Plowing through life in the country…one calf nut at a time. Hilarious!
That is the banner text from Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. You’ll have to read it to get the inside story. Channeling her life through a blog about life in the country, Ree tells about being a city girl making her way through ranching life in Montana. Her voice is authentic. Her writing is crisp and wry. Her fans are devoted. This includes my wife.
She sells a calendar of her favorite photos of the year to her raving audience. This year she donated one dollar of each calendar to the Special Olympics. Her dontation was about 4,300.00. Her calendar sold for 15.00. Do the math. You’ve never heard of Ree? Enough people have to keep her family in fine cow-pie kickin’ boots for some time.
No fancy website, no marketing outside her blog. No gift conventions. No sales reps. Just authentic storytelling to an audience who’s following blog. Her visual voice is singular, straightforward, and satisfying.
When I fly, I often ask for a window seat if the departure lines up with a sunrise or a sunset. I have never lost my amazement for being able to look down on clouds. How long have we been flying now? 100+ years. What a mind-blowing experience it must have been to be above the clouds for the first time. Now people read the newspaper instead. I look around and see nobody in the other window seats looking out at the amazing shapes, patterns, and storms. How do we keep these kinds of experiences fresh? We seem wired with the ability to assimilate the most amazing things and turn them into everyday, ho-hum events.
Here’s another. The iPhone, wireless connectivity, and Youtube are migrating from flat-out-cool newness, to everyday realities for the masses, at least in my mind. But they came together in a “cloud” moment this morning. My 11 year-old is the caretaker of a lizard, an Australian Bearded Dragon to be exact. My job is to buy the crickets. So I’m in line at the pet store, waiting for my crickets this morning. The young man helping me is an Apple nut. I know this and ask him what’s new. He hands me his iPhone. After a quick tutorial, I’m surfing my channel on Youtube and with two clicks I’m watching The Animation Chefspromo. While I’m in awe of a pet store assistant who owns an iPhone, more impressive was the fact that I was watching a video, my video!, wireless, standing in the back of a pet store. I handed back the iPhone and my friend handed me a bag of fresh crickets.
A great story about building a fan base is unfolding as I read Steve Martin’s new book. For those old enough to remember his unsurpassed concert tours in the late 70’s/early 80’s this book is a wonderful study for anyone doing a blog, podcast, or video channel on any social network or membership websight. Martin played to stadiums. Tens of thousands at a time. When is the last time you went to a stadium to see one stand-up comic? None since Steve.
He started building this audience when he was a kid working a venue at Disney, then at Knottsberry Farm as a teen, then in magic shows for Kiwanas Clubs and Boyscout events, then at Comedy clubs, then as a writer for T.V. variety hours, then as a guest on the Tonight show. etc.
His family remembers him playing at a Ramada Inn showroom when NOBODY came to see him. And other times just a few people would show up, drunk.
Point is, Steve Martin’s path is familiar and required. Especially if your audience is generated by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. You have to show up when nobody is listening and say something funny, or show something out of the ordinary. You have to show up often.
As Seth Godin puts it,
“There’s an enormous amount of superstition about what makes some pages rank high while others languish. When you look at the actual figures, though, much of that fades away. It turns out that the new playing field enforced by the search engines is eliminating many of the shortcuts that used to be effective. In other words, the best way is the long way. The long way is to create content that is updated, unique and useful. Again and again we see that sites that do all three manage to get more than their fair share of traffic.”
When they start listening, you have to make it their while to return again and again. If you dial it in with no thought, your audience can tell. Your authenticity is your magnet.
It may take a while. It took Steve about 18 years. Fortunately the internet compresses time. Give it 18 months and you should have a decent fan base.
I’m walking down the sidewalk on the Las Vegas strip a year ago with some associates. Out from behind a bush springs a man in a Gorilla suit screaming at me and my associates like a wild beast. Said Gorilla then runs away with an accomplice carrying a video camera. We’d been punked by a stranger. I yelled out, “don’t you want me to sign a release?”
I receive a number of marketing newsletters. I keep up on the latest trends and movements in the copyrighting, internet marketing and social networking worlds. A marketing newsletter for which I had made no request showed up the other day, for the third time.
I did a little searching in my bank statement and found I’d been charged. I tried to comb through the slender hairs of recent memory to discover what I may or may not have missed via opt-outs, pre-checked forms or inadvertent clicks in my online purchases.
I finally found the culprit. Man is he good. I didn’t see it coming. I don’t subscribe to anything of his but he was behind a recent video offer which I ordered . Got the video, watched it, end of story. Then a free newsletter comes. Predictable. Then another. Then when a third shows up I start looking for a charge and sure enough there it is. He’d used the financial info I used to buy the video to sign me up for his marketing newsletter.
