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JetBlue’s $1 Million Twitter Hashtag.

Two different airlines announced an incredible deal yesterday: for $500, the buyer can fly anywhere the airline flies, with unlimited flights, for one month.

This made a big splash, obviously, in the news. But I found out about it first through Twitter. One of the airlines offering the sale is JetBlue, who frequently pushes exclusive deals on Twitter and is very active in replying to customers who tweet at @JetBlue. I saw the all-you-can-fly deal when a friend starting using the designated #AYCJ hashtag.[1. The shortened version of #AllYouCanJet.] Hashtags aren’t always useful, but in this case, everyone who’s using #AYCJ is promoting JetBlue for free. The campaign is both viral and easy to share, and that’s a huge win for JetBlue.

But there’s a second airline that’s also hosting an all-you-can-fly package: Sun Country. They also fly nationally, to destinations like D.C., New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas. So why isn’t Sun Country’s deal getting the same kind of exposure as JetBlue’s?

The obvious reason is that JetBlue has hubs in New York, Boston and L.A. — all big cities with major media outlets — whereas Sun Country is based in Minneapolis. JetBlue has more flights, and JetBlue has more name recognition.

But there’s another key factor: social media. JetBlue’s presence on Twitter and Facebook — they’ve got 1.6 million Twitter followers and 300,000 Facebook fans — means that they started to sell out of their all-you-can-fly deal before it ever appeared in a single edition of a newspaper or onto the 6 p.m. news. If JetBlue sells just 2,000 of their $500 AYCJ packages, they’ll make a million dollars, and I’d bet they end up making a few million more. And the kicker? They’ll just be filling otherwise idle seats during a slow time of year. Social media pages that cost nothing to own or operate are generating them millions, and potentially millions more in goodwill.

Now look at Sun Country. They don’t have a hashtag. They don’t offer regular, exclusive Twitter deals. Their Twitter account has 6,000 followers. Their Facebook page has 6,000 fans. JetBlue might end up selling more AYCJ deals on Twitter than Sun Country has Twitter followers.

The point is this: if you’re running a business on Twitter — particularly one that sells things — use Twitter effectively. Offer big, outrageous sales to your followers. Build loyalty. Build followers and fans. Let them advertise your brand for you.

Because even if you do it just once a year, like JetBlue is doing, it could still be a million-dollar idea.

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Hello, Stry.

They said it couldn’t be done.[1. They = my parents, siblings, relatives, friends and others who generally care about my sanity.] They said it shouldn’t be done, really. They said I would have to be an idiot to quit my paying job in San Antonio, move to Biloxi, Miss., and start my own news bureau. They said that I should find a more enjoyable way to blow my savings.

I did it anyway.

This week, the pilot project for this news bureau finally launched. It’s called Stry — pronounce it with an ‘O’ right in the middle, please — and it’s ready for your consumption at http://stry.us.

The brief pitch:

Like most good ideas, this one was born on a cocktail napkin. ¶¶ What if, we asked, we could create a new type of news organization? One that covered the issues that affect our lives. One that didn’t care about the headlines or news of the day. ¶¶ A news organization that wasn’t easily distracted. ¶¶ So that’s what we created: Stry, a band of reporters in pursuit of storytelling. We travel the country for months at a time, and when we find an issue worth talking about, we dig into it. We won’t stop digging until we’ve covered the story as thoroughly as we can. ¶¶ The stuff you’ll see on Stry isn’t like the stuff you see elsewhere, because we only do the types of stories that require patience and time. We hope it shows. ¶¶ We know that what we’re doing is different, and we’re okay with that. We’re Stry, a place that’s topical, not typical. ¶¶Welcome.

Yes, right now, I’m essentially doing this for free. But it’s been challenging and exciting and different than anything I’ve ever done. And a truth I’ve learned this week: I’m finding that I’m more productive and more satisfied with what I’m doing now than I ever was when I was gainfully employed.

Turns out that I had to quit my job in order to enjoy work.

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These Things I Know To Be True.

Jorge Chávez International Airport is not a fun place to be, especially after midnight when you’re leaving Peru but your flight back to Houston has been delayed yet again. But my delay at Lima’s airport gave me a few minutes to reflect on my recent trip abroad, and especially on a few things that I very much know to be true.

