Usually, when a web site asks you about
cookies, it doesn't mean … cookies. But today,
KatieFisherDay.com is literally (literally!) asking you for cookies,
and it's all because a comedian got in a fight with an insurance
company.
Two things about Matt Fisher: He's
never, with the exception of a couple of McJobs, been anything but a
comedian, mostly with the UCB Theater in New York (where I studied at
the same time, though we didn't know each other there). And he'd
always been super-close with his kid sister by 7 years, Katie.
“We grew up as real partners,”
Fisher says. “Perhaps because of the age difference, there was no
rivalry. We colluded. We did it all together.” Katie stayed with
him the night before his wedding to calm his nerves. And during
college, she baked a batch of cookies for him every week.
File that one away for later.
In 2010, at the age of 24, Katie was
killed in a car accident. That was horrible enough, but through a
series of weird corporate requirements and manipulations, her family
was required to sue the driver who hit her in order to get a payout
from her insurance. (It's complicated.) And then in 2012, Katie's
insurer, Progressive, hired a lawyer to help the guy they were suing.
“I get kind of embarrassed when I see
people living their emotional lives in public, especially via social
media,” says Fisher. “I'm not the type to tweet about sad
feelings.”
But anger? Anger was a different story.
“I was so offended that Progressive
would line up against Katie and my folks in court that I wrote about
it on
Tumblr,” says Fisher. This “got the Internet's attention,”
as Gawker
put it, and a hashtag campaign was born: Fisher's friends, then
friends-of-friends, then the wider Tweeterverse began hammering
Progressive Auto Insurance (the company with the cute spokeswoman,
Flo) with demands that they quit playing corporate games, tagged
#KatieFisher; the response was the sort of marketing meltdown that
serves as a cautionary tale for any company in any industry, as
Progressive's feed became solely populated by seemingly automated
individual replies to every tweet.
It was embarrassing. Progressive had to
do a good amount of cleanup. And it was hailed as a triumph of
grassroots social media when Progressive apologized and settled
with the Fishers, with one news outlet declaring that “when
it's Twitter vs. lawyers, take
Twitter.”
Life goes on. (Well, not Katie's, but …
anyway.) Matt Fisher is back with another hashtag. And if the first
one was borne of anger, this one is borne of affection.
“It was very gratifying when people
were jumping on Progressive and hashtagging her tweets with her
name,” Fisher says. “But what was being discussed wasn't Katie or
her life. It was Progressive. I'm so glad people got behind my
parents, but I thought: let's bring it around to Katie's life, what I
loved about her, and what she did for me …. So one weekend I
rattled off a bunch of tweets with her name hashtagged, and they were
about her: things I admired about her, facts about her. And one of
those was the cookie story.”
A friend came up with the idea to use
the same hashtag to encourage people to celebrate Katie's birthday by
baking (or buying!) cookies for a loved one. Just random cookies for
random people. (Recipes are available at KatieFisherDay.org.)
“You shouldn't necessarily be telling
Katie's story when you give out your cookies,” Fisher says. “You
should be talking to the person you're giving the cookies to, about
your feelings. If that's the sum total of the connection to Katie,
that's great.” He admits that it fills his heart to see the hashtag
used for positive feelings this time, that it assuages his grief and
that the buildup around the holiday is a welcome distraction. But
“I'm not crowdsourcing my therapy,” he says. “It's more about
all of us acting a little more like Katie than just remembering her.”
So: Happy #KatieFisherDay. Go forth and
deliver a cookie to someone you love. Because Twitter > lawyers
