Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

Loyal listeners of The Hopkinson Report know a few things about me:

- I never miss a week (once in the last 118 episodes)
- I love technology, being online and all things social media
- I love mountain biking (I compared the ‘flow’ of biking to a business in Episode 113)

So when I was away for the first part of my vacation while mountain biking some epic trails in Seattle, the capable Brandon Werner filled in. But then the unexpected struck when I came back to the east coast to go biking in the rocky trails of the Pocono mountains.

Photo: Happier, 2-armed times near Seattle just days before my crash

Do you believe in social media karma? No less than SEVENTY-FOUR different people wished me happy birthday on Thursday August 19th. It was great. Everyone was so happy, and people wished me the greatest day of the year!

Well, as fate would have it, my upper arm (distal humerus) would face a 3-foot high karma boulder head-on. And lose. Badly.

The next week turned into a whirlwind of hospitals, travel, surgery, second opinions, friends, family, pain, insurance red tape, and frustration before finally making it back to NYC.

My friends said that I would somehow find a way to link my broken arm to social media.

In truth? I went the opposite way.

What did NOT matter in that week, was twitter, foursquare, facebook, marketing, viral videos, podcasts, and blog posts.

What DID matter, was family, friends, coworkers, communication and old school doctors screwing a piece of metal into me to put me back together.

I will say this:
- Text updates were great for quick communication
- Facebook is a great way to post gross photos
- E-mail is a good way to tell a story once to many people (helpful with one arm)
- The iPad is a great way to kill 3 painful hours on a train

However, all this is nothing without a real world network.

So I ask you… How is YOUR real life network?

Is it healthy?

Or is it fractured?

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On this special edition of The Hopkinson Report, Jim is on vacation, so I, Brandon Werner (Intern 1.0 for long time The Hopkinson Report listeners) guest-hosts. I explain why Social Media is the new dividing factor between Generation Y and their Baby Boomer parents.

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

On Hopkinson Report Episode 102, Jim interviewed me on my research on my generation, the millennial AKA Generation Y. This group is also called the echo-boom, as they are the children of the famous Baby Boomers. Since recording that episode, I had a revelation that will be the topic of this episode.

When I was a child, I remember my parents (baby boomers/teens of the 60′s and 70′s) used to tell me stories of how their parents “just didn’t get it”. Their formative teenage years were filled with Woodstock, the anti-Vietnam movement, Nixon… These were the years of Rock ‘N Roll and there was a sharp divide between the baby boomers and their “Greatest Generation” parents.

Through my teenage years, I never really felt that level of misunderstanding between my parents and I. In fact, my parents “got-it” almost too well.  I wanted to learn drums and be in a band, my dad taught me how to do it from his own experiences, If I tried to dye my hair, my mom would show me how. The classic parent/son anti-piercing or tattoo fight? They actually encouraged them (so I didn’t really have any drive to get them). I would say I wanted to go to a Green Day concert, and my dad would ask to come with me.

From talking to my friends, this is pretty standard. Where was our rebellion or revolution?  Where was our Rock ‘N Roll? Recently, after a few failed attempts to communicate exactly what I do for a living, I think I found it. Our Rock ‘N Roll is Social Media.

As I mentioned, the big events of my parents’ formative years are immortalized as the hippie and rock movements, I look back on the last ten years and one movement sticks out plain to see, Web 2.0 and the rise of the social networks. While it is hard to imagine, Facebook has only been around for five years. In that time, it has amassed over 500 million users, half of which log in on any given day. More than half of everyone in their 20′s has a Facebook profile.

I am not exaggerating when I say it is hard to imagine life without Facebook, but it is just one site. Think about how much YouTube, for example has changed the way we watch entertainment. I believe we just witnessed a milestone in how advertising is done with the recent Old Spice man response videos. Who wasn’t talking about those? In a time where not so long ago, people were saying TIVO was going to destroy advertising, we are passing around commercials and watching them for enjoyment! These videos received 45 millions views in just 2.5 weeks, with Old Spice sales going up 107% since the campaign started. When I asked my dad what he thought, he replied “Old Spice? That was for old people…” Talk about brand transformation.

The eternal disagreement with my parents is, “why don’t you get off that computer”. They would rather me do anything other than sit at the computer, including sit and watch television. For the baby boomers, the first computer they ever learned to use was at work or maybe Atari. It is a single use tool, or even a toy. For us Millennials, we can not even remember a time before computers.  For me, sitting and just watching television is absurdly boring when I can be doing other things as well.

For me, my computer/iPad/iPhone are my television, office, bank, notebook, phone, book, canvas, post-office, etc. Try to think when was the last time you had a phone conversation for over a hour on a landline… When was the last time you stepped foot in the Post-Office? Been to a Blockbuster lately? Stood on an actual line to get tickets to a concert? How about had film developed?

Even our dating has moved online, with online matchmaking sites being one of the internet’s biggest businesses. Eharmony throws around the statistic that it is responsible for 2% of US marriages and a recent study says that up to 1 in 3 relationships today start online. Even crazier, 1 in 8 couples married in 2009 met via Social Media.

I think one of the biggest differences between generations is old friends. My parents have a tight circle of friends, but anyone they knew from high school or college that moved away from the area, they have little, if any contact with. This just sounds so alien to me. My best friends are scattered all over the country right now, but through twitter, Facebook, and texts… I have constant contact with them. Sure, its not physical, but its comforting to talk to people I have known since childhood.

