Yesterday, Grant McCracken posted a link to a music video by a band called Ok Go. It’s an amazing video, where the four members of the band do an intricate dance involving eight treadmills. I’ve probably rewatched it five times, and it still consistently puts a smile on my face because it’s so endearingly goofy.
Naturally I was curious about these guys, so I went to their web page and started poking around. One of their previous videos, A Million Ways, is just them doing a synchronized dance routine in their backyard. In one of their interviews, they said they had originally come up with the dance routine as something they were going to do in their live show, but they taped it while practicing and thought it would make a good video. The record label disagreed, so they just put it up on the net themselves. It spread fast, to the point where fans were practicing their dance and imitating it themselves. Ok Go, rather than criticize the imitators, decided to encourage them by making it a contest: whoever submitted the best version of their dance would get flown out to an Ok Go concert.
It’s really a brilliant piece of marketing. And cost-effective! They claim in another interview that they spent $25 to produce the Million Ways video. They put it on YouTube, and have gotten great publicity out of it, including appearances in the mainstream media, such as Good Morning America. They’re going to perform the treadmill dance video at MTV’s Video Music Awards. And their dance contest got 500 people to spend hours learning dance moves, and probably telling their friends about this band for the relatively paltry investment (by advertising standards) of a few airline tickets and hotel rooms.
What’s interesting about Ok Go’s success to me is that it illustrates the new world we live in, where the mass media is the trailing edge of consumer awareness. Cultural phenomena spread virally on the Internet, and the mass media covers it when it becomes too widespread to ignore. We’re still in the transitional phase, where mass media is not yet willing to accept that it is no longer the arbiter of taste (witness the crowing in the wake of Snakes on a Plane). But as pundits such as Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin have been saying for years, the rise of the viral market is on its way. With YouTube and Reddit and Digg and del.icio.us, it’s no longer necessary to have the big mouthpiece of the publishers to get an audience. If you do something interesting, people will tell other people and forward links.
My boss provides a great example of this. Joel on Software is a well-known pundit within the programming community. He started off writing five years ago and built up a relatively huge audience despite not doing any sort of publicity in the mass market sense. He wrote what he knew, people found it interesting, told other people, and so forth and so on. He’s even built a company off of the platform of his column. Like Ok Go did with their video, using YouTube to gain mainstream media attention, he became famous first through the Internet and then leveraged that to create real-world results.
One interesting side effect of this is that folks can become famous for something that isn’t really what they are practicing. Steve Yegge wrote a post about this recently called Get Famous By Not Programming, where he was musing about a fan calling him one of the best programmers in the world despite the fact that his blog doesn’t illustrate his programming skills. He observes that it’s not like millions of people use software that he’s written, so he was really getting recognized for writing about software. Ok Go may have the same issue – their dance routines are so hypnotic that it’s hard to judge whether their music is any good on its own (although I’ll probably buy their CD at some point to find out).
So how does one become famous in a viral world? Listen to Seth Godin. Do something to stand out. Be quirky. Be yourself – inauthenticity will be quickly detected. Have a distinct voice and a story to tell. Have a focus, whether it be selling albums or talking about software. Now if only I could figure out how to apply these concepts to this blog…
Well, after listening to the video a couple times, and remember I’d heard another OK Go song relatively recently, I bought the album ($7) off iTunes, and I like it a lot. There are a few other songs (Invincible, for one) that are as catchy and good as their “hits.”