Jennifer Aniston’s Sex Tape

Made you look didn’t I?

That’s exactly what Smart Water is going for in their newest video, a two minute and forty-six second long sarcastic take on the “viral video” phenomenon that continues to grow almost daily. Looking through the comments for the video a lot of people think Smart Water is trying too hard with this, but I disagree. Why? Read below:

1) Viral Video isn’t going away – this video takes jabs at the concept of videos going viral because of a few “essential” types of humor or sex appeal (if you haven’t watched the video yet, you’ll see what I mean).

2) Talking about viral video IN a viral video will MAKE it go viral – If you disagree, then look at your Twitter feed or the trending tweets of the day and it’s obvious that Twitter itself is one of the most popular topics ON Twitter. The same goes for Facebook. It has been shown (will attempt to find the source, it’s from a webinar that I have to find)  that posts that mention Facebook in some way will actual reach more users and will be more successful if the post is on Facebook. The same people that post comments that disapprove of the video are the same ones showing their friends how “bad” the video is…but they are helping it go viral at the same time they are complaining about it.

3) Jennifer Aniston is still incredibly attractive – if I need to explain more here…well, I’m not going to explain why that makes the video better.

4) So few companies have the cojones to attempt a video like this – a video like this is rare. Yes, similar things have been done before to help a company gain “free” advertising by producing a viral video…but for every success there are hundreds, if not thousands, of videos that fail. Smart Water succeeded because it made a video longer than the usual viral video advertisement, chose to be direct yet cynical in their humor and attitude within the video, and risked a total failure but instead succeeded.

5) The line “I can’t just do that” symbolizes the complete evolution of advertising in the modern world – Not being able to “just say” why a product is great is exactly where we have ended up. Social media and viral video has made it impossible to advertise a product just by saying why the product is good. In order to succeed you need to have more content. No, you don’t have to have physical pain, adorable dogs, or lip-syncing child YouTube celebrities in order to succeed…but you need some sort of intangible that will get people TALKING about your advertisement. Think of it this way, the Super Bowl has always had commercials that people talk about for the next couple weeks. Well, now advertisers need to make Super Bowl calibur advertisements an every day thing…like Smart Water has done.

I just don’t see where Smart Water has done anything wrong here, or done something that can be seen as “trying too hard.” They didn’t try to create a video that ripped off a successful campaign, or even tried to produce their own original viral content. They simply called out everything that is true about the modern state of advertising and the internet. I see nothing wrong with that, and I personally believe that this is a job well done.

What do you think? Is this video a reach or a hit? Post thoughts in the comments. Would you have tried anything different?

I will never use Google again

This summer was when I first started really getting into all things social, beyond Facebook that is. I joined Twitter just this past June (sent my 1,000th Tweet today, btw), and signed up for LinkedIn, a host of Twitter clients, Quora (within the first few weeks of it’s beta release I believe), and many other sites that were, or still are, startups trying to get into the game even more recently than that. However, the best online discovery I made was no social tool, it was a search engine…called DuckDuckGo.

Now before you laugh at the somewhat childish nickname, go check it out. Give it one full day of trying it out and I guarantee you never go back to your previous search engine. This little engine that could emphasizes user privacy (“Google tracks you. We don’t” it claims on it’s About page), this privacy mission is explained in detail here (pictures included!), at the aptly named donttrack.us website. While promoting user privacy, it also makes searching almost too easy. How so you ask? Read on:

First, it has this little feature called Zero-click Info that gives you a snippet of information about what you’re searching for without you having to click through to a result. For example, this is what comes up when you search for James Cameron’s Avatar:

Keep playing with it and it also allows you to search things like the distance from Atlanta, GA to Columbus, OH (any cities, states, or countries will do…that’d just the route I travel most often). Why go to some website when you get this:

Next, the “Goodies” (c’mon, how can you argue against a search engine that advertises it’s ‘goodies’ on their homepage and not mean something explicit?) the site offers are incredible, and got me to switch over from Google. The !bang syntax, something I’ve never seen done on any website before, is it’s most useful feature. It allows you to search hundreds of websites directly, without wasting time going to the actual website and typing into the search bar. So, for example, imagine you want to search for…Youtube’s #1 total views leader, Lady Gaga. All you have to do is type in “!youtube lady gaga” in the search bar and you will immediately be brought to this page. Simple right?

**Helpful tip** If you’re using Google Chrome, set your default search engine to DuckDuckGo and now whenever you want to search popular sites like Youtube or Facebook, all you need to do is use the !bang syntax in your URL bar at the top of the browser and Bang! (yes, yes I did) you’re at the results in less than a second. If you ever thought that it doesn’t take much time to go to a site, find the search bar, then search the site….welcome to the world of DuckDuckGo.

The last great feature of the site is that it allows you to type in something like “Simpsons characters” and will return something actually helpful, unlike what Google will give you:

An alphabetical list of Simpson's Characters = helpful

VS.

The one true con of the site (impressive, compared to the many pros) is that it is not 100% independent yet. The image search still uses Google Images as it’s resource, and links you to the Google Images results page whenever you search for a picture. Once this site becomes fully independent and provides this service on its own (if this does ever happen, I don’t see a need right now to change anything), this site will be complete.

Give DuckDuckGo a try, I bet you’ll end up sticking with it. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Business E-Cards: The Natural Next Step?

I may be completely out of touch and be posting about this way too late, but are business cards in the form of quick videos the next step? I’ve heard of video resumes before, but with the natural progression of business card becoming more socially oriented (check out these social media friendly business cards) this does seem like a very easy next step that should take off. What do you guys think? Check out the video below for Emma McKee’s video business card.

Anybody else think this is going to catch on? Because I think it will be huge in the coming months. The amount of content you can post in a 15 second video is limitless compared to what you can put on a physical business card. With internet capable phones and tablets becoming more mainstream, these cards are still “carried” around without being a physical copy. Not only is contact info easily displayable, but also how talented of a designer, videographer, visionary, photographer, etc you are all on your business “card.”

Any good ideas with what is capable in this new phenomenon?