Weekend Inspiration: Killing Persistant Earworms With Unhearit

It’s happened to all of us. You are sitting in complete silence, maybe drinking your morning coffee, maybe checking email for the first time, when it first appears.

“Po- Po- Po- Poker Face, Po- Po- Poker Face…”

You do your best to ignore it, to think about other things, to distract yourself, but before long, it’s fully lodged in your brain.

“Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-roma-mamaa! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!”

You, my friend, have an earworm, and a brand new website called Unhearit wants to help. You go to the site, and click a button, and the embedded player plays a random song. The new song is supposed to help you get your mind off the one you’ve been humming all day.

Unhearit is a dead-simple application. The songs are  already there, stored on parent site SoundCloud. The player seems to be basically the same as what is found on their site as well. I’m guessing this page took them no more than a day or two to throw up, most of that time spent on making sure it wouldn’t come crashing down under the load of viral traffic.

Oh… and they have 2,575 Tweets and over 16,000 Facebook Likes as of when I’m writing this.

This week’s inspiration: SoundCloud cleverly re-purposed existing content to create a viral success with Unhearit. How are you going to do the same?

Let me know in the comments.

Weekend Inspiration: Facebook Resources

Image by Austinevan

It’s been a long, strange trip, and I hate to see it go, but our 2-week long Facebook extravaganza has finally come to a close.

We’re going to close out with some resources to keep you inspired and learning about building your empire on Facebook. I hope we’ve motivated you to work hard at utilizing Facebook’s marketing and social networking potential to its fullest, and I can’t wait for you to start seeing the results!

Official Facebook Resources:

It’s hard to go wrong when you’re getting  advice right from the Mothership itself. Here’s some great resources from Facebook.com:

Facebook Pages - Facebook’s Facebook Page for Facebook Pages. Very Meta. Also Facebook’s main resource for tips, best practices, examples, and additional resources.

Guide to Facebook Ads - Tips, instructions, and best practices for creating, maintaining, and optimizing your Facebook Ads campaign.

Promotion Guidelines- Facebook’s official guidelines for promoting your Page on your own website.

Facebook Developers - Facebook’s homepage for everything related to integrating Facebook with your website.

 Tips and Tutorials

There’s so much to do with your Facebook page, we could cover only a portion of it during the past two weeks. Check out these resources for more tips and ideas.

Creating a Facebook Application -  a beginner’s guide by blogger Emanuele Feronato. If you’re html-savvy and ready to add even more interactivity than your Static FBML page offers, this is  a great place to start.

HyperArts -  HyperArts has a great, intensive FAQ page regarding FBML. A must-have if you are just getting started and need some technical know-how to get the job done.

Mashable - Mashable’s blog is a great resource for everything social-media related.

Galleries

Facebook Showcase - This is a (fairly) regularly updated gallery that shows examples of great Facebook pages,divided into categories (Brand,Business, Celebrity, Entertainment, Other, Web Firm)

Platform Showcase - Facebook’s official Showcase shows how some big brands integrate Facebook with their websites.

Outstanding Facebook Pages

These are some of the Fat Dude’s personal favorite Pages. Check them out for some inspiration!

Victoria’s Secret Pink 

Red Bull

Ashton Kutcher

Old Spice

Gary Vaynerchuk

Toyota

Adidas

There you have it. This is really still just the tip of the mammoth Facebook iceberg, and we’ll return to Facebook here on FatBlog from time to time with new tips, tricks, tutorials, and resources.

Until then, good luck, fellow Facebookers… don’t forget to chime in in the comments and let me know what I’ve left out!

Weekend Inspiration: Three Fun Ideas for your Facebook Profile Pic

Image by Mr T in DC

Or: A picture is worth… Well, you know.

We’ve already covered adding value to your Facebook Page with an oversized profile picture, but that doesn’t answer a more basic question: What exactly should you use as your profile picture?

The practical approach dictates that you should use whatever best promotes you, your product, and your brand. This might be a logo, a picture of your most popular product, a piece of your art, etc. But, for those who don’t have any of those things, especially if your most popular product is you (I’m looking at you, motivational speakers, comedians, actors, etc), here’s some fun inspiration to get you started.

