosaur
Running away from bulls in Pamplona
Scarface
Shaun of the Dead zombies
Batman and Robin after remembering the BatmanRunningAwayFromShit Meme

I returned the next day to find that the Guardian Newspapers Tumblr feed had reblogged the Mo images following a re-blog from the Batman page, (I’m assuming the Guardian were already following batman after reporting on it some months earlier, the page had gained almost 1000 followers on tumblr and was beginning to spread onto twitter and other Blogs and news sites such as TheDailyMash and BuzzFeed.



I quickly called Lee and we began saturating the page with Mo’s Making the most of the views we were receiving. We took great care not to post anything offensive or controversial due to the live viewing audience, we figured that larger pages would pick up on it the following day and took care not to turn it into a troll page as to avoid any bad press, around 8pm that night we celebrated the 100,000 viewers mark, all feeling that same state of surreal excitement of something so vaguely and crudely planned paying off
I quickly called Lee and we began saturating the page with Mo’s Making the most of the views we were receiving. We took great care not to post anything offensive or controversial due to the live viewing audience, we figured that larger pages would pick up on it the following day and took care not to turn it into a troll page as to avoid any bad press, around 8pm that night we celebrated the 100,000 viewers mark, all feeling that same state of surreal excitement of something so vaguely and crudely planned paying off.


This continued for the coming week, as a feeling of almost addiction came about in making images, furiously racking our brains for new and fresh ideas to gain the most re-blogs and the most views from the site, we introduced new graphics and a link to Mo’s official charity to promote the ‘Good natured’ theme of the blog that was being reported on so widely, this was working in our favour as more and more papers jumped on the idea that there was something on the internet that for once was not offensive or trolling towards a celebrity. We toyed with the idea of placing adverts on the site and making money from our thousands of new followers, in the end we decided against this as the whole idea has really stated out as a joke, we didn’t want to cash in on that and ultimately ruin the reputation that the site had gained, 

Over the week the viewers slowly dwindled into a trickle, as the Olympic fever inevitably wore off people began to forget and the meme, as all meme’s became out of date and old news.

 All in all the whole experience of the blog was very overwhelming and occasionally difficult to keep on top of. To my surprise alot of media wished to speak to me personally regarding the success of the page which was very flattering at the time, the blog currently sites at over 2,960,000 page views and counting receiving around 50-200 more per day


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