PR and the Social Web

Matt Harding is from Connecticut and in his thirties.  He was a computer games developer who quit his job in February 2003, to go travelling.  Several months into a trip through Asia a travel companion gave Matt the idea of performing a peculiar dance, apparently the only dance Matt does, on the streets of Hanoi. The video was posted on line and attracted some attention. Harding repeated the dance in a number of locations and edited together 15 scenes of this dance with the background music Sweet Lullaby (Nature’s Dancing Mix), by Deep Forest that uses lyrics from a dying Solomon Islands language.

It attracted the attention of Cadbury which was launching a new chewing gum range called Stride gum. They offered to pay Matt to do another trip around the world to make a new video.  In 2006, Matt took a 6 month trip through 39 countries on all 7 continents, dancing in all of them.  The Wheretheismatt videos have between them been seen over 100 million times.