The “Make It Seven” Soundtrack

At the start of this week, I posted a song/video to YouTube as a bit of an experiment. The song was written with a band I play with called The GMOs. I often joke that some guys play “beer league hockey”, while The GMOs are a “beer league band”. We wrote the song on Thursday night in support of the “Make It Seven” campaign (www.makeitseven.ca) that is working to bring a seventh NHL franchise to Canada. I recorded the song in my basement studio on Monday morning, and posted a PowerPoint slideshow video to YouTube later that afternoon. By Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to be everywhere.



I must admit that I saw this song/video as a potential experiment in content distribution via social media. The message is extremely relevant to many, and the launch was very timely since a major court decision was scheduled for Tuesday to determine the fate of the campaign. My theory with social media (or any media, for that matter) is that relevancy of the message is critical – without a strong and relevant story, nobody will engage the communication, let alone internalize it.

The “Make It Seven” experiment proved to be far more successful than I ever could have anticipated. The song/video was posted directly to the official “Make It Seven” website (www.makeitseven.ca) and the “Make It Seven” Facebook fan site on Tuesday morning (as opposed to posting a YouTube link). Communication blasts immediately went out to all site members (155,000 at makeitseven.ca, and 23,000 on Facebook). While these sites surely received the bulk of views, YouTube continued to click past 10,000 views by Friday morning as the various video links were tweeted and re-tweeted dozens of times, and the song was discussed in numerous sports blogs. By Wednesday it was being called the “official campaign song”.

However, what I find really interesting is the fact that the message carried over to conventional media as well. There have been at least three print stories specifically about the song with more to come – we are only four days out from the posting, after all. The band members were also involved with four radio interviews, and the video, rough as it is, was even played on television news programs. And the biggest kicker – the band is now booked to perform at a downtown Hamilton “Bring NHL to Hamilton” rally on Friday, June 19th, which is planned to be “National Make It Seven Day” across the country. The crowd is expected to reach well over 5000 people. I definitely didn’t see that one coming.

I expected that the reach of this song would be limited to friends of friends who are hockey fans – and that alone would have been “successful” in my mind in terms of shared relevant content. I think the song it alright, and the audio recording stands up well, but the video is extremely amateurish. The fact that this has gone far, far beyond friends of friends suggests that its amateurishness may in fact be its appeal in this context. At the very least, this message hit the right note at the right time, and brought a little more focus and discussion to the core “Make It Seven” campaign. It is just one small piece of the overall picture, but it seems to provide a “soundtrack” to the effort, and music can strike emotional chords that many other communications don’t always hit.

At the end of the day, a strong message and a strong story will transcend any one medium. The immediacy of social media as a medium for message distribution is critical, but like ripples in a pond, the dropped pebble of social media can have a distant reach if the waters are clear. I don’t think this story is finished yet….

The Lorax - Environmental Awareness supports Sustainable Business Practises

Dr. Seuss's classic story "The Lorax" is a well-known treatise on the effects of negative industrial environmental practises, and has inspired many excellent initiatives http://lorax.conservation.org/, http://www.loraxsociety.com/.

As I read "The Lorax" to my daughter last night (re-printed with recycled paper and vegetable inks of course), it hit me like a Super-Axe-Hacker that the subtext in the great Doctor's tale could be about sustainable business practises. As the Once-ler killed off the Truffula trees, he ravaged the local environment - perhaps irreparably (though that remains to be seen.... was there ever a sequel?).

However, as you may remember, the story ends with the promise that the Truffula trees can be re-established, if only the boy takes the last Truffula seed and cultivates a new forest.

"Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.

Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.

Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.

The suggestion is that the forest will live again, the animals will return, and everything will be fine again (which begs the question of why the hell the Once-ler didn't do the same thing years ago).

The sub-text that interests me is the fact that the Once-ler grew his "thneed" business at a rampant, unsustainable rate. The business depended entirely on the wild Truffula trees. He didn't diversify, investigate sustainable business growth strategies, nor did he investigate alternate production materials. He didn't even think to replant what he hacked down. He kept growing his business (under the burden of high debt, no doubt), until the primary component of thneed production was exhausted. He had no fallback - which killed the business (to say nothing of the forest and the environment).

The Once-ler wasn't just a bad person and a bad environmentalist - he was a horrible business person too. This is the part of the story that really interests me - and there are plenty of real-world examples of this kind of shoddy business practice (most of pre-Glastnost Soviet Union comes to mind...).

The Once-ler was a slave to immediate consumer demand, but he had no long-term vision, no strategic plan, and no apparent marketing plan. Crazy stuff. The story doesn't even mention the competitive textile magnate that likely planted a Truffula forest in China to fill the gap in thneed production when the Once-ler's business crashed... but I digress.

I love apparently simple parables like these. There can be so many layers - and so many lessons.