The Barbarian Blog

Social Media Hot Sheet - Week of 1/27/12

Cody Shankman — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:16:00 -0500

From politics to privacy policies, this week's Hot Sheet has it all. Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Earned Media team. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Hangin’ with President Obama

Google’s New Privacy Policy

Social Sharing, Illuminated

More on the "Digital Revolution" story, with input from @BBHLabs

Matthew Scott — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:40:45 -0500

So my previous post, which basically wonders why people seem to be getting so up in arms over this Digital Age (as it has been dubbed) we are in, and the alleged unfulfilled promise of it, has yet another illuminating angle. This time from the folks in London. And it makes perfect sense, and answers the question for me:

So desirable is the digital dream that we have mistaken its potential for reality. This delusion has been driven by an unprecedented bubble of hype, driven by the media, digital advocates and technology brands. They have created, believe and propagate the myth that life has changed irrevocably.

Journalists, whose own industry has been heavily affected by digital media, give it disproportionate coverage and importance; seamlessly suggesting causal relationships between the advent of technologies and real life events.

“Majority report: looking through the digital hype” by Ed Booty, Strategy Director, BBH London

Its a great read, and it comes packed with references and one particularly elegant graph. But in so far as it compliments my prior post is alluded to in the quote above.

Simply put, the reason people seem so up in arms about it, is because the ones writing about the digital revolution so much are in big media, the very same industry in turmoil right now (and arguably for the past two decades). And they are pissed, simply because they are on one hand looking at the destruction of a livelyhood they know well and on the other hand seemingly not seeing any benefits of the rampant disruption caused by digital.

Or, in short: they are asking themselves “that’s it?! wtf!”

Of course I heavily dig the “noisy burst of chirping...

Josh Carr — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:06:22 -0500

Of course I heavily dig the “noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo”, but when the groove finally unwinds and lays it down, this tune becomes wide open for ANYONE.

acousmata:

Area: “Mela di Odessa”

From the album Crac! (1975)

Active from 1972 to 1983, Area was a pioneering Italian group that creatively synthesized currents of American popular music such as jazz and funk with experimental tendencies in song form and sound production. Led by the Orphic incantations of vocalist Demetrio Stratos, Area featured a rotating cast of musicians anchored by the core group of Giulio Capiozzo (drums), Patrizio Fariselli (keyboards), Ares Tavolazzi (bass and trombone), and Paolo Tofano (guitar).

Crac! is Area’s third album, following Arbeit macht frei (1973) and Caution Radiation Area (1974). Although they disbanded within a few years of Stratos’ untimely death in 1979, the group’s early records earned them a spot on the legendary Nurse with Wound List, a hugely influential catechism of underground music circa 1980.

“Mela di Odessa” (The Apple of Odessa”) opens with a noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo, leading into a driving jazz-rock texture topped by a piercing electric keyboard solo. Stratos’ trademark wordless vocalizations occasionally double the instrumental parts, leading through a frenzied labyrinth of improvised passagework. About halfway through, the mood changes quite suddenly, as the the drums and bass introduce a funky, off-kilter groove. Twittering electronic noise, Stratos’ spoken words, and brassy interjections—including a quotation of “Taps“—bring the track to a highly ambiguous close.

In his liner notes to the 1990 re-release on Cramps Records, Franco Bolelli writes: “To sink one’s teeth into the Area apple is to experience a taste which is neither the penitential taste of the avant-garde nor the tamed taste of the spectacle. Area has proven that the poetic and the experimental is not at all difficult and suffering. Indeed, it can be energetic and contagious.”

@barbariangroup made this 2011 Timeline of Social Media Milestones

Benjamin Palmer — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:46:19 -0500

@barbariangroup made this 2011 Timeline of Social Media Milestones

2011 Timeline of Social Media Milestones

Noah King — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:11:00 -0500

In an effort to make sense of the rapid changes in social media, we took an entire year’s worth of links and announcements from some of the key players and wove them into a simple linear narrative.

What began as hundreds of blog posts and stories has been distilled down to 65 of the most memorable milestones. Our intent was to provide a glimpse of the progress and innovation that took place in the past year across six social media platforms. If you care to go a bit deeper, click any individual story to link to its source article.

