Taking the advice of Seth Godin it’s no longer viable to remain normal. Your brand, your business and the way you go about things have got to change. Gone are the days when you can easily buy recognition for your brand, you have to actually earn it by being interestingly different.
Do something fun, something innovative, something that will get people talking and something to make your staff smile. You can’t wake up one day and decide you’re going to be wacky to gain some attention, it’s about changing the entire culture in which you operate. Roll with wilder ideas, take risks, get rid of suits or install a slide in your office, just do something fun and share it. At the time, what you do might appear pointless, but pointless fun can now be shared with the rest of the world, and they’re more than happy to join in and watch.
This new attitude to the workplace always reminds me of a video put together by connected ventures two years ago. It was just a bunch of colleagues lip syncing to a song they liked but the video really resonated with people and ended up receiving hundreds of thousands of hits – all because they had some fun and shared it with the world. Their business is now well known amongst social media users.
Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.
A more recent and slightly more contrived example is Air New Zealand’s air safety ‘bare essentials’ video in which the air crew delivered the infamous air safety demonstration in nothing but body paint. It’s anything but boring, Seth Godin would surely fall over himself to congratulate them since they’re making a point of being remarkable. They’ve changed their culture and done something interesting and unique, but crucially, they’ve shared that experience with the world. Unlike connected ventures efforts it’s clear there was an end goal in the production of the bare essentials video – get people talking – but it goes to show that social marketing campaigns can be synthetically put together as opposed to bubbling up naturally. As Scott Monty said,
Air New Zealand could have kept their video locked up on their planes, but they put it on YouTube. Why? It’s not like people need to watch an airline safety video at their desk. But people do have the power to tell everyone they know about this cool airline and what it’s doing.
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