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Eric Hultgren Eric Hultgren

iHeart perfection

We are a family that celebrates the moment, in the moment. October is for Halloween, November is for Thanksgiving, December is for Christmas, January is for Angie's birthday, I get February 2nd, and the rest of February is dedicated to Valentine's Day. So, I have always found it uninteresting to be the first one to play Bing Crosby before pumpkins are put away. That said, once Thanksgiving is over - I am ready to celebrate the holidays and want to listen to songs that take me back or songs I want to share with Evelyn. 

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In order to get music these days there are a number of ways to do it; Spotify, iHeart Radio, Beats Music, the failed iTunes Radio, or Pandora and I have held a paid subscription to all that have one and spent hours consuming music out of each. All of these products have something going for them but, for me, when it comes to holidays - iHeart Radio curates playlists and stations to a sublime level untouched by the other apps. 

When used at a high level radio becomes the soundtrack for the consumer's life, that could be touching ballads that remind them of the intimate moments of fall, the pulse-pounding club jams that sound better with the top down, or in this case, the songs that remind you of traditions and moments you have shared with friends and family.

This is one of the reason there aren't any new "classic" Christmas songs - because it is nearly impossible to capture that magic. But this season, iHeart Radio is doing it 24 hours a day on their app, everywhere you go. 

Make no mistake, I love Beats music but it has not curated a holiday list to near the level that iHeart has - and for all the emotional algorithm it boasts, I find myself listening in an echo-chamber of songs and artists I already own and rarely, if ever, discover new music that excites me that wasn't a referral from a friend. 

If I had one musical wish it this Christmas would be that, for someone to create an app that helps me actually discover new music that I might not come across on my own. Music for me is the most powerful art form on Earth and that discovery is the most important part of the next phase of the industry. But this holiday, if you need a musical companion to get you in the mood, the undisputed champ is clearly the crew at the iHeart Radio app. 

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Eric Hultgren Eric Hultgren

Social in the time of #Ferguson

Last night the grand jury returned and did not indict Darren Wilson on any of the five counts in the killing of Michael Brown. Immediately after, the streets in Ferguson erupted into looting and violence. We could ask why you would release the decision at 9pm if not to insure that violence happened, we could debate if the decision was correct or not, or did the news media on site escalate the violence because the people had a captive audience?

All of these questions are valid and worth investigating, however I have not read all of the data released last night so my view on this event, likely as is yours, is skewed by what we have seen or in rare cases read leading up to the decision.

Instead, I would like to talk about social media last night, specifically the marketing that happened while Ferguson was burning. Many brands think that Twitter is a killer medium to talk to an audience, I am one of those people. I love the immediacy, I love the ability to get an actual discussion going in a way that is virtually impossible on facebook, and I love the ability to live tweet events and wire into what is happening right now. 

Last night I started tweeting a few minutes before the decision and continued well into the night chasing down rumor and reports of tear gas vs. smoke bombs, was there a gun shot or not, what buildings are on fire and retweeting or sharing that information to my friends who were doing the same thing.

Many brands however, were not paying attention last night.

In fact, there were so many brands who had scheduled deaf tweets about sales or promotions during the Ferguson riots it was embarrassing to anyone who markets for a living. So embarrassing that at one point Buffer, who specializes in scheduled social, tweeted this explanation out on how to not have your scheduled tweets or facebook posts go during the riots.  

So here are some of the worst in my feed last night and we start with a brand that should know better....radio, digital or otherwise, is known for their speed - this is not that case.

Star Wars fan? These are not the riots you are looking for...

Pinterest fan? Take a break from #Ferguson by "repinning."

Sirius XM The Highway has sent only 9000 tweets but last night they got this ill-timed go-cart one out.

Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this, how you should not schedule Twitter, because sooner or later this will happen to you and it will burn your brand. You can see him talking about Twitter below

Friends trust friends and the fastest way for a brand to burn through that trust is to do things like last night. If you want to use Twitter, that is awesome but make sure you know how it works. As a brand you have a responsibility to your audience and that responsibility extends through every hour of the day in the age of social. As with any medium, social is just one tool but it is one that you can build a tribe around that will help you into the next phase of your business, or you could tweet your next sale or widget during a crisis and watch as that tribe dissipates. 

Human beings are social creatures that seek out the communities that interest them, as a brand be interesting, be compassionate, be social.