  1. A country cannot be truly free until its people can print out airline boarding passes from home.
  2. If my mother starts running at the sight of someone, you should start running too.
  3. Wherever your are, the drivers are worse than wherever you just were.
  4. There is nothing more arbitrary in this world than airport taxes.
  5. If you are on a historical tour, and your tour guide is not speaking in his/her native language, the truth will become slightly more malleable.
  6. It is difficult to trust anyone who packs more than 50 lbs. of luggage for a vacation to anywhere short of Antarctica.
  7. The same holds true for those who refuse to turn off their phones in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
  8. The number of crying children on your plane varies directly with the length of your flight.
  9. It actually kind of helps to smile while you’re getting screwed.
  10. Luxury is a very, very relative term.
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Do Not Attend the Fourth of July in Biloxi, Miss., Unless You Have Very Good Health Insurance.

In the summer of 2009, having just accepted a job at a TV station in San Antonio, Texas, I attempted to convince my bosses to allow me to channel my inner Dave Barry and publish a daily blog, to be titled “The Evolution of Local Man.” The pitch, as I delivered to my bosses in an email:

Local Man finds himself in a constant, Sisyphusian struggle against success. He has attempted to scale buildings when drunk. He has acted in anger against drive-thru speaker boxes. He has found himself ornery, naked and, most often, confused.

And Local Man will not stop there. He will persevere; he will evolve. Local Man has not failed at all he can fail at.

The blog never happened, [1. I believe the word “total loss of credibility” was mentioned at one point in their argument against it.] but Local Man lived on that year in our news broadcasts. He crashed through windows, busted through police barriers and achieved all kinds of stupid. I was proud to just be there to read the police reports.

But I left South Texas last week, packed my life into a Chevy Trailblazer and moved east, to Biloxi, Miss. When I was arrived, Local Man was here waiting for me.

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Every year, from some tiny port of call you’ve never heard of comes a story so sordid, it’s tough to believe it only happens dozens of times every year. On the Fourth of July, Local Man drinks heavily, lights off fireworks and brings harm upon himself and others. This year, in Chicago, a firework blew up in a man’s face. Fireworks exploded in a teen’s face in Tennessee. Fireworks even blew a man’s arm clear off on Long Island.

And those are just the first three links I clicked on in Google News.

But what I’m really here to say is that any of those local men could have been me, Dan Oshinsky, a respectable, not-in-possession-of-exploding-substances American who just happened to be dangerously close to the path of a toddler with a lit Roman candle on Sunday.

On the Fourth, at about 9 p.m., I drove down to the Biloxi beach to enjoy the fireworks. I did not expect that this would be a life-threatening decision.

What I know now — and what I wish I known then — was that a Mississippi fireworks show should probably come with a surgeon general’s warning. Just in my walk down to the beach, I crossed paths with a handful of teens shooting off Roman candles into and over a crowd of thousands. I came about fifteen feet away from a ten-year-old who was lighting off some $20 fireworks with the range of a Soviet-era warhead.

To put it in perspective: I hadn’t see that much firepower in one place since my visit to Tiananmen Square.

But it’s tough to blame those kids for being stupid. At least they weren’t drunk at the time [2. I think.]

I will, however, point the finger at one Local Man (see above photo), who, for the purposes of this blog post, I will describe as Some Giant Drunk Asshole (SGDA, for short). SGDA was about six feet tall, with all the shapeliness of a small zeppelin. In tow, he had his son, who was maybe two or three years old. And there SGDA was, handing a lit match to his kid, who put it to the wick on a loaded firework and ran.

This happened, oh, about 20 feet away from me.

It was very, very loud.

And then SGDA lit another firework. And other one. And maybe five or seven more.

All while the actual fireworks display was going on.

Was there remorse from SGDA? An apology for nearly blowing off my ear when one of his miniature rockets turned into a sidewinder?

Of course not. Local Man cannot apologize for what he cannot comprehend.

When the actual fireworks display ended, the kids on the beach were down to a handful of Roman candles and bottle rockets. SGDA had lit off the last of his $100 or $150 worth of explosives.

I still tiptoed out of there like I was crossing a minefield near the DMZ.  I wanted, badly, to live. Besides, what good is seeing Local Man in the flesh if you’re not around to tell his story?

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What To Do When You Want to Bob Your Head But Cannot Because You Are Trapped Inside an MRI Machine.

I’m not supposed to move. My right leg is inside an MRI machine, one that’s designed only for limbs. So the rest of me is sitting on a piece of hard foam, flipping through the issue of SI with Stephen Strasburg on the cover. The MRI technician has the local Jack FM station on the radio, and the Jack station is playing their usual blend of non-sequitors. Tom Cochrane precedes Whitesnake precedes, I believe, something from “Aida.” There is no logic to defend what is happening, but I’m immobilized inside an MRI machine. I’m forced to sit there and take it.