I know that my parents think on some level what I do on the computer is almost akin to playing a video game. They can’t even fathom that I am actually talking to real people on Gchat, having interesting conversations on twitter, producing content that helps get my name out there, or god-forbid making money on the internet through freelance.

We are living in an absurdly exciting time. In my opinion, this could be looked back as one of the most important decades in history. We are (almost) all carrying pocket-sized computers which hold access to all of humanity’s knowledge. It’s a shame Douglas Adams died before he could see humanity with basically The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in our pockets. We are able to instantly connect us with anyone we want, even in video form. We get updated the second any important thing happens to our friends and family, and get the world news at basically the speed of light without the limitations of paper. Think about this: 150 years ago, it took the Pony Express ten days to get a letter from Missouri to San Francisco. Today, we can get a letter from Missouri to China in seconds.

From my parents, I have seen the wonder, but usually aversion to the progress that not only the internet, but the socially networked internet is bringing to the world. They are amazingly supportive of what I do with my life, but every so often things break down and they show just how much they don’t understand. Yes, I know that the largest growing group right now on Facebook is the 55+ year-olds, but for the most part, they aren’t using social media in every facet of their lives to the level the Generation-Y, Millennials are. I know there are many exceptions to what I am saying and I am sure any one listening to this podcast that is a Baby Boomer is one of those exceptions.

But I think I can safely say that Social Media is an invention forged by Millennials and younger Generation Xers.
Mark Zuckerburg founder of Facebook – 26.
Kevin Rose founder of Digg – 33.
Jack Dorsey co-founder of Twitter – 33.
David Karp founder of Tumblr – 24.

For a little comparison… When the Beatles came to America in 1964, largely regarded as one of the keystone moments in rock history, John Lennon was 24! 24! I’m 25 and I don’t think I’ve written anything as profound as Can’t Buy Me Love.

Then why this drive to spill our life and feelings out digitally in little bite-sized pieces? Well, let’s look at music’s equivalent of bite-sized spilling of life and feelings, Rock and Roll. Rock and Roll flourished in the 60’s and 70’s. For teenagers and Young Adults, it was a pretty disillusioning time. America was caught in seemingly unending war, there was a serious split between left and right political views, and the economy was in the toilet. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Like Rock, Social Media allows us to vent and feel connected to a greater whole. Like many people my age, I graduated into one of the worst economies in history with a masters and nothing to do with it. I have applied to over 150 jobs, attend meet-up groups monthly, but still have not found full-time employment. Instead of wallowing in self pity, I decided to put all my time that was not spent working on freelance or searching for full-time into jumping headfirst into Social Media, developing my own blogging collective of people in similar situations. I know I am far from the only one in my age group doing this thanks to the connections I’ve made online.

Neil Young said “Hey hey, my my, Rock and Roll will never die” and I think the same applies to Social Media. Sure it will become more and more mainstream, and one day will evolve into a part of everyone’s life. I am sure my age-group’s children will be all over it, in fact my feeds are filling with baby pictures at the moment. What I find even scarier than this is that this poor children could one day sign up for Facebook with 1,000 pictures of them already. You know those embarrassing pictures your mother shows to your friends when they visit? Oh boy…

Just as social media confuses my parents, I am sure these facebook feed babies will find something that confuses my generation.

I hate saying this. I really do. It makes me sound like a whiny brat. It makes me sound like a hippie/rocker/punk talking about their parents in the 60’s and 70’s. The millennial generation helped change the course of an election using Social Media electing the first black president, saved Conan O’Brien’s career with Team Coco, almost destroyed and then revitalized the music industry with MP3 downloading, and are completely changing the publication and advertising industries. To our generation this is exciting, this is ours, this is Rock ‘N Roll!

If you disagree with anything I said in this episode, please leave a comment below and to you I say relax, its only Social Media, but I like it, like it, yes I do.

For more of my nerdy content, check out TheModernDayPirates.com and follow me on twitter @BBwerner!

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Stop trying to make the perfect viral video, just jump on someone else’s bandwagon

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

“We want this to go viral!”

It’s a sentence that anyone that has spent time in internet marketing has heard 1,000 times. Mostly, it’s from an advertiser that doesn’t realize the cold, hard truth. It’s damn near impossible to purposely create something and make it go viral.

Sure, you can add all the elements that the internet lusts for, such as:
- Cats
- Kids
- Boobs
- Celebrities
- Getting hit in the groin

You can “seed it on Twitter.”
You can “post it on Facebook.”
You can “distribute it on YouTube.”
You can “submit it to Digg and reddit.”

But in the end, it seems the harder you try to make something go viral, the less likely that is to happen. Go ahead, throw MORE money at your viral project. That will even doom it MORE.

Which means the flip side, is that you never know when something is going to capture the imagination of the world wide web. You’re at their mercy.

What’s a smart marketer to do?

Here is a summary of what I talk about in the podcast:

It’s a lot like surfing. Forget about creating a wave, just put yourself in the position so that you’re ready when the perfect wave does come along, and then ride as far as you can until the next one shows up.

Here are the four steps to ride the viral video wave:
Recognize, Hypothesize, Capitalize, Monetize

1) Recognize
In order to ride that wave, you need to be in the right water. Sitting in a pond in Aiken County, South Carolina isn’t going to cut it. You have to head to California or Hawaii to be where the waves are.

In internet speak, some of the places where I find viral content is:
- Reddit
- Digg
- Youtube
- Twitter
- Wired
- Mashable
- Facebook
- Email

Although lets face it, if you wait until someone sends YOU something via email, it’s probably too late.

