Last night the Hypercube audition process came to a close, and 50 Canadians received a free Cube from Nissan Canada. I wasn't able to make it to the Toronto event, but watched via Twitter as winners were announced across the country.

Congratulations to the 50 people who won, and I hope those who did not are still feeling good about their participation. If not, I'm curious to hear about it.

Certainly we are hearing from those who's auditions were successful, and they could not be happier.

My friend Kevin Grandia won, in spite of the fact he lives in the suburbs, and wore a suit to the party last night (going straight from his corporate job). Yet Kevin was successful because he demonstrated a number of key qualities, such as creative videos, a sharp website, and effective mobilization of his supporters.

Talking to Kevin this morning it was great to hear his plans for the car. This is where the next phase becomes interesting. Following along with the 50 to see what they're going to do with their new Cubes.

For example, not only did Rannie Turingan execute an incredibly successful audition for the car, but I bet the images and visions that he'll now capture with the vehicle will be even crazier. Rannie took a wonderful panorama photo of myself at my golf club in early spring, that was part of a huge series of panoramas.

In both cases, to give Kevin or Rannie a free car is a huge bargain on Nissan's part. In exchange for this good will they're going to get at least a year of amazing free content, if not several more.

Yet those are only two! There are 48 more, including Andre Molnar, who promised to turn his cube into a Druplicon, i.e. a moving Drupal display, promoting the free and open source content management system that runs this website and many more, wherever the car happens to go.

Then of course there's Telma Costa, who's enthusiasm is incredible. In fact I was a little worried what would happen if she didn't win. Her stress level in lead up to the day was reaching dangerous heights. She totally deserves the Cube, and will also emerge as someone who Nissan should have been paying all along.

Which is of course the whole point. Why pay big bucks for celebrity spokespeople who at some point will embarrass themselves in public and by extension tarnish the brand?

I personally ignore almost all advertising, although am heavily influenced by what my friends do. However when I do get influenced by people who are not my friends, they are rarely celebrities, or anyone famous, but rather normal people who I can relate to on some level. The genius of this campaign is that Nissan now has 50 of them. (Plus they don't have paparazzi following them 24-7 so when they do mess up we won't know, so who cares?)

Of course that's not to say that all has been smooth. Criticism of the campaign is starting to bubble-up, with Shawn Micallef articulating some thoughtful remarks via Twitter about noise, volume, marketing, and the nature of community on social media platforms.

CapitalC the firm behind this initiative acknowledges that their intention was not for people to spam their friends to get more votes, but rather use the canvases on the hypercube.ca site to inspire and encourage appropriate sharing. While I don't fault them for that, I think more thought needs to go into unintended consequences and developments so things like that can be anticipated and handled appropriately.

However as a whole I think the campaign was a great success, and is now ready to enter what I feel is the interesting phase. Rather than have a mob of 500 scrambling for votes, we have 50 actors on a broad stage, empowered with free cars, doing what they do, with both patience and passion. The signal to noise ratio should now improve dramatically, and with it the maturation of this fascinating social media experiment.