Bec Hollcraft is a nineteen-year-old singer and songwriter with an amazing ability to express, through infectious rock melodies and insightful lyrics, the everyday struggles of her generation.
Working with Meredith Brooks, a multi-platinum artist, producer, and songwriter, and Jody Nachtigal, personal manager at Arcadia Group Management (and with the support of her parents), Hollcraft went from being a high school freshman in Portland, Oregon to an significant emerging artist by providing tons of free music on MySpace and her own site.
The reaction to Hollcraft's music quickly blossomed into a World Wide Rave. Her MySpace monthly page rank by total views reached Number 3 overall and Number 1 for acoustic artists, while her song Numb reached Number 28 on MySpace (out of 3.2 million available tracks) and became the Number 2 rock track and Number 1 acoustic track. This success resulted in Bec signing a record deal with Sony Music Japan International.
My friends John Wall and Christopher Penn meet every Wednesday morning at 5:30 AM to create the Marketing Over Coffee podcast.
Yeah, that's really early.
The podcast has become a World Wide Rave as many marketers listen weekly to hear their thoughtful (and sometimes hilarious) take on the world of Marketing.
Christopher is on the left and John on the right.
Audiobrain is in the fascinating and little understood business of sonic branding. They create and manage music and sound for companies like NBC, Virgin Mobile, Microsoft, and McDonalds.
The team served as NBC's Music Supervisors for their Beijing Olympic Games Broadcast. This was AudioBrain's fourth Olympics collaboration with NBC, and without question the largest undertaking to date. The music initiative was nearly 2 years in planning, and included musical content procurement from publishers, labels and artists, consulting on the music system design and information organization, and creative support to NBC's producers both on-site at the Games in China and at NBC in New York, as they ran 24/7 music operations in both locations.
The Beijing Olympic coverage was the most watched event in U.S. television history, and the largest undertaking in the history of broadcasting – certainly a World Wide Rave. The networks of NBC Universal aired 3,600 hours of coverage from Beijing - more than the combined total of every previous Summer Games broadcast in the U.S. The coverage aired on 7 networks: NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Oxygen, Universal HD, and Telemundo, and there were 2,200 hours of live streaming broadband video available on NBCOlympics.com.
That's a lot of music!
How about this cool photo of Paul Teutul Sr., founder of Orange County Choppers! Paul, together with his sons, created a World Wide Rave in 2002 when they became the subjects of the popular reality TV series American Chopper.
Paul's book The Ride of a Lifetime: Doing Business the Orange County Choppers Way will be published by Wiley in March. Wiley is also publishing World Wide Rave in March. Thank you Paul. Good luck with your book.
Andrew Peters is the brains behind social media promotion leading up to the 1st Annual Singapore Tattoo Show, held January 9-11, 2009. The goal was to get 5,000 visitors to the show where over 120 artists from around, plus activities and companies representing all modern tattoo styles.
Andrew used Facebook as a way for people to connect starting 3 months prior to the event and the Tattoo Artistry Facebook Group quickly gained 3,000 members and secured a place as the center of this artwork for the region. The passion of people for "their event" led to many people promoting to their friends online and built a community eager to attend the live event. This world Wide Rave resulted in more than 15,000 people attending -- three times the expected number.
Tattoo Artistry on Facebook is now Asia's largest social network for the tattoo industry, tattoo enthusiasts, and fans. The group will continue to grow as an online destination to connect and plans are already underway for the 2nd Singapore Tattoo Show in 2010.
My friend Lisa Genova created one of the coolest (and most successful) World Wide Rave's I've seen. She is the author of Still Alice, a novel about a young woman’s descent into dementia due to early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. I met Lisa at Grub Street Writers, Boston's premier writing school.
After Lisa wrote the book and was ready to get it into the market, she spent a year trying to get literary agents and editors at publishing houses to speak with her. The editors all treated her as yet another aspiring writer not worth their time, and the few literary agents she managed to reach thought her novel wouldn’t sell.
Instead of letting "rejection" mean no book, she self-published, created a web site with valuable information about Alzheimer’s Disease, and worked with the Alzheimer's Association to establish a blog. Still Alice, although fictional, was still a truthful and respectful depiction of life with the disease and her free Web content resonated with tens of thousands of people who talked about her ideas.
As a result of Genova's World Wide Rave, Still Alice sold at auction for a mid six figure US dollar advance in June 2008 to Simon & Schuster. The first print run of the new edition of the book, coming this week, was 250,000 copies and translation rights have sold to ten foreign countries so far, with more in the works. In addition, Still Alice won the 2008 Bronte Prize. None of this success would have happened without Lisa creating her own World Wide Rave.
Jackie Ann Patterson grabbed her WWR poster and took her new camera out for a spin during a walk down University Ave in Palo Alto. You can see several other photos on her blog UnIncorporated Tales of Adventure and Musings by Jackie Ann Patterson.
"I stopped at a few cool places along the way," she says. "Facebook headquarters sits back from the street down by the train station. The lobby guards were very accommodating as I got a quick shot to update my Facebook profile." (Facebook is certainly an example of a company that has created a World Wide Rave!)
By the way, Jackie Ann Patterson started using her middle name as a result of hearing why I use mine. She says that she’s now at the top of Google for her full name and she's happy about that.
Tim Washer, the most talented corporate video producer I know, shot this photo of Bob Hoey, the star of IBM’s "mockumentary" series The Art of the Sale. Bob is not only a superb actor, but really is the vice president of worldwide sales for System Z, the IBM Mainframe. Tim is Bob's sidekick in the videos, the handsome man with the glasses.
With several hundred thousand views, The Art of the Sale is a World Wide Rave. Comedy Central selected the short film series as a "Staff Favorite," and it was cited in Forbes.com in January 2007 as the example of the "Jon Stewartizing" of corporate communications.