At which point “What is Love” comes on the radio.

You know the song I’m talking about: it’s the one that spawned a recurring Chris Kattan/Will Ferrell sketch on SNL, and eventually, an ill-conceived movie. It’s impossible to imagine the song independent of Kattan and Ferrell, or their signature move: bobbing their heads in unison to the song.

I want, badly, to begin bobbing my head to this 1993 dance classic. But I’m trapped inside an MRI machine, knee immobilized, and if I move, they’ll have to restart the MRI machine, and maybe then Jack FM will begin playing the YMCA, or Cotton-Eye Joe, or the Macarena, and then I’ll be trapped inside this machine forever.

A 1993 dance classic plays, but I do not bob.

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The Bums Who Would Be Champs (or: Macho Hercules!)

In the fall of 2007, I decided that I wanted to study abroad. The rationale was simple: I was running out of classes to take at the University of Missouri, and also, I could get away with it. Seemed logical enough at the time.

I decided that I’d go to Spain, and the study abroad office at Mizzou gave me a few options. I took the brochures home, studied the pictures intently, and then did what seemed right.

I Googled to see which of these places had the best soccer teams.

I settled upon Alicante, a sprawling seaside city just south of Valencia. They had miles of beaches, a busy bar district and, most importantly, two soccer teams. The first was Alicante CF, a third division team that made a remarkable run that spring and was promoted to the second division. [1. They were promptly and harshly sent back down the following season due to an unfortunate tendency to lose games.] The other was second division Hercules CF, my team of choice, with a color scheme of royal blue and French’s mustard yellow, and a large Greek bust as their crest.

I’d be lying if I said Hercules was an great team that year. They were bums. But they were my bums, and I loved them for it. They were just good enough to avoid being sent down to third division, and just bad enough to stay well clear of the promotional zone. [2. In Spain, the top teams play in a division called La Liga, or The League. Anyone outside La Liga is irrelevant.] I went to games, I cheered, and I even bought a scarf from a street vendor. I’d have bought a jersey, too, but Hercules wasn’t good enough to have a team store. I’d have gone beer for beer with Hercules fans, but Hercules had neither fans nor beer. [3. Their stadium, Estadio Rico Perez, had two bathrooms and one concession stand, which sold non-alcoholic beer, potato chips and soda.]

This was not a team that featured many star athletes. Some teams put their best players on posters. Hercules put Jesus.

Jesus can save, I suppose, but he can’t score. That’s why the year I studied abroad, Hercules finished in sixth place in the second division, almost entirely on the strength of star midfielder Tote. Tote carried the team again in 2008-9, when the team finished fourth, just points away from promotion to La Liga.

This seemed alright with me. Hercules were bums, and I felt that they belonged somewhere right in the middle of second division. In a way, their continued mediocrity reminded me that the city I’d studied abroad in hadn’t gotten too big for its own good.

But then this season, the breakthrough came. I checked the box scores and the post-game reports weekly. I watched as Hercules got out far ahead of the pack, seven points clear of the third place team in the second division. Tote and the boys were a lock to advance to La Liga. But I also watched as that lead disappeared, as Hercules’ new fans panicked and called for the coach’s head.

Alicante, it seemed, would be spared success in the end.

And then, with two weeks to go in the season, my bums got a break. The two teams ahead of them choked; Hercules, meanwhile, got an 87th minute goal and a 2-1 win. In the last game, all Hercules needed to do was beat Real Union, the second-worst team in second division. Win, and Hercules was headed to La Liga. But, I reminded myself, the game was on the road, and besides, this was Hercules. I prepared myself for humiliation.

And then they won.

I don’t know how long it will last — the last time Hercules made La Liga, in 1996, they were sent back down at season’s end. But I do know that next season, Real Madrid and Barcelona, among others, will come to Alicante, Spain, to play. And a team that was lucky to draw a few thousand fans two years ago will be playing in front of a packed house.

I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. I fell in love with a group of bums. But now that they’re in La Liga, they’re heroes. Their fans might be able to buy overpriced Hercules gear in an actual team store, or use bathrooms that have actual working sinks. Their games might actually be broadcast on American ESPN. People might actually expect them to win. It will be different. Not better, necessarily, but different.

It was easy to love them as some second-division bums who nobody had ever heard of. It was easy to root for them because I didn’t have to take them too seriously.

