If you haven’t seen Susan Boyle on the British reality TV show, “Britain’s Got Talent”, then over the last week you’ve probably successfully avoided social media sites, the news, or the Internet in general.
This single video has been on Youtube for less than a week, and has already surpassed 26 million views.
Why is this story so catchy? Why do people want to watch it over, and over.
One of my favorite books in the last couple of years is Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. This book describes 6 characteristics of a sticky story:
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotional
Stories
Susan Boyle’s story was, in every way, simple, unexpected, concrete, credible and emotional.
For the past few months I’ve been meaning to update the look-and-feel of projectrethink.org. As you can see, this new design is much cleaner than the old look-and-feel. The primary goal of this redesign was to put more emphasis on original content.
Another big goal of the redesign was to bring more attention to the fact that there is a real person behind Project Rethink. I think it’s important for a blog to have a voice. My worst fear is that this blog becomes filled with anonymous “fluff” and buzz-words.
Imagine this scenario. You are a major record label and you find that someone just uploaded a video to Youtube featuring a hit song from one of your artists. The knee-jerk reaction from most record labels is to declare copyright violations and have the video removed. Fortunately for Chris Brown and the Record Label: Jive, a different approach was taken.
This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.
So what’s the lesson here? If someone uses your content, it’s not always a bad thing. We need to fight the knee-jerk reactions to pull everything and ask questions later. According to Google, in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s “Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list.
Currently I live equidistant between the main campuses of Harvard and MIT; needless to say there is a high IQ index and one is easily humbled. But over the last two or three weeks I have become preoccupied with the idea of champions.
A few weeks back I was in one of my favorite coffee shops and I overheard a small group talking. It was obvious this group was meeting for the first time, as they were making introductions and detailing a shopping list of their skills and assets. One of the introductions, however, caught me off gaurd.
“Hi, my name is [fill-in-the-blank], and I am a champion project manager“
I immediately began thinking about this phrase, wondering what it meant to be a champion. The blogosphere and twitter are full of titles like professional, expert, guru, ninja, etc. Everyone tries to come up with the catchy, trendy title; but what do they mean? What does it mean to be more than an expert? What does it mean to be a champion?
With all of these question racing in my head a grabbed out a piece of paper and started writing down some of the characteristics of a champion.
The Characteristics of a Champion:
Champions are not defined in a moment. Champions are defined through a history of excellence; champions rise through a journey.
Being a champion does not mean perfection; plenty of champions screw up. A champion comes back from a mistake stronger and more determined. A champion comes out on top.
Champions are not self-proclaimed. A champion is given their title by a group of their peers, colleagues, or even competition.
Champions are not permanent and require self-improvement. A champion is always challenged and never stops learning or growing.
Here is a shortlist of some people I consider champions. I have a learned a lot from every person on this list, and if I haven’t met you, I look forward to thanking you in person some day.
Here is an interesting bit of remix for you. Recently a video was posted to youtube, David After Dentist, that took the world by storm. But what I found most interesting was what happened when this video was submitted to Digg.
During the video, David asks the question: “Is this real life?”
This question spawned a great comment thread on Digg; this is why I love the Internet.
