Before I get into this week’s blog, I want to thank everybody that clicked, retweeted, watched, and otherwise enjoyed Brian. There’s a Part 2 to the video that I’m uploading now.
Okay, so I finally figured out who this Justin Bieber person is. Thanks to a re-run of Saturday Night Live, 1 I’ve discovered he is a young man who sings and dances and attempts to act. And you know what? He’s pretty fraking good. Not a bad dancer…nice little voice…the kid’s kind of a black hole for charisma, but seriously, who’s got charisma at age 15? I tweeted something earlier about how tired I was of people “confessing” their nerddom…”Oh, I was such a nerd when I was a kid…” but I was a little off base. Instead of saying “Kids Are Nerds” I should have wrote “Kids are AWESOME!”. Teenagers are nerds.
We’re all nerds when we’re teenagers. Teenagers, in point of fact, generally pretty much suck. (there are exceptions and if you’re reading this and you’re a teenager, and we’ve met, I can mostly guarantee you don’t suck…mostly). As proof I posit the following: The essence of cool…the purest definition of cool is the act of not trying to be cool. Ergo, nothing is less cool than teenagers, whose entire existence is defined by attempts to get cool, remain cool, and be in close proximity to cool.
Media and markets have a weird relationship with teenagers as they’re often seen as a mass-arbiter of what is and isn’t cool: plus their disposable income and desperate uncoolness made for a self-perpetuating money machine. But online reputation works differently. As has been proven by numerous failed social media campaigns, attempts to buy reputation tend to fall flat. The first corporate sponsored flash mob was cool. The 30th? Well…been there done that.
Most attempts at “viral marketing” seem to orbit planet cool, without ever docking at the station. And I think there’s a reason for that:
The things you love as a child? You love them forever.
The things you love as a teenager? You refer to them later in life as “guilty pleasures”.
In creating for the web, there’s attempts to create cool, which have the half-life of a Double-Down. Attempts to create awesome? There’s your sticky stuff. Perhaps I’m biased here…I have been described on numerous occasions as “nine”. But as marketers, we’re often looking for ways to engage, and to spark a reaction. It seems there’s often a desire to do something cool when doing something awesome is what we’re truly searching for. For some reason, our teenage years tend to take over that thinking, instead of reaching slightly further back.
So if this blog does nothing for you, please remember that it brought you this video, which is going to be the way I plan on living my life from here on out.
Remember: you too can be a shark and do anything good.
1) and the fact that someone…presumably Beau, has started following him on the Klick twitter account.