Sometimes 4 minutes and 22 seconds seems like an eternity (like when you had to the the “bent arm hang” for the annual Presidential Physical Fitness Exam back in public school).
Sometimes, though, those four-plus minutes can be souped up with pulsing, mesmerizing trance music and filled a series of ideas, word snippets, data, and discoveries that make you pull a Keanu Reeve’s “Whoa.”
Think it’s hard boiling your biz message, mission, and vision down to its core essence? Think it would be even harder to turn your value proposition into a Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-esque musical?
Try doing just that with the whole Prop 8 gay marriage conundrum. Just 3 minutes and 16 seconds. Wow.
No matter where you stand on the issue, you have to admit this “Funny or Die” Exclusive is a shining beacon in the world of stellar content creation.
Sure, they’ve got folks like Jack Black, John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris, Margaret Cho, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, and satirical musical genius Marc Shaiman on their creative team (not to mention access to A-List editors, producers, promoters, and equipment). But when you get past that teensy, weensy detail, here’s what they’ve got:
A Big Idea (i.e. message, mission, and vision - Jesus says: “choose Love instead of Hate”)
A short, 3-minute script sharing the Big Idea with humor, wit, and levity
A well-selected Content Catapult (i.e. viral video) to get that Big Idea OUT THERE to its Ideal Audience
The Burning Desire to share it — which supercedes all reservations and fear
That’s a winner of a formula right there, kids. Use it for any (or all) of your products, services, or brands in 2009, and revel in the results.
The stack of magazines has been piling up recently, but I finally made it down to the October 2008 issue of Wired, and read about the inside story of the launch of Google’s new web browser, Chrome.
The story itself is a great read, but what really jumped out at me was this:
From the beginning, the Chrome team hoped that its visual presentation would be so understated that people wouldn’t even think they were using a browser. The mantra became “Content, not chrome,” which is sort of weird given the name of the browser. (”We’ve learned to live with the irony,” Mark Larson says.)
They didn’t want to bowl people over with bells ‘n whistles. They did what they do best - keep it simple. And they realized that a Web browser is simply one more tool for delivering content - “information you share with your audience in any form, which (ideally!) provides a specific value or benefit to them.” (Presented more colorfully here.)
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on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 10:45 am and is filed under All About Content.
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Back when my bro-in-law Fred had just moved back to NH, and was living with us while he worked for the state Marine Patrol, (that’s him on his patrol boat), we got him a poster-sized laminated map/chart of Lake Winnipesaukee from Bizer.
After he moved out and moved on from the Marine Patrol, he left the chart with us. It looks great as an art piece, and since it’s laminated, we put it on the wall in our upstairs bathroom.
Now, leave it to Fred never to mention something like this, and wait for us to find out on our own. One day I was looking at the map, and saw a slice of NH State Route 28 that was darker than the rest of the roadway depicted. I thought that was odd, and leaned in close. And written over the road in tiny letters was this:
“Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.”
The classic Groucho Marx line! But what the heck was it doing on this chart?!
I started studying the chart more closely, and other secret messages revealed themselves:
“Elvis, meet me in Las Vegas next Tuesday - Salman Rushdie”
“I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded.”
“This space for rent”
Then I started to notice other things - like how the labeling of Rattlesnake Island was done in a curved format, or how Echo Island was labeled as such three times, each time in a smaller font.
I called Fred and asked him if he had noticed this. “Yeah, I used to stare at that chart for hours, looking for more of them,” he said.
Well, I’m ruining the surprise for you, then, by sharing the fact that Bizer is hiding secret messages in their charts. It’s reason enough to buy their charts, but they also claim to produce “the only boating map of Lake Winnipesaukee to meet U.S. government map accuracy standards.”
I’ve never heard of any other map or chart company doing something like this (have you?), and I love, love, LOVE it.
It started simply enough, when I signed up for an account. Then I could tweet from their website.
And then I enabled my cell phone, and I started tweeting while waiting to pick up my son at the bus stop.
Then I added BeTwittered to my Google homepage, so I could tweet between headlines, weather, and stocks.
Then I got tired of looking at a terminally blank Facebook status box, so I subscribed to Ping.fm.
Supposedly, tweeting from there would have updated both my Facebook status and my Twitter page, but I haven’t seemed to get it to work very well. So I installed the Twitter application in Facebook, which lets me tweet from within Facebook.
And then I started wondering why I kept getting automatic replies from some folks I followed, which led me to TweetLater. Now, I not only have an autoresponder that thanks people when they follow me, I also have a way to pre-load and schedule the release of tweets - like pre-loading and post-dating updates to a blog.
