I am on a lighter than my typically light posting routine because I am on vacation here in Southern Florida this week. Since I started blogging, my vacation routine of vegging in the sun for countless hours digesting the Sunday NY Times and other reading material has morphed into the same mixed with a not-too-strenuous dose of contemplating and formulating blog posts.
I’ll let you be the judge of whether the result is brilliance or perhaps sunstroke-induced.
Forbes on WPP
The April 21 issue has a great article about Martin Sorrell and WPP, the global ad and PR conglomerate. It might not be that groundbreaking for anyone who works for any of their PR properties (which include Hill & Knowlton, Ogilvy and Burston-Marsteller).
But I found it to be a fascinating story of how a bean counter built a global powerhouse – mostly through acquisition – and of how a big company can be agile and alternately balance and leverage the sometimes competing interests of its many and varied brands.
Going Viral, via Sunday NY Times
Streeter Seidell, front page editor for CollegeHumor.com, wrote an amusing and informative article last Sunday: I Waste People’s Time Online…. It speaks to the futility of guessing and predicting which online content has a chance at going viral (a subject I have blogged about quite a bit).
Each day we wade through an ocean of submitted items, selecting only 30 or so to publish. In an age when Web sites increasingly rely on complicated algorithms to rank content, we pick our stuff by hand. This very newspaper said of us in 2007, “No one can accuse this site of not understanding Web video.” So we sure seem to know what we’re doing, huh?
To be honest, though, we don’t. Nobody in the online content business truly does.
…There are certain common traits of viral content that loosely guide our selections — it should be short, easily understood, universal, nostalgic — but for every hit sharing those qualities there are millions of similar failures, not to mention stuff that simply defies explanation. A 36-second video on YouTube of a doe-eyed Japanese girl silently staring into the camera before giving the peace sign has a baffling 2.9 million views. The Internet is a strange place.