But now that they’re champions? Now that Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo will be coming to town? It’s all becoming real. I’m suddenly forced to make a decision: do I take my level of fandom up a notch? I root for the Terps, the Caps, the Nats and the Tigers. Do I start really rooting for Hercules too?

It was all so much easier when they were just bums.

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When You See Me Sprinting Through an Airport, Please Step Aside.

There’s this amazing moment in one of Carl Reiner’s and Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man” sketches, when Reiner is moving through a line of questions about the early days of man. He’ll get to the good stuff in a second — questions about Joan of Arc, questions about the secrets to longevity — but first, he’s got a softball. “What was the main means of transportation back then?” he asks.

Brooks’ response is classic deadpan, and he crushes it. “Fear,” he says. “You’d see a tiger, and you’d run a mile in a minute.”

We don’t have such sources of transportation inspiration anymore. Except for one, really: the fear of missing an airplane.

On Thursday, I was nearly confined to the multi-thousand square foot beast that is Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

So I ran.

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The last time I made the airport sprint was in San Francisco. My shuttle to the airport was late — by an hour. My flight was on time. From curb to last-call at my gate, I’d been given 14 minutes. But San Francisco International is a relatively easy airport. Each wing has its own security checkpoint, servicing just a dozen or so gates, and I didn’t have any bags to check in, so I butted in line, apologized profusely and then ran — my left hand keeping my pants up, my heavily duct-taped roller bag and belt over my head and waving behind me. I ran like Reggie Bush on a punt return, dodging travelers, spinning away from golf carts, my eyes upterminal at all times. I made it to the gate — the very last gate in the terminal, of course — in time.

I gasped.

I heaved.

But I was on the plane.

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My sense is that Americans, in general, love to procrastinate. We also love to be lazy, to lounge around and to waste time.

So it should follow, logically, that getting a few hours to kill at the airport would be an American pastime.

That’s how I used to feel, actually. When I was young, I’d to ride the subway down with my dad to National Airport in D.C., and we’d sit by the windows and watch the planes take off. Some fathers and sons went to baseball games or the zoo to relax; we went to the airport.

But most Americans don’t see the airport as a relaxing place. That’s why we have a phrase for the occasion: stuck at the airport. Or worse: stranded at the airport.

In all your years, have you ever heard anyone outside of a first class lounge talk excitedly about an extended airport layover? Don’t worry about me, honey. I’ve got four whole hours to spend at Boston Logan!

As a society, we are not claustrophobic, but we fear airport-based confinement, and all of its trappings: patience, non-reclining chairs and doubly-overpriced Starbucks.

Maybe it’s just the way we define airports. We break them up into sections — Terminals, we call them — but we view them with a lower case ‘T.’ As in: beyond curable. Beyond suffering.

As in: the stage just before the light.

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The first sign of trouble hit my inbox on Thursday. There they were two e-mails from Continental Airlines informing me that my flight to Houston had been delayed. I looked at the details. Both said my 8:35 flight had been delayed to…. 8:35. Whatever.

By the time I’d gotten to San Antonio, the departure monitors told a different story. The 7 a.m. to Houston still hadn’t taken off yet. The 8:35 was delayed until 10:15.

My connecting flight in Houston left at 10:30.

I’ll fast-forward for you: I got on a non-delayed 9:15 flight, due to land in Houston’s Terminal C at 10:10. The connection was over in the B gates, no. 75. High numbers are never a good sign, and when my San Antonio flight stalled on the runway for 10 minutes — broken radars in the control tower, the captain said — I wasn’t optimistic about getting to B75 in time.

But we touched down at 10:04, and I was sitting in row 8, and the flight attendant said that since so many people had been delayed that morning, please, for the courtesy of your fellow passengers, let’s have only the passengers with urgent connecting flights stand up when the plane stops.

The plane stopped. The first eight rows stood up.

One guy was connecting to Kansas City. Another to New York. Someone else to Albuquerque, I think.

The doors opened, and we ran.

We ran through the jetway, where the emergency alarm had sounded when the gate agent had goofed in a rush to open the doors for us. We ran through the noise and into….

…Terminal E. Not, as I’d been told, Terminal C, only a quick one-hop subway connection away from my B gate. Instead, I was in the third-to-last gate in the terminal farthest away from where I needed to go. I’d have to cover over a mile of airport in about 12 minutes.

Naturally.

But my next gate hadn’t changed: B75. At least I knew my destination.