We’ve had a lot of fun putting this timeline together and hope you enjoy it as you relive the key highlights of 2011.

Great Moments in Barbarian History

Nick Bonadies — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:25:00 -0500

December 9th marked 10 whole years of existence for The Barbarian Group, and we had this big ol’ party to celebrate.

For this auspicious occasion, we built an iPad gallery displaying great moments in Barbarian history, chronicling everything from our pneumatic beer cannon to that one time a few of us got arrested.

If you couldn’t make the party in NYC (or if you partied a little too hard and missed the gallery the first time), you can still revel in that great historical volume. Ladies and Gentlemen, Great Moments in Barbarian History.

Shout Out To Fresh Veggies!

Ian Westcott — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:56:00 -0500

I recently helped build a site for Stacey Murphy’s Go Green! class at the High School for Public Service. As part of a lesson on the effects of advertising on people’s eating habits, the kids created their own ads for fresh vegetables to contrast the junk food ads we’re used to seeing out in the world. The result is called “Shout Out To Fresh Veggies!”, and it’s a competition of sorts: With the help of social media, the class is trying to see which messages are more effective in promoting healthy eating habits. You can help out by checking out the ads on the site and liking and/or tweeting your favorites to help spread the word!

Team Carrot (photo by Stacey Murphy)

Team Strawberry (photo by Stacey Murphy)

Social Media Hotsheet - Week of 1/13/2012

Noah King — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:25:00 -0500

Back by popular demand is the Earned Media team's Social Media Hotsheet. In this installment, the battle for social ads heats up while the debate between image-based content and text-based content continues. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Brands Embrace Pinterest

A Whole New World for Google Search

Facebook Fights Back with New Ads

Good Content is Shared More Than Images

Have we realized the potential of the Digital Age? Or is it coming later?

Matthew Scott — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:26:08 -0500

I recently read two articles that, when juxtaposed against each other, helps better explain my personal philosophy of how we use technology now. Ergo, I’d like to share my opinion on the benefits/pitfalls of the oft-discussed digital age in the context of these interesting articles.

Do check out the articles for yourself, but here are the snippets that made the lightbulb above my head illuminate:

News becomes a guiltless form of entertainment because we view news as weighty and worthy of attention. We get to have our chocolaty treat while arguing it is actually nutritious. But the ubiquity of the Cloud extends this beyond the six O’clock news. While the leading edge in the old media was entertainment masquerading as news, now we have entertainment masquerading as just about every component of our waking lives.

So for all the apparent newness we have become a culture of the remix. We think that we are in a technological revolution, but what we really have is more of the same, just faster, ever-present, and in color. We are mistaking high resolution and portability as an advancement of culture.
[Rick Bookstaber titled ‘Culture Grinds To A Halt In The Digital Age’]

But then there is another way to look at this:

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images.

A series of tests in recent years has shown that after spending time in quiet rural settings, people “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.
[Pico Iyer, ‘The Joy of Quiet’]

I agree with Bookstaber that news-as-entertainment-as-content-filler is what we are consuming presently. Of course there is a limit to how much useful information our brains can process and indeed, we are already way past that point in the current iteration of the web.

However, to say that all we are doing is reproducing decades old culture and content is beyond the scope of the news-as-entertainment observation. At the very least it ignores what culture has been created by these new behaviors created by our technology advances. At the worst, it applies (possibly outdated) decades-old definitions of ‘culture’ and ‘art’. To say that because we haven’t witnessed advances in civilization is a failure of the digital age is wrong.

Technology has no agency, good or bad. The discussion should actually be on how people are currently using all this new technology, and how they will use it next. The issue is simply that the digital age is very new; and too open for those of us used to restrictions. We have yet to understand what the limitations in the digital age really are.

I believe that we will look back in 5-10 years at our current behavior as naive and juvenile. I mean come on, an ‘age’ by definition is viewed on a longscale. We have to get through this mess now to start making the really useful stuff.

