Popularized by the homeless and beggars, the street corner cardboard sign is very often seen, yet usually overlooked.  It's quite the enigma.  How can something we have been accustomed to ignoring become a powerful and effective marketing avenue?

Seth Phillips is one of the genius minds behind the @dudewithsign account on Instagram.  Using a different motivation and intention behind the cardboard street sign, he and his team have grown the account to over 7.5M followers to date.  The account primarily uses humor and plays off of relevant topics.  It has drawn partnerships from BMW Motors, Old Spice, Canva, and even public figures like Justin Bieber.

Inspired by this account, I decided to take to the streets of LA with my own sign.  Having stood on this corner for only about ten minutes to get a few pictures, I received a handful of honks and shouts in agreement with my sign.  Several passersby also encouraged me as they passed by.  I had a feeling that this sign and picture would be an effective content piece that had strong potential to be shared around.

Taking this to LinkedIn was my end goal.  After posting, I saw very strong results.  At the end of my campaign, this post has over 50K reactions, 1.1K comments, and just under 2M views.  I couldn't keep track of how many shares it got.  I was constantly tagged by connections on other reposts of this picture.  Many of which, I was not tagged.  I even got reposted to Twitter and received over 125K likes on that platform.

I knew that this post wasn't out there enough to land me a job, but it had potential to kickstart the viral nature of my campaign.  It did not disappoint.