Hey guys, it's Jay Baer with another "Jay Today", where I give you a piece of my mind
three minutes at a time.
Back home in Indiana, global headquarters of Convince & Convert.
Here's what I found out today.
Weird Al Yankovic has the number one album in this country.
Weird Al is number one.
I think it's his fourteenth studio album.
I believe that's correct.
And, finally, he has climbed the ladder, and he is number one.
Now that, to me, is remarkable because he's been doing this for 20 or 30 years and has
never sniffed number one.
So what has changed?
Well, I think three things have changed that we can learn from.
First, as you may know, Weird Al released his album one song per day and then had a
video every single day to accompany each song.
A daily video, like "Jay Today", but with music attached and higher production values.
So, the fact that he was embracing video in a way that he hasn't historically, I think
is a really important trend and one that we can all learn from.
Every time I think that video consumption can't get higher in this country, it gets
higher still.
Video.
A key, key component.
Second, is that Weird Al is by definition absurdist.
And if there's one thing that really works on the Interwebs right now, it is absurdity.
You see the memes, you see the silliness, you see the craziness.
Absurdity really works.
We're just sort of in an absurdist phase, I think, in popular culture.
You never see a meme of a white paper.
Right?
You only see memes of kind of absurd, funny, silly things, and certainly, if there's anything
that Weird Al is, it is absurd.
So, sort of his schtick has kind of come back around to popularity.
It's like sometimes fat ties are in, and sometimes skinny ties are in.
You should never throw away ties, ladies and gentlemen, because eventually they will be
back in style.
And the third thing, and perhaps most importantly, is that he did release his content one piece
at a time.
It wasn't like the album is out on Tuesday.
It was a song on Monday, a song on Tuesday, a song on Wednesday, a song on Thursday, and
of course, we call that "atomizing your content".
Taking a big idea and breaking it up into a bunch of small executions, which gives you
that much more chum in the information and attention waters.
Three things you can learn from Weird Al.
Video, absurdity, and atomizing your content.
Nice job, Weird Al.
Congrats.
Today's Sprout Social shout out is to my friend Shep Hyken.
Shep is the incoming President of the National Speakers Association and a terrific expert,
author, speaker on all things customer service.
You will learn a lot about customer service best practices from Shep Hyken, so make sure
you follow him on Twitter, on his website, on his blog, and other places.
We'll make sure to link that up.
It's @hyken.
As you know, the "Jay Today" show is brought to you by the good people at Sprout Social,
a fantastic social media marketing platform, what I use for my own social media.
And, this show is brought to you by Candidio, a terrific video editing service.
I just record these right on my iPhone, I upload them to candidio, and they make them
look beautiful.
They do all the rest.
Until tomorrow, I'm Jay Baer.
This has been "Jay Today".
Thanks for watching.
Hey, I'm Jay Baer.
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