While the Charlie Sheen Train Wreck Express was careening through pop culture several weeks ago, turning the phrase “winning” into first an Internet meme and shortly thereafter a cliche, the rock band R.E.M. was releasing its latest album, Collapse Into Now. One of the songs from that album — “Every Day Is Yours To Win” — has been in steady rotation on my playlist ever since the album came out in early March. Why? It has everything to do with the tune’s attitude toward winning.
“Every Day Is Yours To Win” is the antithesis of Charlie Sheen. The song is thoughtful, hopeful and encouraging. It speaks to the soul and to all of us who struggle, day in and day out, with the joys and failures of life to, as English instructor John Keating (Robin Williams’ character from Dead Poets Society) put it, carpe diem — to seize the day.
If you haven’t heard the song yet, take a listen as you watch the accompanying video, just released on Monday. The video is an interesting concept as it is composed entirely of clips from homemade videos found on YouTube.
In the video below, R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe and one of the video’s producers, Jim McKay, discuss the making of the video. At about the 1:30 mark, McKay describes the song as “a very personal song that people could apply to their lives,” and explains that that is what drove his vision for the film.
What impresses me most about the video is that it celebrates the ordinary humans who are using technology to reach out. They’re not trying to become celebrities. And, unlike Sheen, they are not exploiting their celebrity status to gain even more exposure. Yet, thanks to R.E.M. and the directors of this video, all of them have a little more exposure to the world than they might have.
I ran across this 2-minute video (also embedded below) recently (hat tip to @steverubel for the find). It resonated with me because it affirms what I and many others in the higher ed marketing and PR fields have been thinking about for some time now.
“Think Like A Media Company” is the title of the video. The speaker is author David Rogers, and he’s talking about the shift occurring from traditional brand-building techniques (read: advertising) to one less dependent on established brands and traditional channels. The money quote comes at around 1:30 in the clip:
So, from a brand point of view, what this means is rather than piggybacking on this really powerful brand with a huge built-in audience [i.e., television], we need to look for opportunities to engage by creating our own content. Thinking like a media company, not like an advertiser.
David Rogers: Think Like A Media Company
For a lot of us in the higher ed marketing and communications fields, we’ve been forced to think in those terms anyway, because we don’t have a huge ad budget to begin with. (And if we did, once upon a time, it has been slashed.) Or if we aren’t thinking in those terms, we’re still pinning our hopes for engagement on traditional PR and media relations efforts. That’s a losing game, too. Because as ad revenue declines in traditional media, the news hole shrinks.
But maybe the fact that we haven’t had big ad budgets puts us at an advantage in this new world. Higher ed is blessed with having a wealth of stories to tell.
The greater challenge, perhaps, lies in our ability (as marketers and communicators) to convince the leaders of our institutions that engaging our audiences with great stories that resonate with them will ultimately strengthen ties better than advertising ever can.
Of course, this is not an either/or situation. Media organizations spend money to advertise themselves in order to build awareness and attract audiences. (You’ve seen those billboards around town for your community’s “number one news team,” right?) In the same way, traditional advertising can be used to drive audiences to your self-created content. It isn’t the splashy ad or the big mainstream media coverage that matters (although both are nice) but the content we create ourselves, for our audiences. (Related: When we do get those big media hits, what matters is how we parlay that third-party endorsement to inform our most valued constituents — the ones who tell us we never get any notice from the big-time media, etc.)
And by using social media, we do rely on established channels (i.e., Facebook) to help get our word out. But it’s cheap.
A bit of blatant promotion here — just to illustrate the point. Here’s an audio slideshow some members of the Missouri S&T communications staff put together as a feature for our website (thanks Lance, Brad and Jessica). The audio portion of the show also ran on our public radio station, KMST. It just went live late last week, so the number of views is modest. But it’s an example of how a campus communications team is using the tools and talents at our disposal (the web, talented content creators) to create our own content.
How is your operation thinking like a media organization?
Being easily the easily distracted type, I was naturally happy to hear this and immediately approved of this finding, which apparently was from some study conducted at some university somewhere. I don’t know. I didn’t bother to read beyond the headline, though, because…
2. … I had a sudden urge to check Gmail, and there I found a note from Paste linking to the music mag/website’s list of the 50 best albums on 2010. Which reminded me that…
3. … I and several of my fellow higher ed music lovers are about to embark on my favorite year-end distraction: creating a list of favorite albums from the year almost finished. We’re going to compare notes and compile our collaborative effort on this blog we created last year for the purpose of counting down the top albums of the past decade. Stay tuned for more about that. But first…
You may credit (or blame) Tim Nekritz for inspiring me to post the following. It’s in response to his “invitation to join me in the blogosphere for a conversation titled A Video I Love And Why, where anyone is welcome to blog about or discuss great web video.”
For his entry, Tim chose the poignant and powerful With Glowing Hearts video from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. It’s a great video, and Tim provides a solid list of reasons for why it appeals to him.
And now for something completely different.
I’ve opted for a less polished, animated piece called Battle of the Album Covers. (Warning: Nothing poignant to see here, but there is some blood, gratuitous violence and frontal nudity.)
Why do I love it? Well, let’s see:
1. The concept. Breathing motion and cartoon life into album art is just a clever concept. I wish I’d thought of it.
2. A tribute to a lost art form. Album cover art is an under-appreciated and nearly extinct pop art form. This video captures many well-known album covers, along with some obscure titles, and sets them in motion through some brilliant animation.
3. How many can you spot? Don’t you love those games that challenge you to spot as many things as possible? I do. Hence, I love this video.
4. Four Pink Floyd album covers. Did you find them all?
5. The humor. OK, so it’s sick, twisted humor, maybe. But it’s funny. At least I think so.
6. The production values. What production values? Precisely. This is not high art. It’s folk art — of the people, by the people, for the people. It’s what YouTube was created for. It’s punk.
So, there’s my entry. Let’s keep this meme going. Blog about a video love and tell us why, then let Tim and me know about it.
What did me in was this