Most music videos are kinda ho-hum, but occasionally one pops out that takes the medium to another realm. Check out the visual feast in the new video for the Massive Attack song “Splitting The Atom” as it is truly striking to look at in that “how’d they do that?” kind of way.

The song is also cool in that groovy, downbeat Massive Attack style.

If you use Twitter, you can go to this site, log in with your Twitter account and watch more Massive Attack vids from the groups new album Heligoland. It sends out a tweet when you watch the vids. Definitely a good way for a band - or any one for that matter that is using video to promote something - to utilize Twitter.

You may have caught wind of a job opening we had last fall for an Assistant Content Manager. We took a different approach, asking people to Tweet us their applications. We ended up with some excellent responses and ultimately a very well-qualified employee.

Our Content Department is expanding and we’re once again on the hunt for an Assistant Content Manager. We’re looking for a content machine who’s social media savvy and ready to hit the ground running.

Again, we’d like you to Tweet your application to us. This has proven to be a great way for us to see how applicants think and that they understand Twitter and the social web. Feel free to take a look at the applications we received last fall and of course the Tweet that lead to a job with BFG.

Click here for a complete job description and let the creativity flow. You’ve got 140 characters.

[Update: The Tweets have begun! This is a collection of some favorites:

-@lala122 has Georgia on her mind.
-@rebeccacullers shows off some interactive skills with 9 reasons to pick her.
-@FilipSzy shows his sense of humor and introduces “Judge Onion.”
-@SethFMichalak shares an attention-grabbing portfolio piece.
-@KaceWrangler takes us inside his social media world via video.
-@A_Trev shares a social media rap video.
-@WilliamTheMac interviews himself in this entertaining video.
-Like our man Gary Vee, @SamTheButcher knows it’s all about passion and shows it off in a video.]

BFG’s Sloane Kelley and Hal Thomas had the chance to talk Twitter and jobs with Jessica Kiss of WJCL and TheCoastalSource.com.

You can read more of Jessica’s reporting on this story here, and you can read the back story of BFG’s use of Twitter to hire their newest employee.

When Facebook and Twitter roll out new features or a redesign, the changes are often met with resistance and complaints. When MyYearbook, the social network for teens, saw a need for a redesign, they took a far different approach, one that the larger networks may actually be able to learn from.

MyYearbook went with a crowdsourced plan that accepted user submissions for a redesign and factored in community voting. The approach lead to a new design that the community favored 3 to 1. The main changes are to the network’s logo and navigation although profiles will undergo some revisions soon, as TechCrunch points out.

This video offers a look at MyYearbook over the years and the new look:

If you’re still not sold on the power of Twitter, look no further than Valentine’s Day candy, specifically those colored candy hearts with pithy messages. This year, Sweethearts candy will feature the message “Tweet Me” among the more traditional “Love Me” and “Be Mine” hearts.

It’s not the first time Sweethearts have featured technology-driven messages. “Fax Me” and “Email Me” are the techno messages of Valentine’s Day past. In this case, the Twitter message actually seems to fit the medium quite well, as explained in USA Today.

“We’ve always been short and sweet,” says Jackie Hague, vice president of marketing at New England Confectionery, maker of the Sweethearts brand. “In this case, the technology merged with the ritual.”

Apparently, the Twitter move was consumer-driven. An online survey last year asked consumers for new sayings and “Tweet Me” won out, according to Hague.

Sweethearts executives phoned Twitter executives, and a match was made. “It’s even more proof that people can say anything in short messages,” says Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. “A 140-character message may seem short. Sweethearts are even smaller.”

I love it when a plan comes together.

Photo: Copyright 2009 Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

Last week, Rob posted about Coca-Cola’s recent viral success with its Happiness Machine stunt, where Coke used a fake vending machine to dispense everything from free drinks to a six foot sub sandwich to unsuspecting college students.

Great. So why retread old ground, you ask?

It is important to point out that what made the Happiness Machine go viral is the same thing that made The Dark Knight the winner of the 2009 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Movie: they were both something that people enjoyed watching so much that they felt compelled to share it with others.

You see, brands can’t just create a viral video any more than a studio can just make an award-winning film. Videos go viral; films receive awards. Certainly, going viral can be a goal for brand generated content, just as winning Best Picture can be a goal for a film. Going viral happens after the fact, as does receiving awards. But in both cases, achieving either goal is byproduct of the same thing: creating compelling content that connects with people on an emotional level.

This is why I find it a bit disappointing that so many people in the advertising industry have quickly adopted the term viral with seemingly so little thought about what the word really means. (Here’s a good riff on why “viral” is a terrible descriptor. Maybe we should use something more appropriate to what we hope will be the end result, like “contagious content.” But the last thing we need is another buzzword, and I digress.) Even Advertising Age now has its own weekly Viral Video Chart.