Next, you’ve got to know it when you see it.
A small list of recent internet meme examples are:
- I’m on a boat
- Epic beard man
- Kanye interrupts Taylor Swift
- Balloon boy
- Rick Roll
- Double Rainbow
- Keanu Reeves sitting on a bench
- Old Spice guy

2) Hypothesize
You can do
1. Parody video
Musicians build audience
Hitler redub

2. Photoshop
Keanu with Forrest Gump

Bonus: Combine 2 memes
Example: Balloon boy with Kanye

3) Capitalize
Check out this amazing rendition of someone that combined “I’m on a boat” meme with the “I’m in a box” balloon boy.

- Another angle is to focus on a single word or sentence from the meme and exploit that as much as possible. For example, “Amber Lamps” / Black betty from the Epic Bear Man meme:

4) Monetize

Doesn’t have to be money; can be branding
- Build your twitter or facebook list

What do you do? How do you normally make money?
- If designer, let people know how to hire you
- If musician, have your band’s website and mailing list
- If writer, it drives people to your blog
- If major website, get traffic

- YouTube – allow people to buy the song
- Create a quick tshirt store

Example 1: JK Wedding video

- 3.5 million views in first 48 hours
- Chris Brown capitalizes… his 2008 song “Forever” reached number 4 on iTunes and number 3 on Amazon.com a year later as a result of the post.
- The couple capitalizes… Today show appearance, 15 minutes of fame, $16,000 fund to end domestic violence

Example 2: Old Spice guy

Mike Relm remix
- Worked until 7AM – all nighter – to get done
- 300,000 views
- Good social media: ask fans what to remix next
- Subscribe to his channel
- You need a DJ or someone to remix something? He’s your man

BYU spoof
- 10 film students and 2 full time employees spent a month on a 54 second remix
- About the BYU library?
- Film project

Example 3: Bed Intruder

Starts off with a scary topic. News report that an intruder came in through a window and broke into a woman’s apartment in the projects and tried to rape her. She managed to fight him off, then her brother came in and defended her.

This was the top story on reddit, and for the first 30 seconds, I couldn’t figure out why. Then Antoine Dodson started to talk. It would be easy to say, oh, this is just a poor African-American from the projects in Alabama, he’s going talk in ebonics and say something stupid we can all laugh at. But it was more than that. He was animated, passionate, and dare I say, funny?

Original video:

The comments on the reddit post were great, and then someone said the immortal words, “Someone should AutoTune this.”

Acting fast, the kings of Auto-Tune, The Gregory Brothers, produced not just one of the best parody videos of all time, but I honestly can say one of the best produced and catchiest songs I’ve heard since Justin Timberlake’s “Blank in a box.”

Go ahead and make fun of me, but I have that song on my iPod (if you replaced the lyrics with anything else, it still be a great song), and jumping right to the monetize portion, I also bought the “Bed Intruder” Auto-Tune song from iTunes for $1.29.

The Gregory Brothers hit a grand slam
- They acted fast, turning around the video in hours
- They produced something that was incredibly high quality
- They persistently, but no obnoxiously, inserted links to the original video, their YouTube page, and links to buy, updating it frequently as things changed
- They monetized through iTunes
- 2.5 million views and accounting

But I shouldn’t be surprised. I interviewed The Gregory Brothers on The Hopkinson Report Episode 80, and they were funny, talented, and super smart.

Here is the video.  Wait until you hear the piano solo at the end.

But then something even greater happened. Everyone ELSE got on the wave.

Aspiring musicians around the world gave their rendition of the song. I collected the best ones for you. I present you:

The Best Antoine Dodson / Bed Intruder / Gregory Brothers Parody Videos

1 acoustic blues

2 backup vocal remix

3 funky acoustic

4 young girl a capella

5 rocker dude acoustic

6 beatbox

7 accordion

8 rocker dude lipsync

What did I do with them? I posted the list on reddit.

You know, in hopes that my link would go viral… (no such luck so far)

—-
Follow me on twitter

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Do you have “computer skills” listed on your resume? Get rid of it, it’s obsolete! I explain in this week’s podcast, or the blog post below.

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

Over the weekend, I met with a person I’m mentoring. She went to the same college as I did, found me through our alumni network, and wanted to talk about her next job and look over her resume.

One of the things that I saw on there that was interesting, was a section called “Computer Skills.”

I went through each of the items and called her on it:
- Adobe Bridge Software?
What is that? Is it important? No. Take it off.
- iMac basic programming?
You mean, you used an iMac computer and did some things? She nodded hesitantly. I asked her, do you REALLY know how to program? She shook her head no. Gone.
- Datanet and Filemaker?
OK, so you used these programs to maintain some files. But are you an expert at it and did you really use them all the time? Not really.
- Google Apps
I don’t mind that it’s on there, but she already used it earlier in the resume, so that one gets removed as well.
- Lastly, Microsoft Office
You graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science degree. You live in New York City. You speak French and Italian.  You’ve managed to send me your resume converted into a PDF. Proving you know Office is pretty much understood.

So that got me to wondering.

For anyone that graduated with a Bachelors degree from the year 2000 and beyond, is the “computer skills” section of your resume completely obsolete?

And if the answer is yes, what goes in its place?

To answer that, we have to go old school for a minute. This is when having myself as your Generation X host comes in handy.

Need I remind you, I graduated in 1991, when there were NO cell phones, NO internet, NO email, and Photoshop 2.0 had just been released. For those keeping score, the concept of Photoshop layers wouldn’t be invented for 5 more years, and they’re basically up to version 12 now.

In my junior year Microsoft Windows 3.0 had just been released, along with Office version 1.0.