Houston Intercontinental Airport

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There are three keys, in my opinion, to surviving the airport sprint:

1. Use the Reverse Jinx: Sitting in San Antonio International on Thursday, I knew two things:

A. If I didn’t eat, I’d make my connecting flight but not have enough time to grab a bite in Houston, and I might not eat anything until 2 or 3. That wouldn’t do.

B. If I did eat, I’d miss my connecting flight and have three hours of waiting in Houston, with plenty of time to eat. And I wouldn’t be hungry, because I’d already eaten. That wouldn’t do, either.

So I grabbed a sandwich and secretly hoped to reverse jinx my way into the perfect scenario: eat early and make my connection. (Spoiler alert! It paid off — except for the part where I had to sprint through an airport terminal with a belly full of McMuffin. But more on that later.)

2. Be Loud: When you’re running, make sure people hear you coming. Be loud, and people will clear a path for you as you run. An airport sprinter is a wrecking ball-in-waiting, so make your presence known. Yell, holler, wear clogs — whatever it takes. There’s a reason those airport golf carts have sirens on them.

3. Look Desperate, But Don’t Panic: If you only take one piece of advice here, take this one. When you’re clomping down a terminal, you want people to look up and instantly know which person is rushing to a flight. Your face needs say, Please, for all that is holy, don’t make me stay one second longer than I need to in this place. But internally, you’ve got to stay poised. I’ve seen roller bags go flying out of control in airports. Stay in control, and let your legs do the rest.

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I ran right, then left, then across a moving walkway. My roller bag skidded behind me; the duct tape on the handle seemed to be holding things together nicely. I wheeled past the international terminal, passengers from Guam and Guatamala looking both groggy and very much not on high alert for me, this 6’6” thing cannonballing into Terminal D, where I could catch the inter-terminal train. Up the escalator, passing a couple on the right — sorry! — I made it to the train.

If the Google Maps tool over at WalkJogRun.net is to be believed, I’d just sprinted just over a quarter mile. In sandals. While wheeling a bag and hauling another one over my shoulder. Through an international terminal.

We reached Terminal C at 10:19. I had a chance, but the train pulled away slooo….. ooowwww…. wwlyyyy. We inched along. Terminal B arrived at about 10:22. My gate was just closing, if I was lucky. Maybe the airport door hadn’t shut, too. I had two minutes, tops.

Out on the platform, there were two escalators, both headed down. The guy going to Kansas City was a step behind me, and I beat him to it. I was in full-on “American Gladiators” mode, demolished the escalator and spun onto the main concourse. Lesser airport gladiators would crumble at the sight of the Houston Intercontinental eliminator; I hung in.

I should say here the floors in Terminal B are different, older. They’re a thin layer of carpet over concrete, and I was running in sandals. The thwap of each step echoed behind me, like “Riverdance” in snowshoes.

Terminal B opened into a square-shaped area, with four corridors leading out from each corner. Gates 76 and above were up on the side next to the train.

Gates 75 and below were not.

So there was another run, this time through the square, past another food court and to the right. It was the home stretch, the last tenth of a mile sprint through the B concourse, and my legs sagged. I wanted to quit. I wanted to stop sprinting. I was defeated.

And then, the tunnel turned. There was light.

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“Breathe, honey, breathe.”

I continued to pant, gasp, sweat. The gate agent, Rosetta, printed out my boarding pass. “Oshinsky? Coming from San Antonio? No way I thought you’d make it. Where’d you come from?”

E22.

“That’s amazing.”

The airplane door hadn’t closed yet, so she walked me down the gateway. I was still sucking for air. She mentioned something about wishing that she had my speed, and I laughed. No one had ever called me fast before.

I tried to tell her that, but it came out something like, “Eyyyee [gasp] mmmm not [gasp gasp] thaaat fass [gasp] ttt.”

I was boarding a puddle jumper, so my roller bag had to be checked plane-side. My breath was coming back, and I asked Rosetta if airport employees had a word for what I’ve just done.

“You know, we used to call it — well, before the trial — we used to call that the O.J. sprint.”

I looked back at her before I board the plane. I got here, I wanted to tell her. But I won’t go there.

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What Journalists Can Learn From Phish.

They’ve only made one music video — and that was back in 1994. Their concerts last hours — and sometimes feature as few as four songs. Fans say they’re the group that’s taken the torch — an already-lit, funny-smelling, tightly-rolled torch, I might add — from the Grateful Dead.

