A firm gone viral
WS+B’s creativity and innovation make it an Internet sensation
BY DANIELLE LEE
Scenes from a flash mob: WS+B MP Bill Hagaman (photo, upper left) leads staff into New York, and into a dance
at a glance
Firm:
WithumSmith+Brown
Headquarters:
Princeton, N.J.
Managing partner:
William Hagaman
no. of partners/staff:
82/340
no. of offices/locations:
12
Video hits:
“I Gotta Feeling” —
www.withum.com/
popupvid_music-video.html
“Party Rock Anthem” —
www.youtube.com/user/
On a Friday morning in early December,
some 150 accountants and staff boarded a
Manhattan-bound R train. It’s doubtful any of
their fellow commuters guessed they were all
from the CPA firm of WithumSmith+Brown.
That is, until the dancing started.
Even then, the “CPA” part might have been
suspect, were it not for the subsequent You-Tube posting of this “flash mob” (a sudden
assembling of a group for a brief public performance) by the Princeton, N.J.-based Top
100 Firm the following January.
Further investigation would also reveal that
this was not the firm’s first Web-friendly video.
The previous January, WS+B struck viral gold
with its lip-synced performance of the Black
Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling,” which reached
an audience of 13,000 and was named the
best small-business video of the year by
Accounting Today columnist Gene Marks in The
New York Times small-business blog.
But shooting had only just begun on this
follow-up, as WS+B managing partner and
CEO Bill Hagaman, senior marketing coor-
dinator of interactive marketing Sarah Cirelli
and their colleagues began jumping around
the train in unison to LMFAO’s popular song,
“Party Rock Anthem.”
When the train reached Times Square
Station, members of the firm, still dancing,
flooded up the steps to what has since been
revealed as a significant location following
the merger of WS+B with New York firm Eis-
nerLubin, which had headquarters on that
block of Broadway and 39th Street.
