What’s Hip Hapnin?

For full disclosure I am going to say right up front that I am a mormon so I may be biased. I almost didn’t post about these because I don’t want everyone to think this is a missionary blog. I am not sure how I would categorize this blog but I think most of the posts are about geek marketing. I am posting this because the LDS church has taken a big departure from the normal “family, isn’t it about time?” campaign to this truth restored campaign.

This is an example of great content. You will never get a win on the web until you give people amazing content. They selected real people who had recently joined the church. They give unscripted (but not unedited) comments

instead of actors, those appearing in the ads are all recent converts to the Church talking unrehearsed about their own personal experiences. “It was important that we do this in an appropriate fashion, in a way that did not cause contention or tear down anybody else’s faith. These are converts’ stories about what led them to the restored Church of Jesus Christ.”

The reason I point out that the clips have been edited is that people rarely produce sound bytes on their own. So we may be looking at the highlights of a 30 minute conversation. What is the lesson? Edit your content I wouldn’t have shared or watched the 30 minute version. Unlike user generated content this has been controlled just enough to have high production quality and high believability. Probably not cheap to put together but good content rarely is.

So what did they do wrong? Well what is the point in producing amazing content if you can’t share it? They are still trying to control the message (Marketing 1.0) and that is a mistake. The website should allow you to embed, download, share and email the clips. Where is the RSS feed so I know when new content is added? It seems like this was a traditional media campaign and web was somewhat of an afterthought.Instead of waiting for these to be broadcast in your market you can watch all of the new video’s hereJust in case you are wondering what the title is about it is a quote from a southpark episode