Weddings are no longer about two people celebrating their true and everlasting love. They’re highly-expensive one-shot photo-ops to capture content that represents your uniqueness and originality, which you will meticulously edit, curate and self-publish as an expression of your personal brand/digidentity at its most beautiful.
Nobody wants to suffer the embarrassment of having an aspect of their wedding that is “normal” or “been done before”. Luckily, there are a lot of killer sites and social media services out there who understand this, and will make it easier than ever for you to turn your wedding day into a highly individual life advertisement, no matter what kind of budget you’re on.
Now that “Wedding Season” is over (which is when “normies” get married) and “Alt Wedding Season” has just begun, here are some more helpful tips on how to stand out from the crowd:
An Engaging Engagement — You can’t just get on a knee somewhere special and quietly ask the person you’re in love with to marry you anymore. If you really want to show that person you love them, you’ll come up with something “noisy” that will get linked all over the Internet. Nothing says love like “hits”. Try proposing in a viral video, or a Twitter feed, or if you’re the position to do so, hijack an entire social network and make everyone on it your personal proposal hostage. If you manage to get any aspect of your wedding onto BuzzFeed, you’re going to have a long and happy marriage — so the proposal is a pretty good place to start.
Wedding Domain Registration — You have to stake your claim for URLs, Twitter nicknames, vanity Facebook pages, and all the other places where people will be celebrating your wedding online. The good ones go fast, so I would recommend doing this before you’re even engaged. These are also great ways to drive traffic to your eRegistries. Don’t forget to check latest SEO best practices.
IRL Wedding Domain — Where you actually have the wedding in real life isn’t as important as the domain name, but still probably worth thinking about. Just try to do it in a place that will look nice in photographs, and has plenty of room for your coordinated Animal Collective Dance Routine. Also: make sure there is a strong and reliable wi-fi connection. This latter point is, far and away, the most important thing to consider. If people can’t upload content/access the Internet during your wedding, you might as well not even get married.
The Official Wedding Flickr Feed — This one is huge. This will be the primary visual record of your specialness, so it must be taken very seriously. The first thing you should do after getting engaged is get some Engagement Photos taken. These should be playful, showing you and your fiancee doing something whimsical and creative, like pretending to be old-timey Steampunk farmers, or dressing up as characters from “Mad Men”, or standing in front of some graffiti.
