Last week was long and surreal. Deep Horizon vomiting even more into The Gulf of Mexico…the U.S. and U.K. World Cup teams seemingly cheated out of goals…a three-day-long tennis match at the very proper strawberries-and-cream Wimbledon.

Enough!

So, on this Monday morning it’s time to kick it up a notch. You know, get the juices flowing for the week ahead.

Time to invoke the precious term “confluence” and roll together the World Cup, Endangered Species, Social Media and Fundraising. Only in The Agitator.

So, here’s the deal.

Last week the phrase “Cala Boca Galvao,” quickly became one of the top worldwide trending topics in the Twittersphere species. With notoriety of that sort (and some creative energy thrown on top of it), the phrase was almost globally transformed into a worldwide campaign to save a rare and endangered Brazilian bird.

300,000 Galvao birds in die each year. And, brilliantly, the organizers of the Save A Galvao Bird figured that each Tweet could save one bird. The campaign went viral.  Check out the power of this appeal that received more than 1.1 million views on YouTube in 36 hours.

A campaign to provide hermetically-sealed bird houses to keep their colorful feathers from being sold on the black market.

Talk about the power of “confluence” for multi-issue, multi-channel marketing! Wow!

Well, it turns out that there is no endangered Galvao bird. Nor is “Cala Boca Galvao” , as some suspected, the latest release from Lady Gaga.

Truth be told, “Cala Boca Galvao” is Portugese for “Shut up Galvao!” Carlos Eduardo dos Santos Galvao Bueno is the play-by-play announcer who calls the World Cup matches on Brazil’s largest TV network, Rede Globo.

And the Twitter campaign was apparently started as an insult by some Brazilian fans who had grown as weary of the announcer as the rest of us have of those damn hornet-sounding vuvezela horns played incessantly during the World Cup Matches.

Thus, while Tom and I were hoping to demonstrate the power of “confluence” in yet another cutting edge insight from The Agitator, all we can demonstrate is the power of an insult to exponentially expand into a fraud – thanks to the reach and speed of social media.

Roger

P.S.  For a more in-depth look at the Galvao Phenomenon, download the podcast from NPR’s “On the Media”. Sweet!