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Eric Hultgren Eric Hultgren

A brotherhood formed in the crucible...

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is not something you do, from the moment that you put on the gi, BJJ becomes a part OF you the way a symbiote would feed off of a host changing its primary functions and altering the primary objectives that it once had. To that end, if you had even gotten past the first class you had made what the normal world might call "friends," but in the world of BJJ they would all become brothers or sisters - some you love more than others but all of them shared blood, sweat, and tears with you. Training, serious training, in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a crucible as much as it is a way to stay in shape, or learn to fight.

In the past twelve years I have trained with 5 different jiu jitsu schools, under three different black belts, with hundreds of brothers and sisters I have shared the mat with, all of whom had an impact on my training and ultimately my life. There are a core group that I will always be close with and probably train with well into my 50's with but there are the others who have come and gone in my life for one reason or another. We have either fallen out of contact, trained at other schools, or life intervened. But there isn't a single person I have trained with that did not have an impact on me in some way, that is just how BJJ works.

There is a ranking system (or belt system) in BJJ and I was fortunate to have made it to blue after a very long road that taught me skills that would serve me for the rest of my life. Things like, just when you are about to achieve "the thing" life can get a whole lot nastier before the good stuff happens. In jiu jitsu when you achieve a belt rank (all except Black Belt) you have to go through what is called "the gauntlet," when your entire team hits you as hard as humanly possible in the back (twice) in order to test if you are truly ready to earn the belt...

I had gone through it before Joe with another dear friend Bryan Litwin who got his purple belt the day I got my blue - to this day I can still tell you what being hit by 25+ other teammates feels like in a specificity that might suggest it was not insanely painful. But that is one of the tenets of a crucible right, the testing part.

Today my BJJ brothers are being tested and I write tonight for them as much as for me, which might be unfair to you - but getting these thoughts out has been helpful and for that understanding, I thank you. 

Life is a surprisingly difficult task if you let it and the trick of not letting it at times appears all too daunting to even manage. So, I write to everyone I have ever shared the mat with to say to you, thank you. I may see you every week or not in many years - but every single one of you has made an impact and just about every one of you is going through the same emotions I am tonight, so I hope this helped and since Dylan Thomas' poem "Do not go gentle" seems to be all the rage (in Interstellar and the WWE14 commercial) I shutter to use it but it seems to fit all too well...

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Eric Hultgren Eric Hultgren

A look at the Halo 5 Multiplayer

I have been playing a fair amount of Halo: the Master Chief collection this week and soon I will be able to jump into the beta for Halo 5, which I am excited for. Above is the first look at some of the new weapons and character mods that you can expect when the game drops next year, it looks killer.

Halo was one of those games that changed the way I looked at gaming, like Adventure, Pitfall, Donkey Kong or Pac man, Super Mario Brothers, Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto III, Skyrim, before it and now Destiny (made by the same company) which I believe is one of the best games I have played in a couple of years. 

But Halo always held that soft spot for me just because it was THE title on the original XBOX and each version that came out after, not named OSDT, was an improvement on the platform. Sure Bungie is on to Destiny, but the franchise still holds some magic for me and to plug into the Master Chief collection, play the original game, in either its launched version or an enhanced version, was enough of a parlor trick to have me hooked.

I have tried to love COD, I really have, and there are certainly ones I have liked better than others. Advanced Warfare might be the first one I have played for a single hour and not turned back on, but the matchmaking seemed to favor the upper level players (as it always seems to) in a way that I have not found in Destiny, Titanfall (who has one of the best out there), or even Halo. Each time I play those three games, I have fun - Call of Duty has been a lifelong frustrating relationship that I can't wait to get out of, but here I am sucked in again. 

Halo: The Master Chief Collection has been a welcomed distraction to nights of creating presentations for work, prepping notes for class, or the onslaught of events that are seemingly endless this time of year and my hope is that Halo 5 builds on that energy, The beta will open in December and I hope to see you there!

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Eric Hultgren Eric Hultgren

250 the untold story

Five years ago a couple friends and I had an idea of starting an MMA show with the audacious goal of getting it on the radio - which seemed insane at the time. I love podcasts, but felt that this was a sport and a product that deserved to get out via a mass medium along with the passionate fan-base that comes along with podcasting to create an MMA community that we wanted to hangout with and talk fighting.

