How the internet reacts when you solve a first world problem

A talk by Ben Keenan @warmcola | warmcola.com forhttp://www.meetup.com/Content-Strategy-Melbourne/

Wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for PF Perry - he was an analogue synth expert. I built frostwave.com with him in 1998, his products, my site from ground up with no advertising budget. I just stumbled onto a niche community,

and a figurehead who had something to offer people. It was my living for many years.

Truth: kids & animals are hard to photograph.

After many years in adland i was so hands off, I wanted to be 100% hands on, see something through from start to completion. So as a new Dad, I noticed that I my kids were very difficult to photograph.

Look Birdy solved a problem.

Look Birdy solved an actual problem, so that I guess was good, I just needed to tell people about it and I didn’t want to spend money.

If you grew up in the eighties, you would have had one of these photos taken in a shopping centre, I remember getting kids attention was someones job, I thought i could make a film about that - a documentary with my tv ad

making friends, then i realised it was 2014 and not 2004.

Truthfully, it was a first world problem.

So I looked at my product and if I was brutally honest my idea wasn’t essential.

So I just told the truth.

So i just told the truth, and I got a mate to film me explaining it.

I wrote copy on my website, that maintained that is was indeed a first world problem.

And on lookbirdy.com just told the true story, and gave others the bits they needed to tell theirs.

Mummy bloggers didn’t like it.

I assumed Mum’s would like it, but they want their parenting problems to be listened to and emphasised with - not solved with a mobile phone and flashy light.

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Creative people did.

This was a very simple “platform hack” - it was using a camera’s flash in an unorthodox way, and solved a problem within the problem. People liked this simplicity.

Word of mouth did the rest. From design blog Swiss Miss, to Life Hacker to Buzzfeed.

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To being picked up by CNN in the states and a Malaysian popstar.

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To another geeky Dad who works at the company that created the computer mouse and design thinking endorsing my slightly less crucial innovation.

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What I learnt: Be human, be vulnerable, imperfect, the internet loves this, because we love it. Beauty isn’y symmetry, it’s flaws, I think this may have been lost in our dash to quantify everything.

People don’t really care about brands as much as we think they do, they do however care about other people.

Photograph by Mike Mills

Are you you?

Today, from Kickstarter, to micro brewers, to weird Dads making apps, marketing is the backstory of how things came to be, and more importantly, the people who created these things.

You can download my app at lookbirdy.com and find me on the Twitters @warmcola

I do a workshop that goes deep on what to do after you have a content strategy, and need to muster-up some content that people might actually want to look at and share. More at http://www.thethoughtpolice.com.au