homeless ‘golden voice’ man

3 days ago, a newspaper called the ‘Columbus Dispatch’ took video of a 53 year old homeless guy collecting on the side of the road who held a sign up saying “I have a god given gift of voice, i’m an ex-radio announcer who has fallen on hard times”. And yes, he does have just that…

update: original video (which had racked up over 12m views when i checked last) has been pulled due to a copyright claim, i guess some people are just scrooges…

That video has gotten over 11 million views on youtube, the guy has been on news channels (a search in google news for ‘homeless man’ throws up 1400 articles over the past few days) and he’s been thrown all sorts of job offers and hired by a basketball team as a stadium announcer and given a house.

Although it’s been just 72 hours since the original video was published, we already have parody videos of it which is probably the ultimate compliment…

You know a video is destined to become ‘legendary’ when it gets 11m views in 3 days and has parody being made of it. Just yesterday i was commenting on how crazy the views were going up… when i first seen this video it had less than 1m views. By yesterday evening it was at 4m views and this morning i woke up to see it has 11m+ views!

This is why video is unrivalled – i said yesterday you can’t match it for emotion and you can be sure had this homeless guy not appeared on video and spoke face to face with the camera, he’d still be there today collecting on the side of the road.

Hiring this guy also makes a lot of sense now for businesses. He’s an internet celebrity and the hottest property around right now, he’ll single handedly draw in listeners to a radio show or draw in viewers to more youtube videos. So this is a great example of why businesses need to react in real time to take advantage of ‘opportunities’ like this. An early bird catches the worm as they say 😉