RSS
Home
Content has always been king: Just ask Sherlock Holmes
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
.jpg)
Never seen a Holmes flick? Never read a story? You still know whose hat this is.
I’m back on the soapbox about how creating sharable, mashable, evolving content that can hop from platform to platform is a key to any sort of sustainable and successful outreach.
Leave it to Wired to remind me that this has always been the case. Scott Brown’s piece from this month’s truly brilliant and maddening issue* is a charming and fascinating bit o’ perspective about how Conan Doyle’s introduction of Sherlock Holmes kicked off “the dawn of fandom as we now know it—zealous, fractious, hydra-headed, and participatory. Of course, these 19th-century proto-nerds didn't use the phrase fan fiction. The term wouldn't enter the lexicon until the mid-'60s, around the publication of the earliest fanfic journal, the Star Trek-themed Spockanalia.”
You may or may not realize that most of your interactions with the famous detective are the result of adaptations and parody, and not the original source material. Most of the movies you’ve caught on those late nights when you were flipping through the channels waiting for sleep to find you co-opted Holmes and his stalwart hetero life partner Watson and created new mysteries to solve (like when he helped defeat the Nazis, for instance). According to the article, Conan Doyle actually purchased fan fiction to give him ideas for his own stories—he must have understood that propagation of his content by others could only be a benefit for him.
Sir Arthur created two immortal characters with relevance in any age. His content—the few stories he wrote in the late 19th century—is still around; but the key to global propagation, still going strong more than 100 years later (Ritchie and Downey Jr., please don’t screw it up), is that he created characters who could be vital and fascinating in any situation. You may never have read an original Sherlock Holmes story, but you know who he is.
When I was IMing with my favorite Holmes aficionado, I couldn’t think of any other character with the same kind of power - Shakespeare is adapted and interpreted, but the stories remain essentially the same. Robin Hood is reimagined again and again, but he never leaves Sherwood Forest (this doesn’t count). What other fictional character can jump from setting to setting and still remain true to his creator? Seriously - think about it.
I have a young adult novel coming out in October, and you can bet I’ll use every channel possible to create a multi-platform experience for potential readers. The plan I’m creating involves opportunities to get to know the characters in unique, interactive ways, and the time between publication of the first and second novels in the series will be used to draw readers into the narrative even further.
So what does that mean for you? It means you need to create content that you can offer to your audiences, set it free, and watch where it goes. Create multiple opportunities for people to interact with your messaging; invite them to add to it, to make it their own, and to share it, then leverage their good work to build awareness (I’ll give you some practical advice on how to do this sometime soon).
*J.J. Abrams + Wired folks: I think I found a few of the clues... I can’t believe I finished reading the magazine from cover-to-cover, but I’m still poring over it, paging through backward and forward, looking for hidden treasure. You can tell your advertisers that the number of impressions for this subscriber went way up this month. My retention is high, though I’m pissed about the cigarette ad with the invitation to share coupons with friends. Yuck. Time for you to stop accepting that kind of advertising.
Related Articles:
Comments
