Grown Up Thinking

This Thursday is National Social Media Day! With only two days left to prepare, how will you celebrate? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

- Pick a social media personality and claim it for the day. I recommend being the Fail Whale or the crying Foursquare girl with the crown  Make sure you dress to fit your part like this guy!

- Set some resolutions for the next year of social media. Example: “I will tweet more often because I haven’t in months” or “I will tweet less often because my friends want to slap me.”

- Make a video and upload it on YouTube. Need ideas? Start simple with a demonstrative speech – like how to make a sandwich, how to make a scene at work, or how to make a grown man cry.

- Get your favorite social media infographic and make it your desktop background. Like this one.

- Throw an internet meme party. I will make my friends wear narwhal horn party hats (and bring my pet narwhal), dress as chubby bubbles girl, put Double Dream Hands on repeat, Ice all the bros in attendance, and insert photo bomb seal into all of the party pics (which I will then make into animated gifs). Friday will be boycotted, though, since it will only be Thursday…

Happy Social Media Day to you and yours! Tell us what you’re scheming for the big day.

Nearly three months after the U.S. military gave the “affirmative” for online social media use, an intriguing thing began happening: the soldiers went viral. Up until now, the military had very strict policies on sites such as YouTube or Facebook. No longer. The latest trend of music video-inspired mayhem is being created (quite creatively, by the way) by America’s few and proud. And they’re hamming it up in renditions of Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus for all the world to view, share and “Like”.

I have a wild theory. Call me crazy, but I find this new wave of humanized soldiers (“They’re just like us!”) to be a brilliant, if unintended, underground marketing scheme to recruit soldiers. These men are rocking boot camp and risking their lives–sure–but they’re also gaining worldwide exposure and having a blast, too. Signing up now seems a lot more “Animal House” than “Apocalypse Now”. And that’s a good thing for luring new soldiers to enlist in an uncertain time of turmoil in the middle east. Time will tell if recruitment numbers go up, but I think this is a fascinating trend worth following. In a time of war, it certainly won’t make the numbers go down. Not when there’s a new Gaga parody to be performed in the barracks, right? See for yourself:

The kids of College Humor became an Internet sensation with the launch of CHTV, the series of original viral videos featured on collegehumor.com, a site which traffics over 4 million unique visitors each month.  CHTV’s releases about 5 videos each week in various formats including sketch comedy, film/video parodies and original content including Hardly Working, Jake and Amir and Bleep Bloop.  A personal fan of College Humor for years, I was ecstatic to hear that the series of witty videos were being picked up by MTV to air as the College Humor Show, premiering on February 8th. 

I see this as a huge step for not only for pure entertainment purposes, but also the plethora of smart user generated videos out there.  YouTuber stars like Liam Kyle Sullivan and Jessica Rose (LG15) have risen above their internet popularity to become legitimate spokespeople of this generation.   Major corporations are taking notice of the view counts on YouTube and realizing how influential series like these are in grabbing the attention of this 2.0 world.