They’re the most popular jam-band on the planet. [1. Sorry, Dave Matthews.] I’m talking, of course, about Phish.

But this band isn’t just about playing extended jams for potheads. They’ve made a living out building a brand so powerful, fans spend the summer driving around the country following them.

Any band with that kind of power over their fan base might have a few lessons worth learning. That’s why Phish is the focus of the latest edition of “What Journalists Can Learn From….”

1. Adapt to Your Audience: Back in the 1990s, when most bands were just selling tickets via concert venues or Ticketmaster, Phish came up with an interesting concept: Phish Tickets By Mail. Explains Wikipedia:

For each Phish tour…, specific instructions for mail order were listed in the band’s newsletter, “Doniac Schvice” (and, later, Phish.com), usually involving envelopes of a specified size, postcards and return postage in the event the ticket order was not fulfilled. There were very specific details that needed to be done, in an effort to deter scalpers and ticket brokers. The ticket orders were then outsourced to a business to fulfill the orders. In the final years of the mail order process, ticket orders were processed by the staff at the Flynn Theatre in Burlington, Vermont. The order in which ticket requests were fulfilled was random, and no seniority or special treatment was given to any fan. These tickets were printed in limited amounts on colored paper with foil and some sort of design as shown above, and only issued through mail order.

Weird? Certainly. But weirder than having using an army of 12-year-old boys on bicycles as your primary method of news distribution? Probably not.

But here’s the interesting thing: old-fashioned newspaper distribution is still around, but Phish Tickets By Mail has evolved. In 2001, the band moved all pre-sales online. At first, some fans were inconvenienced. But here’s what Phish proved: if it’s easy enough to use, fans won’t mind that initial inconvenience. Phish concerts sell out faster than ever — and a team of mail-opening employees at a theater in Vermont are no longer needed. The lesson: keep production costs low and operate in a lean way, as long as it’s in the best interest of your fans.

2. Make It Your Own: Phish is famous for their covers, from Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” (see below) to ZZ Top’s “Jesus Left Chicago.” They’ve covered so many songs, they needed a separate Wikipedia page just to document them all.

What makes Phish’s covers unique is the way the band adapts them into their set. You’re not getting a bar-for-bar cover; if anything, you’re in for a Trey Anastasio guitar solo, or maybe an a capella rendition of a southern rock classic. They’re just covers, but to fans, they don’t feel like them. The lesson: The song doesn’t need to be an original, but the way it’s being delivered does. The way you package your stories matters.

3. It’s Okay to Be Weird: Phish has become famous over the years for unusual stunts. Here’s an example straight from their Wikipedia page:

During this fall tour, the band challenged their audience to two games of chess, with each show of the tour consisting of a pair of moves. The band made their move during the first set, and, during the break between sets, the audience members could vote on their collective move at the Greenpeace table. The audience conceded the first game at the November 15 show in Florida, and the band conceded the second at their New Year’s Eve concert at Madison Square Garden. Having played only two games, the score remains tied at 1-1.

There’s so much to love about this, but here’s my favorite part: it’s fan engagement on a massive scale. Fans can actually see the impact that they’re having, and they’re deeply invested in what’s going on. The lesson: If it seems weird, or unfamiliar, or out-of-the-box, then that’s probably not such a bad place to be. Some of the best ideas are the uncomfortable ones.

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Why Twitter is Like Times Square, and Why Nike Ads Are Best Shared on Facebook.

In 1999, in an attempt to defeat the morning ratings Cerberus that was Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker, ABC countered with an unusual move:

They built a studio in Times Square.

If you’ve been to Times Square in the last decade, you know which one I’m talking about. Other networks have studios there, too — MTV’s ‘TRL’ studio among them — but the ABC studio stands out. Their wrap-around ticker is the reason why.

Around the edges of the building is this wavy, double-deckered contraption that was Disney Imagineered specifically for the studio. Short news bites scroll across the ticker 24 hours a day.

Now I want you to imagine going to Times Square. You’re standing in the middle of the busiest intersection in the busiest city in the world. There are thousands of cars streaming past you, thousands of people walking past you. A giant Coca-Cola bottle is magically refilling and emptying itself, while a dozen Jumbotrons flash ads nearby.

The distractions are endless.

Now look over at that double-decker ticker at the ABC studio, and consider this: you’re standing there, all the world whizzing past, and you’re watching words scroll past you on a screen.

In a way, this is a lot like how Twitter works.

