Perhaps you're one of the 13 million people who recently saw Internet-famesters Jill and Kevin's wedding entrance video, set to Chris Brown's song "Forever". If not, go help push it to 15 million views and watch it now.
Did I mention the cleverness of them soliciting donation for a domestic violence charity to offset Chris Brown's own domestic violence problem? With 13 million views and all the free mainstream publicity, they've probably done a very solid amount of good in the world for the cause.
Or maybe you caught the not-safe-for-work "first dance" video set to Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back".
There's an entire collection of people making ordinary and typically uninteresting things compelling to watch. Like the Blend-Tec guys grinding up tiki torches and iPods in their blenders. Or the aging wheel of cheese. Or the UNICEF World Heroes disaster relief game.
These things all have something in common: they were trying to entertain and managed to take something uninteresting and make it incredibly compelling and fun to interact with. In the case of the wedding videos they probably never thought their audience was much beyond the audience in the room, but of course the Internet gave them a much wider reception.
The lesson for you to take from this is that your cause or your brand no matter how boring, probably has an angle that you haven't found yet that would be entertaining to interact with.
You don't need a new content management system. You don't need a new widget. You don't need to redesign your website.
You have to be able to laugh at yourself a bit, and find someone unshackled by your organization's tradition to think about new ways of engaging the public. You need to be publishing more. Writing more. Recording more. You need more content and you need to find people who can do that for you over and over, since many of their attempts will fall flat.
In short, you need editorial staff.
And then you need to let them run.
Disclosure: My firm, Virilion, built the UNICEF World Heroes game. UNICEF is a client of Virilion.
Did I mention the cleverness of them soliciting donation for a domestic violence charity to offset Chris Brown's own domestic violence problem? With 13 million views and all the free mainstream publicity, they've probably done a very solid amount of good in the world for the cause.
Or maybe you caught the not-safe-for-work "first dance" video set to Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back".
There's an entire collection of people making ordinary and typically uninteresting things compelling to watch. Like the Blend-Tec guys grinding up tiki torches and iPods in their blenders. Or the aging wheel of cheese. Or the UNICEF World Heroes disaster relief game.
These things all have something in common: they were trying to entertain and managed to take something uninteresting and make it incredibly compelling and fun to interact with. In the case of the wedding videos they probably never thought their audience was much beyond the audience in the room, but of course the Internet gave them a much wider reception.
The lesson for you to take from this is that your cause or your brand no matter how boring, probably has an angle that you haven't found yet that would be entertaining to interact with.
You don't need a new content management system. You don't need a new widget. You don't need to redesign your website.
You have to be able to laugh at yourself a bit, and find someone unshackled by your organization's tradition to think about new ways of engaging the public. You need to be publishing more. Writing more. Recording more. You need more content and you need to find people who can do that for you over and over, since many of their attempts will fall flat.
In short, you need editorial staff.
And then you need to let them run.
Disclosure: My firm, Virilion, built the UNICEF World Heroes game. UNICEF is a client of Virilion.
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