Social media? Ha!  Mark Zuckerberg was 7.

So as someone that legitimately graduated with a degree in Computer Information Systems, putting a “Computer Skills” section on your resume really meant something.

When I started doing most of the hiring for the multimedia startup I worked for in 1994, it was a real challenge to determine which people had true computer skills, and which had played a few hundred games of Solitaire on their computer and claimed they knew Windows.

Thus, I came up with a computer test that I gave during interviews to see how people shaped up. It became legendary around the office, as no candidate had ever received a perfect score.

What’s interesting is back then, typing speed was a huge differentiator. You could sit in the conference room with someone in their brand new suit and listen to them smoothly talk about their tech skills, but when you sat them down in front of a keyboard and asked them to drill down into a subdirectory and alt-tab to another open application, you knew right away.

Dug into the archives and actually found my resume from 12 years ago:

Computer skills on my 1998 resume:
HTML, JavaScript, Macromedia Director, Flash, & Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop & Premiere, Allaire HomeSite, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, SoundForge, InstallShield, Active Movie (MPEG), Video for Windows (AVI), Microsoft Office

Quite the list, right? Several of those are still relevant, but can you imagine listing a web browser as a computer skill these days? No.

Now it’s 2010, and I’m here to argue that “computer skills” are obsolete, and what is more important are “social media skills.” So how do I propose you address this new category?

Here are 7 things you can do to create a modern social media resume:

1) Your resume should be in the following formats:
- Created in Word or a graphics design program. Please, divert from the template at least a little bit… change the font, add some color, something.
- Save it in PDF format. This should be how you distribute it.
- Have a version that is able to be embedded in an email. If someone can’t get attachments, you may lose your chance. Note that you’ll need to go through and re-format bullets, lines, colors, italics and sizes, and replace with caps, asterisks, and spacing.
- Updated and accurate on LinkedIn.com

2) Depending on your job, you might need to list out skills. But if that’s the case, it’s probably not “computer skills.”
- If you’re listing things that I call “lots of letters” such as C++, HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, SQL … those should be under programming languages or coding skills.
- If you’re listing programs such as SPSS and MPlus, those are market research skills, not generic computer skills

3) Integrate these skills into your resume bullet points.
- When you say that you “Concatenated the quarterly earnings report into multi-tabbed color-coded pivot tables in Excel,” they’re going to assume you can find your way around a spreadsheet
- When you say you’ve created more than 50 animated banner ads, adhering to client and company specifications and optimized them for the corporate ad server, they get the point that you know Photoshop
- If you’re a sales rep and use salesforce.com or some similar program, put that under a bullet point and not out on it’s own

4) Really emphasize it
- This might be best in a cover letter or during an interview, but if you really really are an expert, feel free to have a little fun with it. Say that you’re so obsessed with Excel, that you also used that multi-tabbed, color-coded, pivot table spreadsheet template to plan your wedding.
- Or if you’re a book editor, say that you spend 20-30 hours per week using Microsoft Word’s “track changes” feature to easily communicate and collaborate with authors what suggestions you have for them

5) Replace “Computer Skills” with “Social Media Skills”
The key here is that if you list it, you better back it up. If you do it correctly, however, it can have a great effect. I can picture the following entry on a modern resume:

Social Media Skills
- Skilled in using web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues
- Fostered the creation and exchange of user-generated content to build value and brand loyalty for my company and reach influential consumers
- Actively maintain a personal Facebook account with more than 500 networking connections, providing a 2-way multimedia conversation: Facebook.com/yourname
- Build a loyal group of 1,300 Twitter fans in just 18 months, providing value, learning from industry experts, and staying current with technology: Twitter.com/yourname
- Explore the latest geolocation technology with Foursquare, connecting with online friends in the real world: foursquare.com/yourname
- Created an online video project using Final Cut Pro for my Team In Training charity group, spreading the word virally and totaling 3,300 hits: youtube.com/yourname
- Embraced my love for photography by uploading more than 400 photos on Flickr, including licensing some for distribution under creative commons; “Central Park at Dawn” photo has been used on 11 blogs and has 124 comments

6) Prove it in a portfolio
I feel that nearly every job-seeker out there – not just marketing or creatives – can benefit by putting together a portfolio.
- Were you just the lowly entry-level person checking names at the door at the big corporate gala? Well, I’m sure that event had a slick-looking invite or web page that you could print out to serve as a talking point for your contribution.
- Are you trying for your next accounting job in the finance department? Bring along one of your well-organized spreadsheets, showing how neatly you organize your numbers and graphs (changing any private company data)
- Bragging about your Powerpoint prowess? Throw in several example slides from your last few projects, using it as a talking point for why you chose the layout, the font, and the imagery

7) Prove it digitally
- It has the chance to backfire, but a well-produced video introduction will also go a long way to distinguish yourself from the competition (How NOT to do it below).

- The resume of the future will take place on the web. If you don’t own your name as a URL, grab it right now. Name taken? Try YourNameResume.com
Check out this as great example from Rohit Bhargava.
- Better yet, have you ever spoken at an event, done a podcast, or given a great presentation? Communication skills are paramount in the business world. If you can prove it, you can nail it.
- Are you a designer? How about presenting your resume or your latest project as a colorful Infographic?

(Graphic copyright JeffMcNeill via Flickr)
- Lastly, I’m proud that two of my former interns recently used a portfolio on the iPad during an interview to showcase what they’ve done. It shows they’re up on the latest technology, and it looked tremendous.

