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This post is long overdue to say the least. I am going to try to explain everything that is going on with the Fiesta Movement, if you have any other questions, post them in the comments, or check out my individual agent page.

Training Weekend
About two weeks ago I flew to Chicago for the weekend of Fiesta training. I wasn’t really sure what I was in store for. My roommates had been joking with me that I had unwittingly signed on to some sort of reality show. It turns out they weren’t far from the truth. At the airport I met a handful of the other participants, one of which was carrying around a laptop with was streaming video straight to the internet. Apparently she streams the majority of her life online. Some of the other contest winners include a writer for Jalopnik, the creator of the Evolution of Dance video, an independent filmmaker, and a television producer, and those were only a few of the people from my region. Some of the other participants in other regions include a professional drag racer, a CEO of a cool tech start up, a bunch of bloggers, a correspondent on G4TV’s Attack of the Show and a ton of YouTube Personalities.

We started off by checking into the hotel where the handed each of us a pair of new “driving” shoes. Friday afternoon our training began. As a group we walked to a local restaurant and enjoyed happy hour, dinner and a series of presentations. We met some people from Ford as well as the various marketing agencies who are coordinating this contest. The presentations went over our HD cameras, the missions and some general things about the Fiesta Movement.

Saturday morning we started more presentations after breakfast. This time they focused on the actual cars we would be getting. We went over specifications and how to use all the cool technology they feature. Around noon the loaded us up on a bus and took us to the planetarium. They let us go find our cars (by matching the keys), look at them and turn them on, but wouldn’t let us drive them. We had lunch as a group and then divided up based on ability to drive a stick. Some people began a crash course in driving a manual, while my group headed into the city to test out the cars. I was the fourth out of four cars, with a person from Ford in the first car. The plan was for us to drive around for a while and then pull over and he would switch cars to explain things to us while we drove around. About two minutes into our drive the third person in the line took a wrong turn and I followed him. Unfamiliar with Chicago and without a GPS, we got lost for about half an hour, but finally made it back. The Ford people were surprisingly cool with us going awol. They gave us a few more instructions and then sent us on our way back home.

Fiesta Movement Details
The contest itself is a lot more involved than I thought it would be. We are only required to do two things. First, we are required to make one update a week about the movement, whether it a full blown blog post or as small as a tweet, it doesn’t matter. This is the part I was surprised about. I was ready to be pumping out a lot more content. The second requirement is that we go one mission a month and post a video about it. Each month has a theme and the missions center around that theme. This month’s theme is travel, next month is technology.

There are two categories for points, and there will be prizes given out based on the points. There is some talk about giving out a third prize based on quality of content because there is already one group of agents clearly spamming to rack up the points. Points are given for twitter updates, blog posts, flickr photos posted and videos posted. Those cover the first category which is called “Total Content Leaders.” The twitter updates counting as points is really getting abused, but don’t worry, I’m not going to start to try to compete with that. My tweets will stay the same. The second category is called “Mission Video Leaders.” We get points in this category based on views, comments and ratings of the official mission videos. I’d like to think I have a chance here, but with some of the agents having 50,000+ subscribers on YouTube I’m going to have to make something incredible to beat them.

The really involved part comes from the Fiesta Movement web site. There is a live feed of all the content the 100 agents are posting as well as individual pages for all of us. The internal portion of the web site features a forum with several hundred posts from the past few days alone. On each individual page you can view all the agent’s social media as well as what mission they are currently working on. There is a lot of other cool stuff on the Fiesta Movement site, you should definitely check it out.

Other Stuff
I’m working on a post about my thoughts on the car. I’m waiting to finish it mainly because I want to get some more miles on the road before I pass judgment. Post questions about stuff I left out in the comments.