Touch me there

It’s a curious thing, intimacy. Most of us aren’t more than passingly good at it and we all worry, at one time or another, about “giving it all away.”

Here’s the thing.

When the web first entered daily consciousness, sometime around 1997, the only thing anyone really understood the vast reaches of cyberspace—dwarfed today by the supernova of data the web’s become—was that it was a kind of electronic card catalogue…without the benefit of a Dewey Decimal System.

Remember when AltaVista was state-of-the-art search technology? Sure you do. In those days, the whole internet beast was fact-based, driven by what Rob Tait, our fearless leader, came to know as “speeds and feeds” when he worked on the Apple account back when he had hair.

Call it the Golden Age of Dial-up. And dial-up internet didn't do intimate.

No more.

What’s really going online appears chaotically innovative but underneath the hood, it’s really quite simple: the web is growing more and more like the human nervous system. [A metaphor that the web’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, is working on exploiting right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Center_for_Collective_Intelligence]

That's huge, no? But marketers in general are still immune to a shockingly simple rule of life on the web: it’s not your mom’s web any more.

Broadband—which gave us Fresh Baked’s métier, online video—now means the web is experiential far more so than hierarchical.

What’s this mean? It means that the degree of emotional engagement—collective emotional engagement—is exploding before our very eyes.

Sure, Facebooking is one facet—instant intimacy in instant neighbourhoods. But then there's the tantalizing prospect of far deeper, far more authentic emotional experiences, drawing on the collective creativities of the worlds of theatre, film, advertising, gaming, the performing arts…even geography, given the power of geographic information systems to bring databases to life.

Marketers ignore this tidal wave of web-change at their peril.

In my humble opinion, we’re living smack-dab in the middle of the kind of technological revolution Sony incited via the transistor, the handheld radio that sent Motown and The Beatles into superstardom from Tokyo to Toronto. The Walkman, which made Michael Jackson, the VCR, the DVD, the Flash player: you get the idea.

Every new media technology inspires a revolution in…everything.

Politics, sports, art, communication, cuisine...leisure and education.

Everything.

We connect better. And when we connect collectively online, the depth of the engagement—think: Barack Obama’s Facebook campaign and its amplifying effect on volunteer recruitment and motivation—is earthshaking.

What we do at Fresh Baked is to water one small part of the emotional engagement garden: comedy.

No small thing, that.

The emotional engagement power of comedy—and its already built-in familiarity from fifty years of weekly sitcoms to bring in massive audiences—means that what brought billions of eyeballs to I Love Lucy and Your Show of Shows and Monty Python and All in the Family and Friends and Seinfeld is just waiting to be harnessed for the web.

Repeatedly: week after week after week.

One-off comedy virals be damned: give me a reason to come back to your website every week and see something riotously new and you got me, babe. You just went to the top of my Facebook comments and Digg and YouTube.

People stick around. They pay attention. They engage. They learn to love sticky. And they talk about it.

A lot.

So that’s what we at Fresh Baked do: we slow the web down.

What's that mean, Mr and Ms Marketer? After—even during—their laughter, visitors linger on your website, explore, deepen their interest and willingness to share that interest with others online.

That’s not a virus: that’s experiential marketing, nested in all the possibilities of social communities online.

Via emotional engagement.

Right where we want to be.

Live and be well.