So to sum up, go ahead and drop that heading of “Computer Skills” from your resume and do one or more of the following:

1. Create your resume in multiple formats
2. If you do have a lot of specific skills, they can probably filed under programming skills or design skills or another category
3. Integrate these skills into your resume bullet points
4. If you’re a true expert and are going to list it, really emphasize it
5. Replace “Computer Skills” with “Social Media Skills”
6. Prove it in a portfolio
7. Prove it digitally

Doing so well set yourself apart in the digital age. Good luck.

The latest addition of WIRED magazine app on the iPad is out. You like Will Ferrell? Well, there are exclusive videos of him – only on the iPad, so be sure to check it out. As always, thanks for reading/listening.

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While I think that I bring lots of energy and passion to my podcast, and am usually pretty articulate, I’ve never pretended that I have a great “radio voice.” Well, that distinction is made even clearer when you listen to my guest Matt Walters, a professional voiceover actor.

This podcast is truly a “must listen.”

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

Everyone likes to quote the opening movie line with the gravel-voiced actor belting out “In a world…” but in reality, the people behind the success of movie trailers, commercial reads, and cartoon voices don’t get the recognition that they deserve.

This week I speak with Matt Walters, and he gives some great tips for getting into the business, how he got his start, and some hysterical examples of how my tagline could be read.

Topics we discuss:
- The interesting (and somewhat deceptive) way Matt got his start by defying stereotypes and pulling a “Karate Kid” move
- The process of getting an agent and breaking into the business
- Techniques for getting ready and warming up
- What happens when you get a nasal cold
- The different way a voiceover actor watches TV

Check out Matt’s voiceover reel:

We then talk about the godfather of voiceover, Don LaFontaine. Reading his wikipedia page, and watching a video tribute to him, you realize how amazing this guy was. Can you believe he’s done more than 5,000 movie trailers and hundreds of thousands of TV ads and promotions?

We also talk about whether it’s better to have a big part in a small movie, or in his case, a small part in a big movie. Matt played Owen Wilson’s work friend in Marley and Me (also starring Jennifer Aniston).

Additionally, he achieved the rite of passage for every New York-based actor, landing a role on Law and Order.

Lastly, he played a mop-topped Paul McCartney for a Comedy Central promotion for Beatles Rock Band.

See Matt’s appearances:

But we weren’t done there. Matt was kind enough to indulge me and say “You’re listening to the Hopkinson Report podcast” in the following accents:
- British
- Irish
- Boston
- New York

It was quite entertaining. So if you’re looking for advice about getting into the business, looking to improve your podcasting skills and pick up a few tricks, check out the podcast.

Learn more about Matt Walters on his website.

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A new movie about Facebook is coming out this fall called The Social Network. I give you 7 reasons why I think it will be a huge success.

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

Today in the podcast I talk about the 7 reasons people with “LIKE” the Facebook movie. Get it? Like??? Luckily, the rest of the podcast is not that cheesy. Here is the outline of topics I cover:

1) A built-in audience of 500 million fans
With just the sheer number of people ON Facebook, how can this thing NOT make money? It was announced July 21 that Facebook had officially passed Five Hundred Million worldwide users.

- Let’s see… how could they market this… um, how about with Facebook ads?
- College kids are going to see this… they came of age during the Facebook era and lived it.
- Social media geeks are going to see this… it’s like Sex and the City for nerds
- Other non-geeks that don’t know the full story will see it
- Millions will see it just out of curiosity

2) Social media/word of mouth/bloggers
What’s the best way to get lots of people to see your movie?
Word of mouth marketing.
And no site on the web is better equipped to spread the word than Facebook.

We are consumed with it.
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- The average user has 130 friends

If even a small fraction of the first people to see it shares it with their 130 friends, the word of mouth viral marketing will be like the Old Spice guy on crack.

BUT

Word of mouth only works if it’s a GOOD movie. Bad word of mouth spreads too. So, do we have any indicators to see if it will actually be a GOOD movie? Well, we can start by looking at the pedigrees of the creators:

3) Aaron Sorkin, writer
- He did the West Wing, a show that I’ve heard was amazing, but I never really watched. But 7 years on the air and dozens of awards can’t be bad.
- He also did A Few Good Men, a film that grossed $141,000,000 in the US alone. Did the film do well because Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jack Nicholson were in it? Or did those stars take the role because it was a strong script?
- He also did Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. This was a show that not a lot of people saw (it was canceled after one season due to ratings), but I actually watched every episode and loved it. The dialog was excellent.

4) David Fincher, director
- He did the movie Se7en, not a bad flick
- He also did Fight Club, which the “reddit.com movie critic” subreddit section thinks is one of the best all time
- He was a Best Director nominee for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. While I thought this movie was very good (but not great… and WAY too freaking long), it grossed $127MM domestic.

5) Ben Mezrich, author of the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal
- Mezrich’s pedigree? He wrote book Bringing Down the House, which was made into the movie “21.” That movie made $158MM worldwide, $81 million in the US on a budget of $35MM.

6) Justin Timberlake with a permJust seeing him with that hair is comedy enough. But consider his fan base as well:
- 55 million albums sold with N’Sync
- 9 million albums sold as a solo artist
- Hugely popular guest on Saturday Night Live (I can definitely see him hosting to plug the movie)
- A crossover star in fashion… now doing commercials
- Hugely wide appeal (Notice everyone blames Janet Jackson and never him for the Super Bowl incident)

[Honorable mention for Trent Reznor, who I forgot to mention in the podcast. He is doing the musical score for the entire movie, and has a huge base both as a solo artist and from Nine Inch Nails]

7) Haters
This movie will have a ton of buzz just because it will become cool to NOT like the movie. People will want to hate it, because we’re already starting to see evidence of Facebook overload.