Which was worse, Guerilla or Gorilla? In this case, I felt the same. Surprised. Startled. A little miffed. Only with the Guerilla, I was already on the lookout. He still got me. To this day I didn’t see where I’d signed up. I never had that intention. And that is the point of today’s entry. Is this behavior winning my ongoing business? Of course not. Would I buy a video with myself getting startled by a large man in a Gorilla suit? Odds are better of buying that video than subscribing, or continuing to subscribe in this case, to a Guerilla marketer who ambushes my bank account through marketing slight of hand.
I don’t watch his channel anymore.
The idea for this little number came to me while flipping channels one sleepless night. Which informercials would rub Santa the wrong way?
Perhaps the last item will seem unfamiliar to many of you. Zamfir was an incessant infomercial about 10-15 years ago. “Sold more records than Elvis” was the boast as Zamfir flitted about on his polished pipes. The intensity of Zamphir working the panflute was comical to this viewer, but I’m sure his many devoted fans will take exception. Nontheless, this mellow animation ends with not so much a punch line, but rather a nudge-line for those who remember Zamfir. In fact, in honor of Zamfir’s fighting spirit, I don’t have Santa change the channel, but rather leave him in the Post-Christmas nocturn, alone, with the prodigious panflouting purse of Zamfir.
(for those of you interested, this was animated in aftereffects using photoshop layers)
Years ago, upon finding my soon-to-be wife had never seen a Bing Crosby movie, I took her to see “Hear Comes the Groom” when it was playing at the local art house during a 50’s retrospective fest. I grew up watching the Road pictures. I thought she needed to see Bing in action. So a date it was.
She hates Bing now. “Hear Comes the Groom” was a weak, convoluted plot executed for no other reason than to have Bing sing two or three VERY out of place tunes. It was a “vehicle” picture where the Bing dialed it in. Not one of Frank Capra’s best. (for instance, it just happens that on a plane trip Bing takes from Europe to America, a USO band is riding along too, with Louis Armstrong, Phil Harris, and a host of other biggies from that era. Of course they break into a song which has nothing to do with the plot, the characters, etc. Out of left field. They have their instruments too! Right in the isle. My wife’s most unfavorite scene)
She has never been able to get over it. Ironically, the only Christmas song she can play by memory from piano lesson days is White Christmas.
Here is a young woman who gets it. The reporter in the video does not dig into what it took to get 250,000 viewers to her MySpace page, but focuses instead on the outcome, her millions…which is fine. In fact, many internet marketers would do fine to work with 1 percent of her audience. If you can generate a web fan base of 2,500 dedicatedly loyal viewers, Google will still pay the bills. If it is a podcast, advertisers will pay you handsomely if you have highly qualified visitors. One Irish Podcaster recently noted his podcast attracted advertisers even though he only had 200 subscribers. Why? Because he could demonstrate that marketing executives made up the bulk of his listenership. If haven’t been able to find the transcript but the link is here.
Welcome! Here is a sneak preview of The Animation Chefs, the web show slash podcast we’ve been working on for a while. It still has a way to go in post-production, but for the faithful blog visitors, and recent workshop participants here it is for the first time.
We are excited to bring you this series of exhaustive lessons in creating your own animated stories, from scratch, in simple straight forward lessons. And in keeping with the focus of this blog, I will also keep you updated on how we are creating an audience of raving fans for a show like The Animation Chefs, so you can apply this knowledge in creating traffic for your own channel (whether it be a blog, a podcast, or a website) and drive your fans wild. (or just have them check-in like normal people)
Two recent items for the furstration file. One for me, one for a close friend.
Upon receiving my new bankcard from BankAmerica, I called the activation number. After entering the proper codes they blast an advertisement about their identity theft program. They make me wait for my confirmation number until this ad plays out. Then I press “No” for the I.D. theft sign-up. Then they play the entire ad again. I press ‘NO’ a second time. Then before they finally let me go, they give me another shot at signing up. This makes me worry that I have to wait until after this ad to REALLY be activated. Hostage marketing! Not interruption, not permission, but hostage marketing. I know we all go through this, but three times?
Another hostage situation: I’ve been advising a friend on his thesis for undergrad degree in communications. His area of study is visual communications. Specifically he has been doing field research on the perceived effectiveness of visual literacy programs in regional elementary schools.
After doing three months of research, he presents his rough to his advisor. The advisor, I’m not making this up, declares herself unqualified to accept the thesis based on her inexperience in this area of study. Visual literacy is not a “communication” topic, said she, but rather an educational topic more appropriate for the educational dept. at the University.
What? Visual communication is not a “communication” topic? That is bad enough, but to “advise” this student for an entire semester, to hold him hostage to her class, and then tell him “no deal”?
