Ten years ago, I sat down for lunch with my old creative partner, Andrew Zolty, to talk about what I could do to help share my adventure as I rode my bike across the USA on the TransAmerica Trail. Prior to departure and along the way, I would provide updates at my blog, No Direction Known, with the goal of eventually writing a book about it. But I also wanted something else that happened in realtime and would also raise money for Livestrong.

“I want people to get my side of the story,” I’d said, “but I want my bike to tell a different one.”

This was all the brief Andrew needed.

YESIAMPRECIOUS.COM was conceived by Andrew’s new company, BREAKFAST, as a way to follow along with our journey. To do this, they built Precious a real brain, and while I wasn’t involved in the concepting or design of the site, it would be my job as the person who gave Precious his personality to fill that brain with thoughts that would get published to Twitter.

This project did what any good digital project should do–it told a rich and compelling story. Below is a brief summary of the pieces and my involvement:

The Brain/Site
The brain, inside a box that sat in a bag under the bike seat, was loaded with a bunch of sensors. These sensors measured things like temperature, speed, gradient, location, and heading. All of this data formed the basis for readings on the site, while certain manual things would be ‘pinged’ in by me as I saw them (roadkill is a good example). I would also upload a new photo from the road every day to keep the background fresh and the site looking awesome. If you want to know how the brain worked, there’s a case study by BREAKFAST, and I also made an ‘on the road’ video talking about how it worked and what I did every day.

When certain criteria were met – a certain temperature, a GPS position – the system would reach deep into the brain, find a thought that matched that criteria and send it out to all Precious’s followers on Twitter. I wrote all those tweets well in advance (examples above), and created the personality of Precious. In essence, I was the copywriter and brand manager. :)

The Cause
The site provided a direct link to donate. Milestones were also set up in the system to send out donation-based tweets when certain financial goals were met, as a way to encourage followers to get involved. During the course of the ride, Precious raised over $7,500 for LIVESTRONG and also got a shoutout from Lance on Twitter. Not too shabby. (It should be noted that this was a PERSONAL project on behalf of LIVESTRONG. They didn’t have anything to do with it, beyond Lance giving it a tweet after it was live.)

The Other Stuff
As part of my Kickstarter project for the trip, I made a ‘book of Precious’ for backers. The “Yes, I am Precious” book was available to buy for anyone who became a fan of Precious during the trip, either on Twitter or on his Facebook page. He still tweets – mostly about how I don’t take him out of the house very much.