- It’s going to be similar to Apple. Do some people hate Apple? Yes. Do they call the supporters Fanboys? Yes. Does it stop millions of people from lining up days in advance to buying every product? No.

- Mark Zuckerberg is not entirely happy with the movie (he “expressed distaste“)

- Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Facebook had the following to say about The Social Network (I paraphrased a bit)

“It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter and leaves out things that really did. Other than that, it’s just cool to see a dramatization of history. A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.”

- The anti-movie spoofs have begun:

So to sum up, not everyone is going to be “a fan” of the movie, but I think enough people will “like” it for it to crack $125MM with ease.

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Today I’m going to talk about a concept that stems from a single word called “flow.” I’m not going to get too deep or spiritual with you, but I think it’s a very important state of mind to recognize and strive for, both in your life and in your work.

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

It’s approaching August here in New York City, which means it’s hot as hades, things are starting to slow down a bit, and in the next few weeks, both the city itself and the offices around town empty out as people end the summer with much-needed vacations before cranking things back up post Labor Day.

Quick flashback on my life … I lived in Seattle for 3 years and just about every Thursday after work when the weather was good, friends and I would head to a trail called Tiger Mountain just outside downtown to go mountain biking. It was the perfect release after 4 rough days of work, with a brutal 40 minute uphill climb the second you left the parking lot, followed by a 45 minute descent through rocks, roots, and flowing singletrack trails. On the weekends we’d venture further from the city and find other amazing trails. It was some of the best times of my life.

Needless to say, life changes pretty quickly in the concrete jungle of Manhattan. Gone were the days of throwing the bike on the roof rack of the car on a whim and being on a trail in under an hour.  Now my mountain bike adventures are few and far between.

It wasn’t until last holiday season that I rented a mountain bike for a day while in Santa Monica, CA and hit a half decent trail that I truly remembered how much I loved biking. I immediately pledged to do a more formal trip this summer, and that’s what is in the works now, piggybacking a visit back to Seattle to bike again and then on to Durango, CO for hopefully some of the best biking in the U.S.

The day after the details came together, I was listening to the Adam Carolla Podcast and Adam was talking about a dream he had. He told how he flashed back to when he was younger and playing baseball as a centerfielder. He meticulously described a scene where a ball is hit and immediately at the crack of the bat, you’re turning and sprinting toward the wall because you know it’s over your head. You’re completely in the zone, looking back over your shoulder to spot the ball, adjusting on the fly, tracking it down, and everything immediately comes together and you make the catch.

During this time, there’s no way you’re thinking about your mortgage, or the fight you had with your wife, or the rude person at the airport. Your body takes over on instinct and you’re in the zone.

While I’ve certainly heard of being in the zone for sports, his sidekick Teresa Strasser jumped in and gave one of the best supporting information I think she’s ever done, talking about the psychological state of “flow.”

Like being in the zone, it’s a state that your mind blocks out all the foreign disruptors, from problems at home to the fans screaming at the top of their lungs. But she also mentioned that it’s more than that — there needs to be several factors present.

Let me note that many of the definitions below are taken from Wikipedia so I’ll let them take it from here…

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (MEE-hye CHICK-sent-me-high-ee | photo via his Facebook fan page), he identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:

1. Clear goals
2. A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback.
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it)
10. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

By complete coincidence, while on his wiki page, turns out Csíkszentmihályi did an interview with Wired back in 1996, talking about flow in terms of website design.

I immediately understood that this was why I loved mountain biking (and for that matter skiing and driving the perfect car on the perfect twisty road) so much. It’s a very different activity versus lying on the beach or watching a movie or doing a very difficult crossword puzzle.

The reason is because it’s not necessarily an easy activity. You get a feeling of accomplishment because you are exerting effort and skill to achieve something. Yet, once you get decent at it, it’s not an activity that is so difficult that it causes you to have anxiety.

What’s more, as you speed down the mountain on a challenging trail, you are constantly – constantly! – racing your mind at a mile a minute calculating your next move. It’s bang bang bang:

- Look ahead
- See the obstacle
- Pick a line
- Make the adjustment
- Repeat.

Let’s look at what other activities are associated with achieving flow:

Sports – From the greatest players in basketball to the best golfers in the world, many describe being in the zone when the basket or the cup seems so large that you just can’t miss. Baseball players see the baseball coming at them as a floating beachball and not a 98mph fastball. Marathoners talk of a ”runners’s high” when the pavement melts away and you feel like you can run for miles.

Arts – Wikipedia says that Historical sources hint that Michelangelo may have painted the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel while in a flow state. It is reported that he painted for days at a time, and he was so absorbed in his work that he did not stop for food or sleep until he reached the point of passing out. He would wake up refreshed and, upon starting to paint again, re-entered a state of complete absorption.

Music – Every band will tell you that the goal is to get everyone “in the pocket,” when every member is acting as one, anticipating each other’s direction, nailing every note and transition, syncing up bass and drums, and moving from one song to the next. Also from Wikipedia, lyricists (particularly hip-hop Emcees) who freestyle experience flow when formulating rhymes off the top of his or her head. This is commonly known in hip-hop culture as “flowing”.

Alas, my writing flow has been broken a bit and I need to steer this some sort of marketing angle. But that’s ok, I’m on a roll.