Speaking of blogging, nothing else since has made getting your content, message, mission, and vision out to the world been so easy.
That is, until Twitter came along.
I hope the owners of Twitter figure out how to monetize it, because I’d be so sad to see it go away…
We’ve recently been passing emails back and forth with Dailey Pike, a marketing consultant (among other talents) who runs the Cedarlane Natural Foods social network and blogs for “Cedarlaneoholics,” the mavens of the Cedarlane brand. (Full story in Dailey’s comment.)
Inspired by our conversation, Dailey put together a 14-page ebook entitled “10,479 Free to Use Graphic Images,” and though I’m excited enough to spoil the surprise, I’m going to do the right thing, keep my mouth shut, and simply promise you it’s worth the look. (Yes, it’s free, but so are all 144 rack cards for every tourist attraction on display at our local grocery store. Some free things are worth more than others.)
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on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under All About Content.
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Well, they didn’t adapt, that’s for sure. And for a modern-day variation on this scenario, look no further than the Associated Press.
In the Web 2.0 world, where bloggers often post snippets of other people’s work and then link to the full details, AP has gone the way of the cyber-dodo and filed multiple Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests against bloggers.
The non-gobbledy-gook explanation: Claiming misuse of copyright, AP filed a complaint with the bloggers’ hosting companies. Because the DMCA is a guilty-until-proven-innocent law, the hosting companies had to comply.
Check out Mike Masnick’s Techdirt analysis of the situation, a response to the AP byRogers Cadenhead (one of the takedown-ees), and a pointedly funny response by Silicon Valley blogger Michael Arrington to get the full scoop.
Me, I think the whole thing about using a snippet in a blog and linking to the article is the high-tech equivalent of how we used to use footnotes and bibliographies, back in the days of secondary school. It’s a good thing no one from AP was sitting in any of my classrooms, waiting to sue me over a reference in a history paper, or takedown my final essay in civics. Sheesh, I’d have flunked if that were the case!
C’mon, AP. Adapt. Get with the new.
(Thanks to Kevin Skarritt at Acorn Creative for flagging the issue for us.)
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on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under All About Content, Blog Bits.
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We’re members in Melanie Benson Strick’s “Ultimate Wealth and Success Circle” coaching program, and part of it includes access to their forums. Lani posted this little story under the title “Cool things, small world, serendipity abounds”:
So I recently joined a local networking group that’s just celebrated its one-year anniversary called “Women Inspiring Women.” Leslie Sturgeon, the President and Founder, has already demonstrated an authentic bent toward being truly supportive for our biz in many ways, including asking Allen and I if we’d be open to putting on workshops on blogging, branding, social networking, etc. in the future. (Heck yes!)
Soon after I joined, Leslie asked if I was available for an evening phone call. Of course, I said yes. We ended up chatting about everything under the sun for 2+ hours, which was fab, but the thing that drove her to want to connect to me in such a powerful, intentional way is this:
She had recently heard about this amazing lady named Melanie Benson Strick. She’d been reading Melanie’s ezine and checking out some of her blog posts, etc. One day she decided to take Melanie up on an offer to check out a CD on “How to Get Out of Overwhelm.” You know, get the CD and only pay for the shipping. As she was listening to Melanie in her element, she heard a familiar voice talk about a breakthrough. This familiar voice was laughing, and mentioning her husband Allen, and sharing a story about how she went from five calendars all over the house and office to one main calendaring system after just 20 minutes with Melanie.
Turns out the voice this woman heard was mine.Moral of the story?
It’s a very good thing for a community leader and networking maven to hear you rubbing elbows at a boot camp with the visionary behind Success Connections.
Leslie now knows I’m on the “bleeding edge” of success-minded lifestyle entrepreneurs, that I’m spending my time and energy pursuing the things she’s trying to infuse in her own life and networking group.
I just love this kind of serendipity, don’t you?
Great little story, right? Well, Melanie saw it, and said:
This is such a great story, thanks for sharing it!
I hope you don’t mind but I have to post this on my blog…it’s a great story and it made my whole body tingle when synergy shows up like this!
Which she did, here. And she also referenced it as part of the regular content in her weekly communications to the Ultimate Wealth and Success Circle as well as her Fast Track to a 6 & 7 Figure Lifestyle Business groups.
That’s how easy it is to make content work harder for you - sometimes, you don’t even have to create your own to get your message, mission, and vision “out there”!
Okay, so Allen and I have been proudly calling ourselves “The Content Lovers” of Epiphanies, Inc. for a couple of years now. Which is to say…
We love content (duh, right?)