And here is where Iyer’s article comes into play. It reminds us yet again to find balance between our connected and disconnected life. But what I found relevant to the discussion of the digital age is the author’s summarizing observation. In his experience, Iyer suspects that the next generation of digitally-native children are most likely way ahead of us “in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential” and how they balance consumption with reflection.

Indeed, the digitally-native kids of today will probably be the ones to create new metaphors for us to parse and consume information with better clarity and attention. And they will be the ones that look back at our current slaving to 24hr connectivity as naive. They will view our feeble attempts to grapple with information overload as juvenile.

Quite simply, we cannot pass judgement on the Digital Age just yet, its only gotten started. I can’t even imagine the final benefits society will realize from the potential unleashed by the technological revolution.

Javascript in Textile Test

Greg Kepler — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:52:00 -0500

The other day, Noah wrote a blog post about getting javascript into a textile blog using the “notextile” tag. This is my little test to see if I could get that working. If you’re not seeing anything besides about 500 pixel of white space, that means that it’s not working for you. If you do see some spider webs, congrats it works.

Disclaimer: This javascript sketch is using the html canvas tag, so that probably why you’re not seeing anything.

Social Media Hotsheet - 2012 Preview

Noah King — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:13:00 -0500

2011 was a monumental year for social media. To summarize these events and look forward to another amazing year, our Earned Media team has put together a list of the top ten biggest trends and predictions. What do you think 2012 will bring?

Social Music Will Continue to Grow

The New Facebook and You

Mobile Will Crest in 2012

Google Plus: No Longer the New Kid on the Block

Influence Heats Up, Privacy Concerns Arise

Easy Image Sharing Proves to be Recipe for Success

Design Continues to Matter

Personal Data Showcased as Personal Experiences

As Seen on TV: YouTube in 2012

Amateurs’ Hour to Shine

Adding Custom Javascript and HTML to Textile Blog Posts

Noah King — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:49:00 -0500

Here at The Barbarian Group, we use Textile for our blog to help make publishing fast and easy. But occasionally there are blog posts in which you want to have more control over the markup or you want to embed more sophisticated web objects than simple text and images. After struggling with several tough posts, I’ve spent some time learning how to work around these limitations. In this post, I’m demonstrating how to embed custom javascript code into a Textile blog post.

What happens if you simply add javascript to your post?

It won’t work, because any time Textile encounters a less than (<) or greater than (>) sign, it treats it as an html tag and acts accordingly. Fortunately, you can encapsulate your markup within <notextile></notextile> tags, and your code will remain entirely unadulterated by Textile.

To demonstrate this, below is an example of a simple bit of code that toggles the visibility of text sections using javascript.

Working Demo

Section 0 Heading

Section 1 Heading

(click to read more)

Down and Dirty with Barbarian Chet Gulland

Lexi Peters — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:02:00 -0500

What’s your role at TBG?
I lead the Strategy team, which includes strategic planning and analytics.

Uh, cool, what does that mean?
To say it simply, we bring together an understanding of people, culture, media, brands and business into a smart, core idea and framework that will get our clients from point A to point B. So when a brand says to us “people don’t know what we stand for”, or “we want to grow our share of the market from #3 to #1”, or “we need help bringing our brand to life on the Internet”…It’s our job to try to see the whole picture around the situation and focus everybody in the best possible direction.

So we lead the early stage of most projects and try to create and moderate a super collaborative approach by sitting down with everyone on the team that first time and saying, “ok, so what should we do and how should we do it?”. We do a ton of research. Throughout the process we are part of the core team that works through creative ideas, builds them out and puts together a program. It’s also our job to hold our work accountable and make it smarter. So we spend a lot of time looking at data, helping refine ideas, monitoring our work out on the Internet, and making sure it’s accomplishing what we set out to do.

We have an awesome and growing strat team. My role in general is to lead the group and help us be as good as we can be. I’d say our style combines the best of the traditional Account Planning you’d find at general creative agency, digital strategy, and comms planning. We are definitely not just digital strategists – we aspire to bring the same level of rigor around consumer and brand thinking in the traditional world, but coming at it from a digital-centric point of view, and hopefully a fresh and forward thinking approach to strategy in general.