Business

Is there such a thing as your business and marketing plans entering a state of flow? I believe there is. Wrangling all the elements of social media is certainly a challenge for any marketing manager. On Wired alone I can think of 11 elements:

Magazine, website, iPad, podcasts, video, newsletters, emails, mobile, Facebook, Twitter, and live events.

How can you hope to sync them all? That is your goal. It’s important to remember that all of the things I’ve listed perform different functions. The voice you bring on Facebook is different than that on your newsletters and on Twitter. It is a mistake to try and bring absolute uniformity. That would be like trying to keep your elbows and knees at a 45 degree angle at all times while biking.

No, what you need to do is look at the ultimate goal. In biking, it’s getting down the mountain in one piece while having the maximum amount of fun. In marketing, it’s representing your product according to the goals you want to achieve.

That means your logo and color scheme should be similar across all platforms. That means the voice of all your writers and editors should be aligned. And that means whether a customer experiences your product on the web or on twitter, they feel at home with the brand.

Life

Lastly, I’ll leave you with the hope that you can find your flow in life. That comes when the elements of your career, relationships, health, wealth, work, play, and the environment in which you live all come together.

Have a great summer.

I hope you enjoy the 10-30 minutes when I get into my podcast flow each week, and if you do, please tell your friends to visit TheHopkinsonReport.com.

Let me know how YOU find your flow. Write me marketing guy @ wired.com

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This podcast was recorded on Tuesday July 6, 2010, and it was a historic day for Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Superstar LeBron James. No, it was not the day that he announced which team he was going to via free agency. It was the day that LeBron joined Twitter.

Let’s look at the lessons learned from LeBron James’ first day on Twitter.

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

1) Major brands need to engage in social media

Let’s face it, LeBron James is a brand. He is worth millions, is recognized worldwide, and generates revenue and profits on everything from ticket sales to merchandise. Until now, he has poked fun at Twitter, but he has finally broken down and signed up. Any major brand looking to engage with fans that does not have a social media presence does so at their own peril.

2) Your social circle strongly influences your decisions

What is the goal of nearly every company’s marketing department? To build a product with strong word-of-mouth marketing. Did you start using Google or Facebook because you saw a TV commercial about them? No. You found out about them because someone you know said “Hey, you need to check this out.”

A person that does this consistently, finding the newest products and spreading the word to multiple people is called an early adopter and a hyper-influencer. If you don’t follow basketball, you might not know who Chris Paul is. Well, he’s another NBA superstar and good friend of LeBron, and it was he that finally convinced LeBron to create an account. It’s this kind of marketing – trusted, and free – that helps spread the word.

3) If you build it, they will come

If you build a strong user base and have a brand that people love, true fans will want to associate with you. Once word of LeBron’s Twitter account surfaced, the followers came rolling in. He became a trending topic, and went from 0 to roughly 200,000 followers in less than 24 hours.

4) If the content is there, design can wait

The reason I believe this was a spur-of-the-moment decision by James, and not something entirely crafted by his PR team – despite the fact that the NBA is advertising on Twitter – is that he didn’t immediately add a “corporate friendly” Twitter background. Personally, I feel this would have been quite easy to do, as I’m sure he has hundreds of graphics and backgrounds to select from various marketing campaigns. It also would have added a better first impression to the tens of thousands of people signing up today. But there it was, his brand new account with the vanilla, generic, baby-blue, default background. Just like anyone else’s first day.

5) Have something to say

The timing couldn’t be better for LeBron, as this is the most anticipated NBA announcement of the last few years. Even the most casual fan of the league probably clicked the follow button today. Additionally, the link on his twitter page goes to his LeBronJames.com website, which is also in the early stages and appears to be yet another way for users to get LeBron information.

On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that if you’re a company you should wait until you have a product to announce to create a social media presence. In fact, if you create a Twitter account and then immediately jump on and start talking about how people can buy your products, without providing value first, your new media efforts will most likely fail.

6) Be authentic

While reading articles when the story first broke but before the account was verified (great job by Twitter for acting quickly and verifying the account), I came across a sentence that made me grimace. It said something to the effect of “It is unclear whether LeBron will be tweeting for himself or if he will have a team tweeting for him.”

Perhaps it’s that it has been drilled into our heads as a best practice in my 3+ years enveloped in all things social media, but it’s amazing that this is even a question anymore. I think Shaquille O’Neal said it best when talking about rapper 50 Cent being outed for not writing his own tweets, “It’s 140 characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”

So it was refreshing to see LeBron’s first tweet, which was clearly written by him.  As a stickler for grammar and punctuation, I would point out inconsistent capitalization, incorrect use of quotations, and both a misplaced and missing period.  But at least he did a lot better than Oprah’s first tweet, in which she basically made up the word “Twitters” and effectively YELLED AT ALL HER FOLLOWERS by using ALL CAPS, a gross violation of internet etiquette (and also misplaced 2 periods, what’s up with that?).

However, I’m willing to forgive the typos because a) he only has a high school education, and b) because it’s his voice. For example, although I understood the context of the term “gas’d,” I jumped over to the Urban Dictionary to try and get some more insight (not very helpful).

Also impressive was his @ reference to his friend Chris Paul. Maybe he had someone looking over his shoulder and helping, but including Paul’s twitter handle (@oneandonlycp3) in the message equates to a public “thank you” for helping him trying something new, and I’m sure garnered Paul several thousand new fans as well.

7) Control your message

LeBron has been surrounded by a constant media frenzy from his high school years until today. Every move has been documented and every TV and radio station, newspaper, and website has taken his words and actions and interpreted them to the world. Creating his own Twitter account allows LeBron to speak directly 1:1 with his fans.

