Now, on to the video.  What a powerful, yet simply done message.  The tempo, flow, imagery, and music all come together to really get the point across.  This group targets church members around the United States and their YouTube video already has about 90,000 views.  Not bad for trying to reach a niche audience.

The simple concept was to capture the twitter messages of historical figures, and in doing so, create a funny and compelling new type of content.

Together with Alan Beard of Wave Strategies, we wanted to combine a hot new technology (Twitter) with the boring old history books to showcase how content can create a new conversation (and hopefully generate some laughs along the way).

Some messages are benign, some are lame puns, some push the envelope, and some will likely offend. But the goal was to create something of interest out of something common — history and pop culture.

The Early results: in three weeks, after 20 posts, with nothing more than a Twitter account, and submissions to both Digg and StumbleUpon, the site has generated 2400 unique visitors and 12,000 page views. Not bad for little to no marketing work.

As the site grows in interest, we will enact a more active marketing campaign, but, so far, this content experiment has yielded great results.

Do you have “common content?” Every organization has its own, boring content — history, milestones, stories, and more. How can you use this content to your advantage in an engaging way?

You can subscribe to Historical Tweets by Twitter, RSS Feed, or Daily Digest Email.

The “viralness” of your video depends on a) whether or not your video’s tone resonates strongly enough with your target audience, and b) whether or not your target audience is web-savvy enough to forward, blog about, re-post, and redistribute your viral video to their friends, contacts, readers, etc.

An interesting statement from the post:

Some respondents said a viral video for a marketing campaign is a hit if it draws 100,000 views, while others pegged success at 250,000 or 50,000 views.

One million views seems to be the number that everyone throws around, so it’s good to see smaller numbers get some attention as well.  50,000 views is an expensive ad buy for $100k, unless your 50,000 viewers were hitting your client’s sweet spot.

On being open to “less efficient” processes early on:
Appreciate the different creative types among your people—and realize that some are better at certain phases than others. And be very tolerant of the subversive. Creative work must, like Mark Twain’s character Huck Finn, avoid all “sivilizing” influences.

Creativity is really about silencing the voices (inside or outside ourselves) that say “no.”  Little annoying, evil voices that kill ideas before they’re fully hatched.  Efficiency, profitability, and misplaced strategy are all enemies of creativity.

Certainly, creative-types shouldn’t be lazy, excuse-making slobs.  (Some are)  Because true creativity comes when your mind is fully engaged in something else, and something makes a connection.  Your mind’s freedom (or your organization’s or your team members’) is important.  I read that Steven Spielberg’s best ideas come in the car, while driving.  His mind, fully engaged in the passive/reactive state of driving is allowed to drift into other places.  Come on, we all do it.  He just takes what he dreams up and makes blockbuster movies.

So what can you do to either be more creative yourself, or foster an environment of creativity in your workplace?

Be positive to ideas. Nothing kills ideas like a steady stream of “no.”  Be open to rethinking yourself, your brand, and your goals.

Create a sandbox to play in. Create a place to execute ideas on a small level, before they must be canonized, and put into production for all the world to see.  A test blog, a low-end video shoot, a sketch rendering.

Be prepared for failure. Many ideas lead nowhere, but they are great lessons, and lead to better ones.

Creativity can come from anywhere, and in an era of media and commercial saturation, it is only true and genunine personal creativity that resonates.  Are you having problems standing out?

UK’s answer to the Cup O’ Noodles, Pot Noodle has a comedy-friendly brand (hey, the feature dwarf wrestlers on their web page, after all), and they recently worked with ad house AKQA to create a little viral buzz.

They created a news report from the 80’s about a guy who develops sheep-like wool after eating enough Pot Noodle. “You are what you eat,” the guy claims. It’s funny, but certainly not funnier than anything else I’ve seen online.

The value comes from its editing — the video itself was copied onto an old VHS tape and re-imported to give it that static-y, 80’s feel. AKQA also teamed up with The Sun to run a fake news article about the video.

The video only has about 1200 views on YouTube, but is creative enough for me to take note.

Where this doesn’t apply so much is the opening up of a marketing campaign to draw in viewers. As news continues to become commoditized, how do you stand out?

CNN crossed two mediums that don’t seem to work together. Headline T-shirts.

Brilliant. What does CNN have an endless supply of? Headlines. What would be the least-relevant news delivery-vehicle? Clothing. Put them together and you have a humorous, self-referential motif that really works.

In this case, the number of shirts they sell don’t matter as much as the concept itself. They are printed on demand, and carry the benefit of a buzz-worthy idea.

