These days, it seems that everyone is into DIY. And when it comes to creative online communication, those Gen Y digital natives are the DIY masters.
A popular recent trend that demonstrates this is something called “LipDub” — where large groups of youngsters choreograph elaborate one-take videos in which they each take turns lip-syncing a few lines of a popular song. It might sound quite trivial to you and very YouTube, but the ones that are done well are actually quite infectious. And boy do they go viral.
In this first video, the young employees of New York-based Connected Ventures — a group of friends who work for Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker — “perform” Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger. All good fun, but there is commercial purpose to this frivolity. They were hiring. It’s a safe bet that thousands of 20-somethings were falling over themselves to work with this mob after watching this video (it was filmed three years ago).
The second video is doing the rounds at the moment and has less commercial purpose. It’s a LipDub produced during the integration week of UQAM (Quebec, Canada) with 172 communication students. Again, it’s infectious, and they did it… well… because they could.
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Paul Ryan Reply:
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Well said, Michael. Culture is still so undervalued by many organisations. Even those with great culture don’t always use it to their best advantage.
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