I was in Los Angeles a few days ago, having had the chance to be the best man in rock-superstar Dave Ghazarian’s wedding… It was an awesome time but that’s another story for another day (wedding was beautiful, btw).  The point of this blog post is actually what happened on the flight back from LA.

I was sitting on a very full flight wondering who would sit down next to me. Much to my surprise and delight, it was Greg Goodfried!

Who the heck is Greg Goodfried? you say…valid question. I actually didn’t know either at that moment. Then Greg starts to tell me about how in 2006 he and his business partner, Miles Beckett, hatched an idea to put a show on YouTube. They pooled a little money, casted for it and found Jessica Rose – a cute, young, unknown, new to LA, girl from New Zealand. They named her Bree and she went under the identity of Lonelygirl15 on YouTube.

If you’ve never heard of Lonelygirl15, you have really missed out. Bree was an instant success racking up astonishing YouTube views for each video they posted…I’m talking hundreds of thousands – almost overnight. What was amazing was that the views grew with each subsequent video release. Unlike previous one-hit-wonders on YouTube, Greg and Miles created a SUSTAINABLE AND GROWING audience.

This brings me to my point…CONTENT.

Greg and Miles planned the whole show out. Each webisode was carefully scripted and was part of an overall story that had already been written.  The morale of this story is, no matter what form of social media you are involved with (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or all of the above and more) you need to have a roadmap and a plan and most importantly, you need to create content that is interesting, engaging, shocking, surprising, funny, mysterious…you get the point right?  People have to want to read or watch your stuff.

In a world that is now being saturated by content, where everyone is a creator, a publisher, a screen writer, an actor, a field reporter…Ultimately, Good Content Will Win Out.  Greg and Miles now run a company called Eqal, which specializes in helping talented people centralize their social media presence while working with big brands.  Want to guess what their secret sauce is?  Yep, Content!

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In case you are still clueless on the Lonlygirl15 phenomenon… I have embedded a video from Bree during the series below.  This sucker has been watched 3.5 MILLION times and racked up over 10,000 comments from viewers.  Notice the media is nothing special.  It’s low-res cam, messy room, rough-cut slapped together editing and a rather stupid puppet show at the end…however…when it’s over you feel connected to the character.  She’s going through something with her parents.  She can’t tell us.  What is it?  You think people watched the next episode to find out?  Oh yeah.

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1. Toobla – Best way to gather and organize content on the Web
2. Blogging Lessons from MIT – What Companies can Learn

Content copy create creation creative Greg Goodfried Lonelygirl15 Miles Beckett writing YouTube