The home page, like every other university web site out there, has a large photo-centric center section that corresponds with a recent news-ish story.

There’s a tiny bit of interactivity with the mouse on LMU’s page, however, and despite how subtle it is, it really works. It got me to stick around the page minutes longer than I otherwise would, and it just makes it more fun.

Quantifiable? No. It’s a surprise a little feature like this made it through the various discussions that I know happen at institutions of higher learning (”Will people get it?” “Is it too flashy?” “Will this make us look too hip/trendy/fun?”).

Way to go, LMU. It almost makes up for your crazy, almost unreadable URL-naming system:

• Admissions = http://www.lmu.edu/page76.aspx
• Contact Us = http://www.lmu.edu/page70.aspx
• Quick Facts = http://www.lmu.edu/pagefactory.aspx?PageID=110

Give bloggers a chance, will ya?

I am really impressed by the size and brightness of that screen, and was overall impressed with the visuals that went behind it.  At times, they seemed out of sync with what he was saying, and other times, added to the moment.  The biggest problem with the setup was that they didn’t make sense to the TV audience during the close-ups (Garr goes into details about this).  He should make available a wide shot photo of each and every slide with him in front of it.  It would give bloggers something to talk about, rather than just the missteps.  My visuals grade: A for Effort, B+ for Execution.

Conversely, Barack Obama painted a different backdrop at his speech at the DNC.  His staging wasn’t that fancy: what seemed like a bunch of American flags in front of a building (looked like a ranch-style house, or stable?).  But the true backdrop was the crowded Denver stadium.  The TV cameras were able to cut away to thousands of average, seemingly middle-class people listening to the speech.  It was a different way to generating and furthering a message.  My visuals grade: B for Effort, B for Execution.

There are a lot of bloggers up-in-arms about this, as bloggers can be (read: “The DMCA sucks!” “Burn copyrights!” “Anarchy!”). Bloggers, who tend to be writers, creatives, artists, and marketing self-promoters are probably especially fond of Mad Men, and were, probably, like me, excited about further interacting with the characters. Twitter seemed to be a spot-on communications tool for the show.

I 100% agree that AMC (which pays for and owns the show) has the right to do this.

I just hope the cable network takes note of the moment and makes these Twitter accounts official.  They should continue the good work of their anonymous (and probably now pissed-off) fans. I can only hope that staff writers or assistants are tasked with maintaining these accounts, and they don’t have to run things through legal before each post.

Links of note:

• I am @Paul_Kinsey
• Mad Men on Twitter
• DMCA takedown notice forces Twitter to blacklist Mad Men characters (Venture Beat)

I just stumbled across something totally separate from the show: someone has created Twitter accounts for a couple of the main characters, and they’re interacting, as if from 1962, with fans from 2008 (and with each other). Brilliant.

Twittering from the Past!

So far, I’ve been able to find a couple of character Twitter accounts. Don seems to be the most active, with over 800 followers and 170 status updates. Sure, Twitter is mostly for early-adopter technophiles, much like being on Digg, but it’s a probably a smart tactic for engaging the fans most likely to blog and use online media to spread your messages…

• Don Draper: Twitter (Bio at AMC)
• Peggy Olson: Twitter (Bio at AMC)
• Pete Campbell: Twitter (Bio at AMC)
• Joan Holloway: Twitter (Bio at AMC)
• Updated: Sal Romano: Twitter
• Updated: Bud Melmen: Twitter (and LinkedIn)
• Updated: Bobbie Barrett: Twitter
• Updated: Paul Kinsey: Twitter

The most interesting part of these accounts is that the characters are responding back to questions, rants, references to post-1962 pop culture (e.g., Peggy has never heard of “A Clockwork Orange”), and furthering the fan interaction into the show. Most of their updates are replies. Official or no, this is cool.

And, probably pretty easy. All it would take is someone with a deep knowledge about the show and a program like Twitterific or twhirl, where you can have multiple Tweet windows open.

And it doesn’t stop with Mad Men. After a little more research, I found Twitter accounts for:

• Liz Lemon (Tina Fey on 30 Rock)
• Michael Scott (Steve Carell on The Office)
• Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson on The Office)
• Darth Vader
• Borat (with over 5,000 followers!)
• Norman Dale (Gene Hackman from the movie Hoosiers - seems abandoned, but you get the point)

That’s a lot of fake Twitterers! Perhaps a real fake Twitter account might bring in the right audience to kick-start your communication strategy.