Just because a brand makes a funny/wierd/cool video and posts it to YouTube does not make that video viral. The United Breaks Guitars video and its successor–those are videos that have gone viral. The Levi’s Unbuttoned Films have arguably gone viral. And yes, Pants on the Ground, painful as it may be, will go down as viral phenomenon.

What all of these videos have in common is a certain x-factor; they are just outside of the mainstream, are usually not overproduced, and often have a grassroots element. These are not videos most corporate folks would have predicted to be viewed hundreds of thousands (even millions) of times. Contrast the aforementioned videos with the Evian Rollerbabies, which to date have spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks atop Advertising Age’s Viral Video Chart:

Hmm, let’s see. Cute little babies dancing on roller skates to non-threatening old school rap music thanks to the miracle of really expensive post production and special effects yields (as of the time of this post) over 17 million views on YouTube. A surprise? Not exactly.

So while defining exactly which videos are viral or have gone viral can be a bit ambiguous–and maybe even an exercise in futility–the one thing to take away is that, much like winning a People’s Choice Award, the best way to create content that has the best chance of going viral is to create something that is authentic and connects with people on an emotional level. Surprise them in a way that they cannot help but share.

[Disclosure: Coca Cola is BFG client, but Happiness Machine is not our work. We still dig it, though!]

MyBrandz bills itself as a social media community offering brand lovers the convenience of interacting with all their favorites in one place. Members can discuss their favorite brands, share brand information with others, receive updates from brands, and “expand the brand community.” See their video overview here (Video contains brief nudity, so don’t say you weren’t warned).

The problem I see with MyBrandz is that people are already sharing information about, and interacting with, brands in other social media spaces (e.g. blogs, Twitter and Facebook) where updates and interactions occur within the context of a larger social network. People tell others about brand experiences, both good and bad, conversationally via these social networks. In this instance, I am unconvinced that a more narrowly focused social channel like MyBrandz is actually good thing for brands; it removes the brand fans from the general conversational stream.

Unfortunately, MyBrandz reminds me of another experiment in brand consolidation, Firebrand, where you could watch all your favorite commercials in one place. Ultimately, “advertising as content” failed. I can’t help but wonder if MyBrandz will share a similar fate.

Last year, one of the emerging trends on Twitter was Twiction, where people assumed the identities of fictional characters and tweeted as such. For some fun examples, check out James Bond the Dog, Mad Men’s Don Draper, and Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World.

A recent promotion for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum takes this idea to the next level by tweeting the daily details of JKF’s 1960 presidential campaign in real time. It’s hard to say at this point whether or not twhistory lessons will find traction as a Twitter genre, but you have to admit it’s a rather creative (albeit anachronistic) use of Twitter as a learning tool.

Reddit.com co-founder Alexis Ohanian talks about how Greenpeace losing control of an online promotion was the best possible thing that could have happened.

Flavors.me is a new tool that promises to help you corral all your digital ponies into one place. According their website:

Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the Internet. Ideal for personal homepages, lifestreaming, splash and microsites, celebrity fan pages, commercial promotion, brand marketing – and everything in between.

Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.

Although still in restricted Beta testing, Flavors.me could become a powerful tool for use in personal branding, a phrase that came up more than once in a recent webinar entitled Bringing Creativity to Your Job Search. The webinar’s host, Joshua Waldman of CareerEnlightenment.net, says this in a recent post:

A resume is a necessary evil… [But] too many job seekers spend all their time polishing off a resume to submit in an application process, despite recent statistics. In one study done by Manpower, 40% of jobs actually come from networking. Only 16% come from job boards, and therefore resumes alone.

Waldman suggests that there are three main questions an interviewer needs to answer in order to make a decision about hiring you: Do I like you? What motivates you? Can you do the job? As Waldman points out, the first two questions are primarily questions of personality.

Make way for the rise of the personal brand.

To make a careful distinction, the rise of the personal brand is not about the commoditization of individuals (although for years career services folks have been teaching us to “sell ourselves” without any backlash to the terminology). This is actually an opportunity for personalities to shine; a spotlight on the very thing that makes each of us unique. Such a paradigm shift should come as a welcome relief to those (like me) who have always felt it difficult to communicate the sum total of who they are in a twenty minute interview. Imagine being able to supply a potential employer with one link (hello, Flavor.me) to multiple options for getting to know you better: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, your blog, etc.

Learning to Self-Edit

Building a personal brand does not happen without a certain amount of strategy and personal responsibility. In social media spaces, honesty is always the best policy. No one likes being “gamed,” and there is a general disdain for pretending to be someone or something you’re not. But with that said, you should think about your audience (friends, family, co-workers, potential employers) and develop appropriate filters (permission settings in Facebook are great place to start). In short, learn to self-edit; just because you can say something online doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Photos and detailed accounts of what happened to you this one time at band camp may not be the kind of brand recognition you are looking for.