Garr Reynold over at Presentation Zen spotted this video called ‘Built to Last‘.

“This 3-minute video presentation called Built to Last won first prize in The Congress for the New Urbanism video contest a few weeks ago. The rules for the contest were simple: “Create a 3-minute maximum video that illustrates how the principles of New Urbanism – density, design and walkability – can effectively respond to current environmental challenges that we face.” Watch the video.” Garr Reynolds.

Here is another great example of creative communication. Built to Last combines a great mix of music, large/bold text, images and story that helps to convey a message. In it’s own right it’s a great example and it won the video contest … BUT … what’s even more important is the ‘spreadability’ of this story. With Web 2.0 tool like Slideshare, YouTube and Blogs, we can now take ‘consumption‘ of media to a new level … that level is ‘sharing‘ with others who want to follow and be part of this Movement.

This video will not change ‘everyone’ … in fact most people won’t even watch it to the end. That’s not important though. As Seth Godin in his book ‘Tribes’ (and Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody) points out – if you try lead/convince everyone you’ll end up leading /convincing no one. Just like Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movement, he didn’t change everyone’s mind … he simply stepped up and lead a worldwide group of people that wanted to be lead.

Clay Shirky likens the Social Media revolution to a Triathelon. Last century we were all running a single leg of the race … that leg was called ‘Consumption‘ of media.  You know … billions of hours of human thought wasted every weekend watching TV commercials (Clay calls this our Cognitive Surplus).

In the past decade, masses of people (millions and millions) have taken up the Triathelon and added 2 more legs to their race. Those 2 legs are the ‘Production‘ and the ‘Sharing‘ of media. What has emerged is an explosion of new ‘stuff’ on the internet and the creation of vast amounts of new knowledge. Wikipedia is a classic example of this. Wikipedia is what happens when people start to apply that ‘Cognitive Surplus’ to the Production and Sharing of videos like Built to Last.

In Sum

Watch (Consume) and enjoy this video …

Send it to your friends (Share) who might care about it … and start to (a challenge to you all) …

Create (Produce) your own sideshows and videos and that communicate stories for which you are passionate about … you never know, you might even start to lead a movement and make the world a better place!

Cheers

Geoff