Captains of Industry

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry
Whew! This continues to be an amazing experience for us at Captains, and a great learning opportunity for us and everyone involved. We applaud all the entrants for understanding that you can have a great product or service, but unless you’re telling a good story on the web with interesting content, there’s a risk of being ignored. We also want to thank Ann Handley of Marketing Profs for her invaluable help in the review process.

We’ve selected 4 great finalists, and have provided some insights of each of them here. Over the next two weeks, we invite your feedback on which of these 4 should be the ultimate winner. While Captains will make the final decision, the dialog in the marketing community about these entrants, and the very nature of web content and engagement, will play an important role in the process. Please weigh in and tell us what you think.
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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry
In the age of “the sooner the better,” it seems some of us might have gotten a little lazy with our manners, etiquette, and grammar skills. But after years of sending and receiving friend requests and invitations to LinkIn, there hardly seems like there’s time to keep up with Emily Post, never mind knowing when to avoid a dangling modifier in a 140 character Tweet.
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ZZZ…

The Incredibly Boring Web Content Challenge has been quite the intense process. The Captains have been hard at work reviewing one utterly uninteresting submission after another. The entire team has been working late nights, downing double espressos, and reading and re-reading until most of our employees have developed double vision. To see for yourself just how grueling the submission process can be, check out the latest video from Captains of Industry.

All submissions are due today (March 8)! So get them in to www.captainsofindustry.com/yawn while you still can.

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry
One of the more attention-grabbing submissions we’ve received with our Incredibly Boring Web Content Challenge is from a company called “Intimate Surprises.” They have a web-based service you can sign up for that sends you and your mate monthly surprise packages with “items that are fun, sexy and unexpected – and designed for couples to enjoy together.” Although there are no photos of these items on the site, I am making the leap that the items are not related to knitting, baseball card collecting, or scrabble. In any case, the submission from Intimate Surprises raises a very important question: Is it enough for your product to be sexy in order for people to seek it out on the web, or does the web content – the interactive elements, the video, the copy, etc – have to MAKE the product sexy?
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By Jean Levasseur, Captains of Industry
In honor of the launch of the Incredibly Boring Web Content Challenge, I have gone searching for the most boring game ever. I found it. And for such a boring game, it’s terribly addicting. Enjoy!

The Most Boring Game Ever

When you’re bored with that, head over to the Incredibly Boring Web Content page and enter your submission!

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

Picture a gangly teenage boy sitting in the back row of his science class, listening to his teacher, Mr. Powell.  At the time, I was compelled by my mother to wear hand-me-down bellbottom jeans, and they were too short, so I looked vaguely like someone from the Starship Enterprise. I was not particularly good at science, but I revered Mr. Powell and hung on every word he said. He talked about working two jobs. At night he was a meat cutter. By day, he taught at the Diamond Middle School in Lexington. He told us about his life, how exhausted he often was, and how too many people had forgotten the importance of working hard and giving it all they had.
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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry
I’d like to bet my Super Bowl winnings that anyone who didn’t watch the game Sunday night still saw the top-rated commercials. How can I be so sure? Well, because content that tells a story gets watched. In fact, Google’s “Parisian Love” spot jumped from 27,020 views to 2,706,757 views on just one YouTube channel, and it’s only been 2 days since the Saints announced they were going to Disney World. When it comes to content that tells an interesting story, the people will come to you.

By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry
When Marc Zuckerberg and his gang of Harvard brainiacs opened Facebook to students in 2004, we all went crazy for The Book. From posting to tagging, it seemed like a great way to keep in touch and for those of us with a keen curiosity, to keep tabs. But when Facebook went global, some businesses were skeptical about the social network and wondered if it was a wise program for companies to be using.
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By Ted Page, Captains of Industry
In a January 24th story in the Boston Globe, Scott Kirsner offers some good tips for getting your company greater visibility in search engines.

Kirsner suggest that fresh and useful content should be a part of any company’s strategy for getting seen. The Captains agree with this, but we’d go one step further. What’s needed is great stories that captivate the imagination of the people you most want to connect with. In the age of YouTube and Vimeo, when millions of people are snacking on short web videos every day, great storytelling on the web often means video. Any website today can be its own TV channel, with an audience that’s as narrowly focused as it needs to be, with video content that helps attract just the people who matter most to your company. A case in point is the media center for First Wind, a leading wind energy company. Check out this video for a wind farm in Utah that came about through the vision of a local high school teacher and his students.
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By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry
Generation Y has gotten a bad rap over the years. We’ve been called everything from spoiled to idealistic. And our Disney-like anything-is-possible attitudes have been irking other generations for years. In fact, most Baby Boomers predicted in November 2008 that Gen Y’s blithe spirits would be crushed by the 2009 economic crisis. But in a recent article by Marcy Shinder, VP of Brand Management for American Express, it’s Gen Y’s positive attitudes that have been the most refreshing in an otherwise dismal market.
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By Ted Page, Captains of Industry
Sometimes technological changes creep up on us, and sometimes they seem to occur all at once as a revelation. Last week, when I saw Avatar in Imax 3D, I experienced both forms of technological advancement. The movie took my breath away. The huge, engulfing screen, excellent sound, and amazing special effects all created a sense of reality for the world of Pandora that I had never seen before. Hype aside, it really is a breakthrough, even if the plot is basically Fern Gully meets Dances with Wolves. Other movies with great special effects, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Jurassic Park, certainly paved the way for the further advances in Avatar, but the sheer scope of Avatar made it feel very new all at once. Read more Share This

It’s always good to see the things that we talk about with our clients work for us. Last night, Ted posted an called “How to get a job at a marketing agency (or anywhere else).” It was a post inspired by a great resume we received, and what people can do to make themselves stand out from the crowd and get hired.

Well, it’s been up for about 18 hours, and already we’ve had a couple of twitter responses about it, several comments, and had it referenced in a post about using the web to get hired on America’s Job Exchange Blog.

Great content gets talked about and shared.