Two days ago I put up a post and recognized even as I was writing it that it would likely bump the traffic to my website. Sure enough. The very next day was, in fact, my best day ever. It feels kinda like a cheap trick…but effective. I guess, if you are looking for a new spokesperson for your product, you might want to consider the power of Lil’ Wayne.
Before:
After:
Photo nicked from here, many thanks.
I recently found out via The Smoking Section, that according to compete.com Lil Wayne ranks second among search terms on YouTube, right behind Sex. Not sure what that says about our society, but man that is some serious power for Lil Wayne. According to these results, if Family Guy were to create a remix of Chris Brown’s No Air, featuring Soulja Boy and Lil Wayne then YouTube may explode from the people drooling on their keyboards waiting to watch that video.
Another interesting cultural data tool is lexicon from Facebook. It monitors the messages on users’ walls and then keeps tabs on the usage over time. When I check Lil Wayne’s power with this, he pales in comparison with sex. This just means that Facebook users aren’t chatting about Lil Wayne as much as the other topic. It is interesting to note that the lowest amount of Facebook messages pertaining to sex occurred on the pious day of December 25th.
What is interesting to me is that just by writing about this subject I may get more hits to my blog. So, I am going to post a chart of my current site visitation and then check back later to see if it makes a noticeable difference.
Posted in Research
Tagged Chris Brown, Facebook, Family Guy, Lil Wayne, No Air, Sex, Soulja Boy
I have enjoyed Vice Magazine for a while. Now VBS.TV carries on the heritage of Vice in the form of online video content. (NOTE: not all the content is for the faint of heart and some is NSFW) Recently PSFK has had several posts about the future of TV, including this one with David Cohn from Vice Media. One of the points he made struck me:
We at VBS need to find those stories and tell them in a way that no one’s doing. That’s the reason to exist, a voice and point of view that no one else is covering.
-David Cohn, Vice Media
When I think of other online sources that get a lot of attention (YouTube, Google, Vimeo, Facebook, Even Current.TV) they are all giant funnels for information that inundate you with massive amounts of content. And by massive amounts I mean, the good and the crap. VBS.TV I value because they not only produce their own content, which gives it a certain level of quality, they also have a point of view to the stories they cover. Regardless whether I agree or disagree with their take on the subject I am always happy to hear it. In a world where everyone is distracted and so busy they can barely make it in the rush from meeting to meeting, it seems the way a media channel can stand out is creating their own voice and providing quality content rather than aggregate the content of others. Really, you could likely do well as a media channel even if you aggregate content from others, but make sure they all maintain the consistency of voice along with the quality and rich content.
Bonus
In honor of earth day be sure to check out the Garbage Island series on VBS.TV Great Work!
Posted in Branding, Conviction
Surely this will be my last post on mixtapes. People may start to think I am obsessed. I just discovered this tool via YesButNoButYes and its even better than Muxtape. Easy to use and much quicker to put together…wonder if that kills the point of making a mixtape?
Photo nicked from here many thanks.
I’ve never come across a digital campaign that made me cry.
As I have mentioned before I believe new media, and especially digital campaigns often lack emotion. I believe this is often because the creators are too interested in exploiting the novelty of some new technology that they are playing with. Campaigns that I have seen online that evoke emotion, like this one for the GAP (written about before here and here), seem to revert back to a known entity (moving pictures and sound) and simply exploit online as a channel to distribute long form.
I am curious if anyone has seen a digital campaign that created strong emotions in a novel or interesting way.
Southern Planner 
