Tag: Community

Geelong Football Club: Theme Song

Creator

Past player John Watts was responsible for the Geelong Football Club’s theme song. He got together with his team-mates during the 1963 season to pen the words.

Fittingly, Geelong won the premiership that year.

Surprisingly, for a footy theme song the music is from an opera. It’s based upon The Toreador March, from the George Bizet’s Carmen.

Geelong Football Club - Geelong Cats

Purpose

A football theme song is a great way to unite the players and supporters. In the AFL, typically the theme song is played after each match the team wins both on the loudspeakers at the ground and as a bonding ritual for the players in the rooms.

Manifesto

We are Geelong, the greatest team of all
We are Geelong; we’re always on the ball
We play the game as it should be played
At home or far away
Our banners fly high, from dawn to dark
Down at Kardinia Park

So! Stand up and fight, remember our tradition
Stand up and fight, it’s always our ambition
Throughout the game to fight with all our might
Because we’re the mighty blue and white
And when the ball is bounced, to the final bell
Stand up and fight like hell!

Source

Listen to an audio version here

The Official Geelong Football Team website

Geelong Football Club on Wikipedia

(image from Wikipedia)

All AFL football team club songs

John K Watts – creator of the song

Comment

In my opinion, the words here are less important here than the actual music and having a catchy chorus. It’s meant to be a rousing tune that is bellowed out by a crowd of players and supporters – not crooned by a sultry singer.

A look at the specific words reveals a few layers of good goal setting:

  • ‘Greatest team of all’ is a strong and broad aspirational goal.
  • ‘Play the game as it should be played’ is a statement of intent around the attitude of the players
  • ‘Remember our tradition’ is a call to the past and all players and supporters that have gone before them
  • ‘Fight with all our might’ is another creative statement of being and action.

The power of this theme song comes from its call to identity. It starts with the magic word ‘We’. And it boldly states who ‘we’ is: “We are the greatest team of all”. If you wanting to unite your team and community, an inclusive ‘we’ is a great place to start.

PS: I’m a Cats fan, that’s why I featured there song and not one from a rival club. Go Cats!

More

It’s also worth noting that there are occasional updates and tweaks to the lyrics and format.

The Cloud Appreciation Society Manifesto

Cloud Appreciation Society Manifesto

Creator: The Cloud Appreciation Society

Purpose: Because “…we love clouds and we’re not ashamed to say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them.” (Society home page).

The Cloud Appreciation Society Manifesto

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.

Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked. They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul. Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save on psychoanalysis bills.

And so we say to all who’ll listen:Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

Source

Website: http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/manifesto/

Stephen Johnson: The Third Place Manifesto

Stephen Johnson: The Third Place Manifesto

Creator: Stephen Johnson, Director – Social, Community Engine.

Purpose: To highlight the shift to the ‘third place of discovery’ and the importance of community as capital.

The Third Place Manifesto

The ‘Third Place’ Manifesto: Discovery of Community and Contextual Value Within a Persistently Disruptive, Emergent Social Ecosystem.

We find ourselves today confronted by an overwhelming frequency of radical transformation and information overload.

Extracting meaning from this paradigm and accordingly, addressing opportunities and challenges which arise through ubiquitous connection and socialisation, has become the conversation of our time.

Here, community has become currency, exercising great power and influence over the way we build brands, innovate products and services, solve complex problems and manage, or destroy reputations.

These signals usher us toward a world where knowledge, power and productive capability may be more dispersed than at any time in our history.

This white paper posits that we are on a trajectory toward another sociological tipping point – the paradigm of the ‘third place of discovery’; an ecosystem which demands context and meaning and is represented by overlapping communities of passion; a mix of semi-public, semi-familiar social and commercial transactions, wherein value creation will be fast, fluid and persistently disruptive.

Source

Download the white paper: http://www.communityengine.com/the-%E2%80%98third-place%E2%80%99-manifesto-discovery-of-community-and-contextual-value-within-a-persistently-disruptive-emergent-social-ecosystem