Alec

McNayr

On the heels of the all the Mad Men twittering business of a few months back, I created a new web site called HistoricalTweets.com.

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.

According to Ad Age, 40 execs at advertising agencies were polled and 70% are looking to direct more budgetary consideration towards online “viral videos,” which can be a very hit-and-miss operation.

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.

Harvard Business Review has a great article (albeit long) article Creativity and the the Role of the Leader.  It’s a great read.  Something that stood out:

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?