As we fall on the one year anniversary of #UnicornLibations, I figured this would be a good time to appease some of you that have asked: “What’s with the unicorn?”
The Birth of #UnicornLibations
Intuit has an annual internal conference called ‘Create the Offering’ (CTOF), essentially it a conference for about half of all Intuit employees that work on creating our products (including services). At last year’s event (CTOF14), the Intuit social team was giving out prizes to employees who were tweeting about the event. Long story short, I was rewarded with the fabulous 3D Unicorn Mug. To be a good team player, I took a selfie and posted it to my social media accounts. Thinking it would get a few laughs, then just die off like the real life unicorns did.
OMG! Look what I won because I tweeted with the #IntuitCTOF hashtag. #3dUnicornMugSelfies pic.twitter.com/yqzU2oCA43
— davidleary (@davidleary) May 13, 2014
Within seconds, there were numerous tweets and comments along the lines of “That is so cool!”. Before we knew it, this exchange with the Intuit Careers twitter handle happened. It is the first ever use of the #UnicornLibations hashtag.
@davidleary #unicornlibations 🙂
— Life at Intuit (@IntuitCareers) May 13, 2014
The conference proceeded as normal, with the exception of me carrying around this #3dUnicornMug for the next 8 hours and lots of CTOF tweets about #UnicornLibations. Intuit had a reception which involved a bus ride, if you put a bunch of product managers and engineers on a bus for 15 minutes magic happens, we now owned www.unicornlibations.com. Fast forward …food trucks, aviation museum, an 80’s cover band… it was time to head back to the hotel. Many Intuit employees were gathered at the hotel bar, so with the #3dUnicornMug in tow, my teams and I decided to join.
Then other folks started taking pictures with the mug using the #UnicornLibations hashtag.
#unicornlibations @jenniferlopdrup #intuitctof pic.twitter.com/4xZbjmuGTN
— Pa!ge (@paigenow) May 14, 2014
#UnicornLibation Finds It’s Legs
The next day at CTOF, #UnicornLibations was the star, it even had it’s own slide montage prior to the opening keynote. With the Scaling New Heights conference on the horizon, the Intuit Developer Team decided that the mug should travel to San Antonio for our developer mixer. A few weeks later, it was in my suitcase.
After a successful developer mixer and cocktail reception with 1000+ accountants, I was seeing spots from all the cell phone flashes during pictures with the mug. Things were a tad out of control. #UnicornLibations was becoming something bigger than anyone could see coming.
I ran into our CEO Brad Smith on the escalator at the hotel, he proceed to take this selfie and tweet it using the #UnicornLibations hashtag. He knew about #UnicornLibations! That is when I realized that #UnicornLibations had it’s own legs as an internet meme.
Ready to rock with #unicornlibations #SNH14 pic.twitter.com/BHkHsy1frS
— Brad Smith (@IntuitBrad) June 17, 2014
Conferences, stickers, shirts, tattoos, and even more mugs
During the past year, #UnicornLibations has been a part of events all over the globe and has been adopted by not only Intuit employees, but QuickBooks ProAdvisors and Apps.com Developers. It even had it own video at QuickBooks Connect.
-david
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