How’d you end up as the Executive Director of Strategy?
I basically grew up in a family sports apparel business, and have been in love with business and brands since I was a wee little tween. The Internet came along at a perfect time for me – I was about 13, and was living in a pretty remote area of Ontario Canada, so the Web became my window into a bigger world, and an obsession. I’ve been lucky to be able to put those interests to use at some great agencies – the last two being Anomaly and Droga5 – working on clients like Puma, Activision, Converse, Jawbone, Virgin America and such. I loved all those experiences but always craved being with a creative group obsessed with the Internet, and there’s no better place than The Barbarian Group for that.

How’d you arrive at TBG? (and no, we’re not talking transport)
I’d known Ben and Rick for years just through the ad and tech worlds, so we started talking when the opportunity came up, and then I met everybody and we all liked each other.

Who’s your main sidekick when it comes to getting the job done?
I’m lucky in that I get to literally work with everyone here in some capacity. We have a killer strat team that’s pretty amazing to work with everyday.

Most exciting project you’ve worked on here?
Everything we’re doing on GE and where that is headed is very exciting. And I’m excited about a lot of the stuff in the pipeline that is top secret.

Best thing about your job?
I mean it’s a pretty awesome job – I spend a lot of time trying to understand what is happening in the world and think about ideas that will do something new to it – that’s fun.

Not-so-best thing about your job?
We’re surrounded by amazing opportunities left and right and generate a lot of ideas that we all really want to make happen. They don’t always get to become a reality and you have to stay strong and keep moving.

First blog you check every morning:
Twitter. When was this question written, 2006?

Favorite apps?
I liked Instagram, then got tired of artful shots of breakfasts, then have recently totally fallen in love with it again. Instapaper of course. Pretty much anything Insta seems to appeal to me.

All time fave thing you’ve ever found on the Internet?
I remember really clearly the very first time I used the Internet. A family friend took me to a wacky Metallica fan site, and the page took about 10 minutes to load. But we sat there watching, totally transfixed, and I’m not sure I’ve yet been able to match that level of pure excitement about this awesome new thing.

Which decade produced the best music?
I’m not very nostalgic, and tend to listen only to music of the now, which some people think is weird. So I think this decade is already the best and will prove to be the best (if the world doesn’t end next year).

What’s the last furry thing you touched?
Ben found this weird furry faux rock that we brought to meetings for a few days as a good luck rock. It seemed to work pretty well.

Bowie or Blondie?
Robyn

TBG: X Tenth Anniversary. Party.

Lexi Peters — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:41:00 -0500

Hi everyone,

On Friday, December 9th, The Barbarian Group officially turned ten years old. And in true Barbarian style, we threw a Big Bash. But this was no ordinary Barbarian bash (not that they ever are…) This was fancy. Bowery Hotel fancy. So we flew all the teams in to New York, put on our black-tie-best and partied the night away to celebrate ten glorious years. We even had an iPad wall to chronicle the most notorious (and…unbelievable) moments in TBG history.

After partying to our favorite tunes from DJ Eleven + DJ Japanster, endless drinks, signing the world’s largest birthday card + eating the most obnoxious birthday cake we’ve ever seen, we kicked off our heels.

At midnight, we hosted a very official unofficial after-party at an unused theater space. Where we got super unfancy. Because no Barbarian party would be complete without a little bit of down and dirty…

Check below to see the insanity first-hand.

Happy Anniversary Ben, Keith + everyone at TBG, here’s to ten more xo

Guest of a Guest: “The Barbarian Group Tenth Anniversary Party at The Bowery Hotel“

Paper Mag: “2011’s Best Memes“

And best of all, The TBG:X Photo Booth Pics. You’re missing out if you don’t click through, basically.

*And we commissioned the very talented Alan Forbes to create this thing of beauty, also known as the TBG:X invitation.

NB: Jonathan Toubin was originally scheduled to play the first set of the evening, but was tragically involved in an accident last Thursday. Our thoughts and prayers continue to be with his family at such an unfortunate time. Jonathan is still in critical condition, please ‘Like’ and keep updated at the IheartJT Facebook Page.