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The problem with the Internet is not a lack of content. In 60 days, according to YouTube’s latest numbers, more video is uploaded to the site than was created by ABC, CBS and NBC in the past 60 years. There are 400 million active Facebook users, and more than 75 million Twitter users.

But that’s before you factor in mainstream media sites, blogs and — most massive of all — e-mail.

All of these sources are creating content [1. Which I’ll simply describe as words, pictures, sounds or some combination of the three.] The problem is — and I am by no means the first person to suggest this — a shortage of filters to sort through all that content.

There are only two filters that most consumers use to find stuff on the Internet:

1. People you know
2. Google

This is kind of a problem.

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Mark Cuban said it well at South by Southwest: it’s not the production of Internet content that’s expensive — it’s the marketing.

If you’re creating something on the web, you’re up against an infinite amount of content.

But that’s not the case with Twitter. On Twitter, it’s even harder to stand out, because the amount of content that Twitter produces each minute is astonishing — the site records more than 50 million tweets per day, at last check — and the filters for Twitter are even less developed.

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What this is all coming back around to is this notion that it’s even possible for a brand to stand out on the Internet.

It is.

But it takes a really impressive effort to pull it off.

So consider the example of Nike. The World Cup starts in exactly 21 days, and Nike’s heavily invested in some of the biggest soccer stars in the world, including Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo and Didier Drogba. So Nike did what it always does for a big soccer tournament: they pulled out a massive marketing campaign.

What they came up with — and I’ve embedded it below — features the biggest names in the soccer world. Plus Kobe Bryant, Homer Simpson and Roger Federer. And some awesome footage from around the globe.

This afternoon, over at one of my favorite soccer blogs, I saw the ad for the first time. I clicked through to the YouTube page. The video had only 300 views.

But below the video, there was an unusual note: the video had been “unlisted” on YouTube, which meant that it wouldn’t show up in search results or on Nike’s YouTube channel. The URL was secret; unless someone pointed you to it, you’d never know it was there. It’s the YouTube equivalent of Harry Potter’s Platform 9 3/4. Either you know it’s there and can get to it and experience it, or you can’t. You’re not going to be able to just stumble upon it unless someone else shows it to you.

What Nike was saying when they unlisted the video was, To prove how loyal our fans are, we’re going to make it as hard as possible to find the ad. We’re betting that the video will go viral anyway.

So I tweeted the link to the video and went to take a nap. When I woke up, I saw that my initial tweet had gotten a few retweets. I went back to the YouTube page for the spot to see how it was doing.

It had over 97,000 views.

What the hell happened?

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I went to bit.ly to see if they could offer insight. They did. The link I’d tweeted  — http://bit.ly/czPBdf, which redirected viewers to the YouTube video — had been clicked on over 7,000 times. [2. To be clear: I was not the first person to tweet that specific bit.ly link, though if I was video view no. 300, I must’ve been among the first.] 114 of those clicks came from twitterers, some tweeting in English, Portugese, Spanish and even Korean.

But 5,700 people had shared the link on Facebook. Another 1,100 had “liked” the link on Facebook.

So I followed the trail of links.

Nike has only 8,000 followers on Twitter. On Facebook, they’ve got over 600,000 fans.

And how did Nike mobilize that Facebook audience to action? They’d invited them onto the virtual red carpet.

On May 15, they announced that they’d be screening the video on May 20 at 6 p.m. They invited their fans to watch.

On May 19, 80,000 people had RSVPed on Facebook to watch. On the morning of May 20, that number was 108,000. At launch time, 120,203 fans had confirmed themselves as guests.

So what happened? Nike leaked the video at the appointed time. People showed up to watch it. And then people starting sharing it. And sharing it.

And suddenly, an invisible link on YouTube had 100,000 views in a matter of minutes. [3. Some 48 hours later, the video is closing in on 4 million views. As for the initial link I tweeted: the number of times it’s been tweeted hasn’t changed. But an additional 125,000 people have shared the video on Facebook, and another 70,000 have liked it.]

And the best part for Nike: these were people who actively wanted to watch the video — a video that, I should add, is actually a paid endorsement for shoes and soccer balls. These were people who, technically, were going out of their way to share the video with their friends.

But it didn’t feel like those people were going out of their way. When the barriers to sharing are as low as a click, how could you?

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A few months ago, my dad was asking me about something I had written. He thought more people deserved to read it.

“But I thought you put it out on Twitter,” he said.

I did, I explained. To my 200+ followers. A few clicked; a few retweeted it. And that was it.

“Doesn’t being on Twitter doesn’t make something viral?” he asked.

