Sonic Launches 'This Is How You Facebook Connect' Crowdsourcer

As a city in Wisconsin rolls out its "How do you Sheboygan?" tourism campaign, fast food brand Sonic is asking (telling?) consumers "This is how you Sonic." Why does everyone suddenly hate verbs?

The new viral campaign by the drive-in restaurant chain is a fairly standard crowdsourcing project that challenges Sonic fans to "Whip up your own Sonic story" for a chance that the brand will "make it our national commercial."

Users are invited to upload a photo of themselves into one of several structured spoof movie trailers. The current leader is a spot titled "The Long Greasy Kiss Goodnight."

As a crowdsourcing project, it leaves a lot to be desired. The format allows for only a few pre-set outcomes and the only true crowdsourced element is a user-uploaded picture. While this may increase participation, it's unlikely to produce an ad worth spending to broadcast nationally.

But then, maybe that isn't Sonic's goal anyway. The videos are not embeddable and require Facebook Connect to publish. So every user video that's made allows Sonic to connect with users on Facebook, where it has a tab for the promotion (collecting all that juicy "basic information") but not beyond.