However, like Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.
- A tweet sent near gametime will get him in trouble with the NBA [policy]
- A message sent in anger criticizing the refs will get him fined [Dallas owner Mark Cuban was fined $25,000 in 2009]
- A piece of information released too early could cause trust issues [Player Kevin Love tweeted that coach Kevin McHale was out as coach before the team announced it publicly]
- Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of internet public opinion

Day 2 and beyond

I have no doubt that LeBron will try out this new social media toy for the next few days, including announcing which team he will be going to. I’m sure the league will remind him of the rules, his PR team will snazzy up the page like his buddy Chris Paul (below), his Nike reps will make sure the brand is represented jusssst right, and he’ll learn a little etiquette from Shaq and his other pals. That’s the easy part.

But the true test will be the weeks and months to come. Will he embrace this new communication platform and provide the consistency and content that his fans crave once the shine has worn off?

Just like his NBA plans, we’ll have to wait and see.

Game on.

[I've had a Twitter account for quite awhile now, with more than 2,200 followers and 1,500 tweets sent. I talk about marketing trends, tweet when there’s a new podcast that goes live each week, but also provides value by sharing links I think you’ll like and insights into my personal life. Check it out at twitter.com/hopkinsonreport.]

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Jim’s guest is Deanna Zandt, author of a social media book. They talk about how she got a book deal, raised money to fund it, and how she got free pizza.

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

Deanna Zandt is the author of the new book, “Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking” which you can find out more about at her website, DeannaZandt.com.

During our interview, we talk about the following topics:
- How the former corporate employee and self-proclaimed ‘webmonkey’ went from independent consultant to author
- The process she took to turn her training seminars into a book idea
- The “Jedi Mind Trick” philosophy her publisher uses, and how she used “the force” of social media to raise funds in order to work on her book
- How she used crowdsourcing on everything from the title to the cover — and how people reacted to it
- The free software program she used to dramatically ramp up her productivity during the writing process

And yes, she explains how she scored a free eye exam and free pizza along the way.

Give a listen.

Twitter: Deanna | HopkinsonReport

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Jim interviews top podcaster Adam Carolla, talking about his new format, podcast revenue models, and portable dishwashers.

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

For years we’ve praised the concept of “time-shifting” as a unique advantage of today’s digital media. No longer are we forced into a do-or-die option of being present at a live event or face the consequences of missing it completely.

We can use a DVR to record a World Cup game in the morning for viewing later that day, stream Saturday Night Live on our laptop via Hulu on Sunday morning, and forgo commercial-filled drive-time morning radio in lieu of an iPod’s worth of our favorite podcasts.

Since his live morning radio show was canceled in February 2009, that’s exactly what entertainer Adam Carolla (Loveline, The Man Show, Crank Yankers, Dancing with the Stars) has done. He’s amassed an army of loyal listeners that have downloaded The Adam Carolla Podcast millions of times, making his show a mainstay at the top of the iTunes charts.

But now he is “getting the band back together” and attempting to combine the best of both worlds. He’s brought back nearly the entire staff from his former radio program, including news co-host Teresa Strasser, producers, announcers, and even sound effects wizard “Bald Bryan,” who is able to insert his comical sound bites into the podcast on the fly.

However, in an interesting turn away from time-shifted content, Carolla’s goal is to get people to tune in daily to keep up with current events, essentially creating a drive-time morning show via podcast.

The format allows him to avoid long commercial breaks, escape the watchful eye of both program directors and the FCC, and do what he does best – rant at will on any given topic – packing the show into 90 minutes vs. the four hours of live drive time. The plan is to record the topical shows late in the afternoon or evening, so that they are ready for download each morning.

Will the new format be a hit with fans? And just as important, can he generate enough revenue to keep everyone happy? It’s hard to bet against him given his success thus far.

I sat down with Carolla in New York City while he was in town promoting another of his myriad of projects — with more and more of them venturing into the realm of social media — a user-generated video contest called the Klondike Everyman Challenge.

As a fellow podcaster that also enjoys weaving heavy doses of pop culture into the conversation, I brought up a unique similarity that we both shared: our families both owned ugly, hulking portable dishwashers in the 70s. This set off a classic Carolla rant that users have become accustomed to, reflecting back on his cheap parents and meager upbringing in North Hollywood.

On the topic of generating revenue, Carolla has been fearless in trying new ventures. While the daily show is entirely free to download, he urges listeners to support the program in one of several ways.

Revenue streams for the Adam Carolla Podcast:
- An archive 2-disc DVD box set of the entire first year of digitally mastered downloads (“We sold a few thousand”)
- A store with t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, and stickers
- Pay-to-download for a select few podcast episodes
- Short pre-recorded and “live read” ads before and during the show, covering products as diverse as flowers for Mothers Day, souped up computers, BBQ grill accessories, and adult movies.
- Live, in-person performances in LA and other cities

So when I ask him what source has been most successful, he responds that any individual tactic isn’t a lot of money, but you start to get a cumulative effect with multiple sources of income.

Without missing a beat, he says, “You know, you add them all together and in the end you’re still broke, but eventually you have enough to afford one of those portable washing machines.”

Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:

Also see: Episode 47: Thoughts on Adam Carolla, Bill Simmons, and more

Interesting photo credits:
Yellow dishwasher: “Jeremy” successfully selling it for $40 on “Nova Scotia Classifieds” in 2007.
Connector hose: “FantasyGoat” on gigposters.com, using it as part of his still when creating homemade moonshine.

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