The “Oh Sh*t” Factor

Friday, January 22, 2010 in 10 Commandments of Music and Social Media, Best Posts, The Power of Digital

4 Comments

Or rather, that’s the ‘Oh Sh*t, I gotta send that to my friend’ factor!

I remember a couple of years ago I was in your typical “boring” Monday morning meeting and was asked what my secret was in making a viral video as that month I had been fortunate enough to have had several successful back -to-back viral videos, so they wanted my input.  The whole room looked at me and I had to think and act quickly. The first thing that came to mind was remembering my experiences in 2001 when I worked on websites such as Playstation (Number 1, waaaay before PS3) and Liverpool Football Club (I support Arsenal but Liverpool paid well).   I realised that at the time, you were defined very much by where you clicked online. Portals like Yahoo, MSN, Breathe (showing my age here) alongside the large  companies that had a stranglehold over media/music offline, ie, BBC, MTV etc were generating traffic like it was going out of business. You went to these sites daily, added them to your bookmarks and occasionally joined their mailing lists, right? But then, things changed.

With material on the web growing very fast in terms of the speed content could be obtained as well as how much content was available, the focus shifted from ‘you are what you click’ to ‘you are what you share’…Oh, and I guess that of course the rise of use in Social Media had a huge impact on this too! Not only did it become easier to share content but having online personas which came with networks (friends) we then also had our online reputations to bare in mind too.

With this, a snowballing effect became inevitable ,which in turn gave us more ‘power’. The power shifted from companies to individuals, reaching the point of which we are accustomed to today where people are creating careers from sharing (wow, who would have thought!). A whole host of bloggers are now full time because of their opinions and content they share. Beyond that, I’ve seen part-time musicians with just a dream, getting signed off the back of people sharing their music and videos. I’ve also seen and heard of numerous companies being formed based on sharing content. Even the global brands have had to adapt to the sharing syndrome!

Back to the office scenario though and after reflecting on this shift of online power and the importance focused on online sharing, I answered my question in the most professional manner I knew;
“Err (I always say this when I’m buying time), basically you need to create the ‘Oh sh*t, I gotta send that to my friend factor”.

There was laughter in the room but my boss didn’t even grin and just answered, “Explain.”

The “Oh Sh*t, I must send that to my friend” factor is this: If you are creating content that you want others to see, ask yourself this question “If I received this, would I want to share this with my friends?”.

With the amount of emails we get daily or information forwarded on, let alone the content we may come across on a casual browse, what makes something stand out that we then want to tell everyone else about? And on top of this, there’s also our online reputations to bare in mind! This is one of the areas I always teach and it sounds simple, but can be very tricky….stop, take and second and think about it:
– What was the last thing you saw that made YOU go ‘Oh Sh*t!’
- Would it be something you’d send to your friends?
- If it was up to you to create that ‘Oh Sh*t’ factor and you had one chance to do it per day (say one Twitter update or one blog post) what would you write?

For a more detailed analysis of this “Factor”, check out chapter 3 of our 10 Commandments of Music and Social Media Ebook