Get Cartoonized

There are a number of recognizable brand names out there that will allow you to make a cartoon version of yourself. Uncle Fat Dude is particularly fond of:

The Simpsons (via The Simpsons Movie)

Mad Men

South Park

Fun with Photos

There are a number of sites online that will help you do some fun things with a simple every-one-of-your-Facebook-friends-has-one headshot. A lot of the results can be sort of corny digital versions of those “stick your head through the hole” things you see at theme parks and carnivals, but Photofunia is a personal favorite here at Fat Dude. the results are pretty original, and convincing too.  Here are a few examples using the Dude’s ugly mug:

DIY for the Win

If you have the means (not to mention the talent), there’s nothing that can beat the thousand-and-one different one-of-a-kind results you can get out of a digital photo editor like Photoshop. From simply fixing the color and white balance of your portrait, to using the software’s build-in photo effects to building a work of art from scratch, nothing is likely to give you a better (or more universally praised) result.

Here’s the profile picture, inspired by A Scanner Darkly your uncle Fat Dude is currently sporting on his private profile:

Here’s a great tutorial regarding how to create a portrait like this.

What are you doing with your profile picture lately? Let us know in the comments!

Weekend Inspiration:The Man Your Marketing Campaign Could Smell Like

You may already be familiar with the Man Your Man Could Smell Like. If not, you really should do yourself the honor:

Old Spice made a huge splash during this year’s Super Bowl as Procter & Gamble launched this new ad campaign, featuring the charismatic Isaiah Mustafa, all-in-one-shot video trickery, and a wry sense of humor. After a second ad recently debuted, the campaign had proved to be a huge success. More importantly, it was a huge success with a young demographic.Old Spice’s public image is changing. This isn’t grandpa’s cologne anymore.

In Mid-July, the Old Spice team kicked a respectable campaign to near-legendary status in just a few days, when they shot 150 riotously funny video responses to messages sent to the @OldSpice Twitter account, getting celebrities like Demi Moore, Kevin Rose, and Alissa Milano in on the fun.

The effect? Neilsen reports a 55% increase in overall sales for Old Spice since since the launch of the Old Spice guy ads, which is impressive enough. What is unbelievable is the reported 107% increase in the last month.

Clearly, Old Spice already had an ad campaign that was working phenomenally well, but the added viral marketing added a lot of respect for the company, an enormously impressive portfolio piece for the agency responsible, and a huge boost to Procter & Gamble’s bottom line.

You may not have the visibility of a company like Procter & Gamble, and you probably won’t be able to get celebrities tweeting about your online campaign, but this is something to take to heart nonetheless. Are you doing everything you can to promote yourself online?

Give it some thought while you’re laughing your head off at Old Spice’s You Tube page.

Weekend Inspiration: What’s Old is New Again

The folks over at Lifehacker pointed out a true gem this week. Classic Cinema Online serves up a truly awesome variety of classic old flicks that are just bound to provide you with some inspiration for your latest project… Or simply a few vintage scares for Halloween. If you’re looking for some scares, you could certainly do worse than the original House on Haunted Hill.

We’ll leave the lights on in the Comments section. You know…. Just in case.

Weekend Inspiration: 97 Ways to Build Web Traffic

#98, read Jonathan’s post, which includes gems like:

36. Start a conversation about a highly controversial topic and link to thought-leaders’ blogs

and…

82. Take a damn shower, at some point you’re going to need to get lunch and talk to human beings

and my fav;

35. Shave someone else’s chest, back, eyebrows or ass for charity (disclaimer – get permission)

In all seriousness, there are both some great laughs and some great ideas (which I intend to take advantage of, and hope you do too). Thanks, Jonathan!

97 Ways to Build Traffic Without Resorting to Dumbass List Posts
(johnathanfields.awake@thewheel)

Weekend Inspiration: Al Franken Draws the US from Memory

This may be a little stale by now, but still a good motivator. Senator Al Franken has a special talent, besides the obvious: he can draw the map of the United States very well, and very fast, from memory. Several different copies of this video have been floating around YouTube for maybe a month, and it has over 700,000 hits.

What can you do better than anyone else? How can you leverage it into a bigger audience and a brighter spotlight?