Greg Canty Fuzion Blog

When I do my social media courses I do a simple exercise to get the participants thinking about their online etiquette.

I ask them the following question: “What are the characteristics of people that you like doing business with?”

I see the puzzled look on their faces with many thinking ..I thought I was here to learn all about social media?

After a while they get into the exercise and I get a list that normally includes characteristics such as honest, reliable, efficient, decisive, knowledgeable, trustworthy, helpful and professional. (I do get a few mentions for ‘people who pay their bills’!)

These are big things but I also get softer characteristics, which are just as important such as passionate, optimistic, humorous and I even get a few saying I like people who are ‘like me‘!

A simple but yet powerful word that wraps a number of these things together is the word ‘Nice‘. In all of those business courses and management books do we ever hear about the magical power of being ‘nice‘ and what it can do for you?

I found myself proudly reading an article recently about my son, Brendan Canty (www.feelgoodlost.me) who directed the Hozier ‘Take me to the Church’ video, which has until the moment of writing incredibly received nearly 52 million views on YouTube.

This is one of these miraculous stories where a music video, which was done on a shoestring budget for an up-and-coming hugely talented artist called Hozier went global. The day after the filming Brendan told me that Hozier was playing in the Pavilion in Cork and that I shouldn’t miss it. Pathetically I was too busy and missed a special intimate gig as a tiny crowd were lucky enough to witness a star who was about to be born.

Brendan played me the video in the Fuzion office before it was set live and we all knew it would be special …it was a great song, with a powerful theme all captured brilliantly by Brendan and Conal of Feel Good Lost and featuring a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers.

The video erupted instantaneously online as soon as it was published and in no time it had a lot of tongues wagging and the media caught hold of it. When the Huffington Post featured it you could feel it had the potential to have a huge impact globally. Hozier deservedly won a record contract soon after and has gone onto be a huge success internationally.

You might think that Andrew Hozier-Byrne might forget about the enthusiastic troop who made this video as he laps up his newfound fame but at every opportunity this ‘nice‘ gentleman always mentions the role that Brendan and the guys played in his success.

In Brendan’s interview he was asked about how he got his first breaks in the industry and I was proud to read what he said: “I started reaching out to people online and they started reaching out to me. People are basically nice if you’re nice to them”

Nice works online and come to think of it nice works offline as well..

Take me to the “nice” church!  

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion

Fuzion offer Social Media Consultancy and Training in Dublin and Cork

Tags: Brendan Canty, Feel Good Lost, Hozier, Nice, Take me to the Church

This entry was posted on December 22, 2014 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Music, Parenting, Personal Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.