Earlier this week, Virgin America announced a contest in partnership with Awkward Family Photos. To enter, just upload a strange pic of you and your closest relatives, and if online visitors deem it awkward enough, you have a chance to win four roundtrip tickets anywhere the airline flies. The concept is a recipe for social media success -- it's easy to join in, it's fun for participants, there are prizes, and no new babies are born.
However, there is a new social media initiative that might look good on paper, but in practice it goes too far. If you've been following my posts over the past few months you'll remember I wrote about the group-buying site Groupon. Basically, the site lets you purchase great daily deals from local businesses in your home town. Forbes Magazine has called Groupon one of the fastest growing computer companies of all time. This growth has led them to launch a sister site and a campaign that encourages its participants to, hold on to your seat, make babies.
The Groupon spin-off is called Grouspawn, a dating site for men and women. However, it doesn't end there. Front and centre on the homepage is an ad for their "Groupon baby" contest, which will hand out up to two college scholarships to Groupon couples who make a baby. To qualify as a Groupon couple you need to prove that you used a Groupon deal on your first date. In other words, if you buy a deal at your local Thai restaurant, ask a partner to join you, and then in the months to come have a child. The wee one then has a chance to get his or her tuition paid for by Groupon.
I'm still waiting for someone to tell me this isn't real, but as Grouspawn says on their FAQs page "Unlike the moon landing, Grouspawn is for real. It's really real. For real." If you don't have a Groupon date, you can find someone on the Grouspawn website, a dating portal, who might be a good match (although so far there are only about 150 people predicating within the Date Assistant).
The site does have a disclaimer: "We do not encourage you to have children simply to be awarded the Grouspawn prize. This money is for your baby and even though we probably wont be able to tell if you use it for something else, it would be wrong."
While I'd like to sit back and laugh a little, and believe that no one will take advantage of this contest, I realize that nine months down the road I'm going to be writing a post about the world's first Groupon baby. Sigh. Awkward family photos I can accept, but encouraging two strangers to make an Internet-inspired baby so they can win a contest crosses the ever-fading digital moral line.