We believe in the power of great content to build businesses and skyrocket profits
We champion its vital role in all marcom for ALL ventures - from the solo pro’s email signature or website to corporate white papers, CEO podcasts, social networking pages, tweets, text messages, YouTube clips…the works.
Then this Joe Pulizzidude of Junta42.com strolls into the picture, and all I want to do is build him a monument, declare him the King of Content, and bow down to his passion and commitment to everything content-related until the end of my days.
I can only imagine he’s got an army of brilliant content trolls working underground 24/7 to pull off what he’s been doing over the last year or so. Not only has he launched and declared a CONTENT REVOLUTION(and explained it in quick, rock-n-roll powered 2-minute videos!), but he’s created Junta42 Match – the eHarmony for Publishers and Content Providers — a place they can flirt, assess needs and expectations, and go all the way with their missions and visions, if that’s the way the relationship plays out.
Jeez, Joe. Do you sleep? How are you doing this all so well?
Here’s the quick YouTube vid, if you’d like to find out more about how you can use Junta42 Match to help take your message, mission, and vision to the next level. It’s a killer idea, and it sure looks like Joe has executed the idea like a rockstar. Hope you can use this resource to drive your profits and build your business with stellar content! (Which, of course, is a KILLER way to “A-Ha Yourself!”)
And, if you end up using Junta42 Match, please let us know how it goes for ya.
TV theme songs. Groundbreaking sports milestones. Interview clips. Commercial jingles. Historical benchmarks. Famous personalities. Comedy routines. Political speeches that actually said something meaningful.
We all have a lot of aural flotsom and jetsom floating around in our heads, right? And when we’re lucky enough to hear one of our favorite soundbites from yore, it’s amazing how quickly we can be transported to another time, place…even dimension.
One guy who always makes Allen insanely happy is Vin Scully. If you don’t know about this legendary sportscaster (literally named “Broadcaster of the Century” in 2000 by the American Sportscasters Association), he’s been the play-by-play voice of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers since 1950 (!!!!!), and he’s still going strong.
Allen made it to a Dodger game with his old writers’ group buds during our three-week romp in Malibu, CA. That made him happy, but what REALLY thrilled him was hearing Vin’s voice every time he tuned into a Dodger game on TV. (Here’s a recently-discovered vintage Vin clip I found on NPR that’ll no doubt THRILL Allen once he realizes I’ve blogged about Vin: Recorded History: Vin Scully Calls a Koufax Milestone.)
I think we all have those amazing voices in our heads - the ones that defined our lives, before we knew they were being defined. Among my childhood flotsom and jetsom are: the Celtic’s Johnny Most (”Bird stole the ball!!!!”), Archie and Edith Bunker’s version of Those Were the Days, DJ Little Walter and his Time Machine, and the theme song from a silly kids’ TV show called Barbapapa.
Which brings me to my question: Is there a YouTube-esque website that collects nothing but user-generated audio clips? I’m not talking iTunes or some other mp3-farm site, but a site that collects, categorizes, and openly shares all manners of audio snippets? And if there isn’t, shouldn’t there be?
The YouTube model is so inspiring and can be duplicated, niched-out, or tweaked in so many creative ways — many of which could likely help out your own business or industry.
For example…
How ’bout a G-rated YouTube for kids? (If Mattel or Disney or Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network got to work on making that happen, don’t you think they’d get their money’s worth in targeted eyeballs?)
Or, a collection of “Best-Ever” radio commercials? (We pitched a blog version of this idea to the GM at Nassau Broadcasting two years ago, but he was pretty old school in his thinking and couldn’t see how this would help his sales team sell more ad space. Too bad. I still think it would be deliver a HUGE bang to the savvy radio station manager ready to use Web 2.0 for mucho financial gain. If you’re a radio GM and would like to hear more, by all means, give us a ring at 603.524.5248!)
Even something as ridiculous as audios of “Ultimate Sports Smack Talk” cribbed from the sidelines or bleachers, or a massive collection of video clips of nothing but authentically accidental groin injuries. Don’t you think these strategically-themed content meccas would call like the siren’s song to their target audiences? Having both a husband and a brother who’d eat this stuff up, I know for a fact they’d KILL.
Hey, we all eventually find ourselves lost in cyberspace, poking around, looking to be entertained or educated around the topics that ckick with our geeky little brains. Think about your target audience. What would make them smile? What would have them laughing, or feeling smarter, or just feeling better for having spent a few minutes on your website, with your brand? What would get them to send your site to their circle of similarly-minded friends?
Keep it simple. You can add on over time. If you stay true to the intent of entertaining them, they WILL come to you.
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on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 1:41 pm and is filed under All About Content.
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We’re members in Melanie Benson Strick’s “
One guy who always makes Allen insanely happy is 