At that time, it was a much different show with around 6 people (bad idea) trying to fill the 45 minutes we were given out of the gate, we started after UFC 100 and really had only a "nugget" of an idea of what to do. Guys like C Bryan, Brad Dennis, Paul Cicchini, Mike Allen, + Joe Teague, were all part of that first launch and in that first year some of those shows were just terrible, but to quote Hemingway, "the first version of anything is shit." So, we pressed on through the first year doing shows we wanted to do, mistakenly talking to local fighters and promoters which was something we would decide never to do again after the first year and stuck to it. That decision ultimately was mine, it came from an event I did at a bar in town where they held an event on a summer night and to get people to come, sponsored the show - but as the sun faded and it got cooler, the cage floor got wet and the main event ended when one of the fighters broke his own arm walking to meet his opponent, we fired the client and never took another one.

As the second year started we found our way into some of the larger events and even started talking to some of the undercard fighters in the UFC. After six months we had made an impression on a guy named Ryan Simms who let us talk to Dana White. Heading into that interview I am not sure I had ever been that nervous, nor have ever been since. Dana was brilliant and after that the floodgates opened for us as the show began to change. A couple guys got busy or just faded out and as luck would have it one of my dearest friends Ken Evans was coming back to GR from Kalamazoo.

What you wouldn't know at that time is that I had always had Ken in mind for the show because of how perfect he would be for what I wanted to make, but contracts have a way of keeping great ideas apart, so I had to wait. But that wait was absolutely worth it.

As the show went on we kept getting fighters on the show and at one point in year three we had talked to everyone on the UFC roster who spoke English, which was a milestone for us. As the UFC was growing, the show was growing. We had been picked up in Detroit and picked up a fan in Daryl Parks. At the time, Daryl was the head of talk at Clear Channel (now iHeart Media) and took time to help craft this show into what you hear today.

We had been told by "talk luminaries" to do 7 min segments because shorter "was the only way radio would let you grow," advice we gave the big middle finger to, he agreed and instead told us to do two longer segments and see if Premiere Radio Networks wanted to pick us up - a tryout was scheduled.

The thing about being able to do something only once is that there are a lot of things that could work against you, that night they did. The tryout wasn't terrible, but I was hardly shocked we didn't even get a phone call to tell us they didn't want us. The side-effect was we got picked up by two other stations and got some amazing advice from Daryl that planted the seed of what would be the show you hear today.  

The next time the universe would intervene I would be training at 3rd Law BJJ one Sunday morning when I was paired up with a guy from San Diego who came in with Budd Wright. I had trained with Budd and while I had no idea what a Sean Dizay was, I was alway up for training. About 6 seconds into our sparring (in BJJ they call it rolling) Sean submitted me from his guard by planting his knee into my jaw/eye socket. I tapped immediately and I think he thought I would be mad because he had a pause about him, instead I asked, "what was that? and can you show me again" and just like that we became fast friends. It wasn't long after I met him that I had called some Muay Thai fights for him that I thought he would be a great edition to the show. 

In those 4 years we had picked up some amazing fans, lots of whom I talk to nearly every week. One of them was Joe who out of the blue asked if he could help with the facebook page, I am not sure I even thought about it for a second before I responded, yes. I am not sure why I was not more protective of the page, but he just seemed like the guy for the job. Once he was comfortable he asked if he could come into the show and of course we said yes - as with most of this history fate entered and one day Sean didn't show so Ken and I asked Joe if he wanted to jump on the mic and the final piece of the modern WOW Show was formed. 

I tell this history as I am watching UFC 180 for a couple of reasons, one because I wanted to give a peek behind the industry stuffs and two, because none of this happens without an amazing understanding wife + lot of luck - which we have been very fortunate to have. Luck, amazing friends, and fans who have supported us at every turn and for that I am eternally thankful. I am especially thankful for my wife because Angie has been a fan of the show since the original idea, it took me two years to figure out she really just wanted to talk to GSP (which she got to do) but the support was vital and I trust she knows that.

Finishing the show this week was bittersweet, it was an amazing feeling to have done 250 of them ALL OF THEM with dear friends. But, I very much would have liked to have had Sean and Ken on that one. The good news, I plan on doing another 250 so I am sure we can fix that by episode 500. 

So if you have listened to one minute of one episode or memorized Dr. T's insane explanation of the plot lines of TUF episodes - THANK YOU. From the bottom of our hearts Ken, Sean, Joe and I thank you.

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