No, I told him.

But I don’t think my dad’s alone in his confusion about how something gets exposure on the web. He’ll notice content when it rises to the top. He’s rarely aware of that content’s journey to that point.

So here’s the takeaway:

Twitter works best in tandem with an actual event. An election, an inauguration or a big Congressional vote. The Super Bowl. A conference or a class. Anything, really, in which there are large amounts of people gathered and discussing/watching/listening/reacting to a single thing. That’s when you really get to see Twitter at it’s best, because that’s when great discussion is happening in real time.

But when it comes to sharing content, Facebook is still tops. Facebook taps deeper into those Dunbar circles. Twitter tends to hit the outer edges.

If you’re standing in Times Square, Facebook’s that friend from New York who says, “Hey, see that thing over there? That’s what you’re supposed to be looking at.”

Until Twitter creates the filters to replicate that experience, people will still turn to Facebook first to share.

But they are sharing. And for any brand, that is very, very good news.

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Why We Need to Change the Concept of Time — Immediately.

Today is my birthday, and my annual reminder of how much I dislike the concept of time.

Truth is, time is unfair. When I see someone wearing a watch, I don’t see someone with punctuality in mind. I see someone slowly counting down the seconds until the grave.

What is a day, after all? It’s a very strange segment [1. Do we divide anything else by 365?] of a larger year, which we define as the time it takes for the Earth to circle the sun. And if you’re like me, you can’t get enough reminders that the Earth is spinning blindly at 67,000 miles per hour through a vast and unknowable universe.

Point is, I’m just not a fan of time, especially on birthdays, when it serves to remind me that I’m getting both older and no closer to figuring anything out. Human years are so scarce; if we’re lucky, we get 70 or 80 years to live, and that just doesn’t seem like enough.

What I wish was that there was a way to make time seem less scarce [2. This, in itself, is a pretty strange thought, because time is infinite. What I really mean to say is that I mean to make my available time less scarce, though I’m not sure when I became so possessive about it.]. So I’m proposing here, on May 16, 2010, that we adjust our notions of time.

The human attention span is, depending on which Google source you trust, somewhere between five seconds and 20 minutes. 150 years ago, the Lincoln-Douglas debates lasted anywhere from five to seven hours at a time. Today, those debates would be reduced to mere soundbites, because our attention spans are shrinking. Who has time for five hours of political discourse? Hell, who has time for any political debate involving more than a few bullet points?

In the 2010, we have more distractions than ever, and we’re as easily distracted as ever.

But if that’s the case, then why are our standard units of time not adjusting to our shorter attention spans?

Let me put this another way: when Andrew Carnegie died, he was worth $475 million. But $475 million in 1919 isn’t worth what it is today. Luckily, we’ve got tools to compare the dollar from 1919 to today’s dollar. [3. In today’s money, Carnegie’s fortune would be in the billions.]

We adjust to each age. When humans got taller, we raised the height of our doors. When people got fatter, we widened the space in the supermarket aisles. A news cycle used to last months. Now it lasts hours. We constantly recalibrate to what’s happening now.

But we still allow time to remain constant. I don’t think that’s fair.

If a piece of paper can become more or less valuable over the course of time, then, well, why can’t time, too?

The best part is, there’s some precedent for this.

Abraham lived to be 175. His wife, Sarah, continued to have kids well into her hundreds. Biblical time clearly didn’t use our rigid time structure.

So what’s stopping us [4. Besides common sense] from altering our concept of time? I’m okay with seconds and minutes and hours — anything that can measure the length of a YouTube video seems like it should stay — and I’ve got no problem with sun-up-to-sun-down days. But why shouldn’t we alter our concept of years? Does any modern human have the capacity to actually pay attention to something for an entire year?

How’s this sound: let’s decree that each season is considered a year. The modern calendar year gets split into fours, so today, I’d have just turned 92 — and I’d still be entering my prime.

What happens to everyone else?

Dick Clark becomes four times as valuable. Gyms get four times the number of resolution-related membership drives. Champagne companies see four times the rate of sales.

And best yet: wasting a year doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, because there are so many more of them to waste. Sure, it’s just a way to trick the brain into believing that we’re not screwing around as much as we really are.

But it’s working.

Our concept of time is changing. It’s time to make it official, I think.

When I die, I want my rabbi to be able to say, “Here lies Dan Oshinsky, who died at the age of 375.” The crowd will nod appreciatively. Honestly, who’d believe that a man so old could have accomplished so little?

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