25th
Chicken or egg? Does a viral video happen or do you make a video viral?
Within any large company different agendas compete. No different where I work. One of the ideas that was batted around was leveraging celebrities who had gotten into financial trouble as spokepersons for our brand. Not a shabby idea. And, our first effort (psst…Ed McMahon) I thought was hilarious.
Still, there is the little manner of “releasing” such content. I prefer a more robust social media strategy where we engage with users *beforehand*, talk about our efforts *beforehand* and even share a little (or a lot) of what we’ve done right, what we screwed up, etc…I even prefer seeking feedback as we create assets and information to help guide its creation. Seems very consistent with “Web 2.0” to me…
Not so to others here. Fair enough. Develop in a vacuum and *hope* it resonates. I suppose, if it is truly creative and compelling it will. But, still seems like we miss out on authenticity of community and it generating that true sense of connection with our brand. Here, many seem to think a win is if a blogger blogs about us. To me it seems a win is getting the community to “comment” about us and engage with us, regardless of channel. We still seem to be focused on “uni-directional” messaging.
On the brighter side, it isn’t cheap to create “compelling” short film, and brands (ignoring the immediate gut gringe of commercialism) can act as a producer of (last?) resort.
Will keep you posted on whether we created an egg or started a new chicken…stay tuned!
ACEdge
