My good friend kc and I went on a pretty nuts trip this past May. It was a whirlwind that started with Amanda and I spending a week on the beach in Mexico followed by London, Bamako, Casablanca, Paris, and Lyon with the main purpose of the trip to get our boots on the ground in Mali, make sure things were going well, and to see where we could further get things done.

This post was inspired by my really good friend Will. I have a problem explaining my job to people who are not in the industry. I have known Will for quite a while at this point and when we get onto the subject of work, I’m pretty sure he still doesn’t completely get what I do. He understands the blogging part, project management, and the research, but when it comes to the other Social Media aspects of my job, not so much.

Don’t get me wrong. If it were that cool retro curved metal hook they
stopped making 20 years ago, that would be teh awesome. But no, this
paperclip is an irritating avatar (oddly, in only two dimensions)
which pops up to serve up completely useless advice. I kid you not.
That’s what it does.

For the last few years the recording industry and RIAA have been fighting an uphill battle trying to keep their traditional model alive in an evolving market. The dinosaur analogy has been used over and over again as the industry tries to keep their share (and more) of the market through digital distribution. Disruptive delivery services like itunes, muxtape, lastfm, pandora, and the countless torrent sites have fully blown apart this market leaving “traditionals” scrambling to find acquisitions and partners in order to keep some market share.

A few years ago a client approached Invoke asking us to “make me a viral video”. At the time, we were fresh out of Starwars kid and our numa numa guy was out of the office, and chocolate rain guy had a sore throat so we came up with a plan… Instead of Invoke creating one concept that may or may not “go viral” we would contest the production out, get 100′s of entries, and maybe, just maybe, one would “go viral”. Given the millions of hours and trillions of gigabytes of video online, the odds of any piece going viral is a bit of a long shot, however a contest campaign greatly increases your odds in two ways. First off you have a larger sample of video and creative, and secondly you have an incentive for entrants to self promote (to win the prize).