Content Conversations: Margot Bloomstein on Curation, Branding, and Ethical Content Strategy

Sadia Latifi — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:01:00 -0500

I posted the results of my questionnaire with Margot Bloomstein last week as a prelude to this heavier discussion with the content strategist and author of the upcoming Content Strategy at Work. We talked a bit about how content strategy fits within brand strategy, the dangers of algorithmic ‘curation,’ and ethical content strategy. Read on!

At Barbarian Group, the content strategy department sits within the user experience department but often collaborations with our strategy department since many of our techniques overlap. You identify yourself as both a brand strategist and content strategist. How do they distinguish themselves or work together?

When I say that I’m a brand and content strategist, I don’t offer the breadth or depth of expertise that a branding agency might. I feel like as long as I’m upfront with my clients about that, that’s usually appropriate for their needs on a particular project. Often times, clients might come in and say we’re a new company or we’re an existing company trying to relaunch our brand on the web so maybe they already have figured out how their brand works offline, but they need help translating it to a new medium or figuring out the voice and style and what that means for content types that they should be supporting. So I really practice brand strategy in the context of content strategy. I think that also speaks to my background – I have a BFA in design – so I have approached it from a visual and verbal angle, and I think it also more broadly speaks to the breadth of content strategy. We say that content strategy is a pretty broad umbrella in that there are people under it that focus more on metadata-driven content strategy and content models, and maybe other people that focus more on workflow and governance issues as they relate to content management and still other people that focus more on brand-driven content strategy. That’s really where I tend to work.

Have you worked in tandem with a branding agency or branding strategist before?

Early in my career, definitely. I learned a lot by working alongside those folks especially how they view the entire marketplace in which we were introducing a new brand. And I worked just as much with usability and user researchers, and that’s helpful to understand the audience that’s going to be engaging with the brand. Now that we’re focusing more and more on content strategy as it works in communities and social media and user generated content, we have to constantly balance the needs of the business and the needs of their target audience and kind of establish the goals and rhetorical arena that exists between the two.

I wanted to talk about one of your recent presentations on creation, curation, and ethical content strategy. What on the web are you responding to right now?

At a semantic level, over the past year, I was seeing more and more how people within content marketing, SEO, and content strategy realms were kind of co-opting the term curation and using it interchangeably with aggregation and editing in some contexts. That bugged me because I knew that we were getting behind something as a buzz word without really understanding all of its implications. That’s why I wanted to reach out to the more traditional world of curating content – museums and exhibit designers – to find out more about when they use that term – what do they mean, what does it entail, and what are the implications and responsibilities that they have to convey.

That was the conversational milieu that I was responding to and then specifically on the web, when I was seeing content, it appeared like it was aggregated entirely by an automated engine without human oversight. That was really bugging me because I knew from a branding perspective that it was undermining what it was attempting to do. It was undermining the credibility and thought leadership of the brands that were producing it.

Do you think aggregation of content or amassing content is ever useful?

It’s definitely useful as an intermediary step in an internal process. I’m a big fan of automated curated solutions to sort of establish the scope and gather the things that a human curator can oversee and say ‘Okay, this obviously came in through the keywords and it came in through a Boolean search but it’s not right for our target audience, or it’s not right because it’s talking about an especially volatile political issue.’ There’s always got to be that person that steps in and until our so-called “curation solutions” get better at sentiment analysis and understanding nuance in the way that people do, it’s going to be very tough to replace what a human can do in that process.

Does curation ever pose a threat to open access to information, in the vein of Wikipedia or WikiLeaks?

Well, I think the idea with open access to information is half of the equation. We’re giving everyone access to all of this content with the assumption then that people will look through it and make their own decisions. That’s great and it works when you have a very focused, niche target audience and a narrow data set, but once you start saying, everybody jump into this, where this is a huge volume of content, then you have to wonder: are people looking through all of it? I look at the challenge of when the Huffington Post says ‘OK, the government just released all of this content and we need volunteers now to look through it to look at what’s important’ – they’re basically saying we need help curating.

Even if we just look at content online, there are billions of websites, millions of blogs, and more content goes up on YouTube every minute than anybody could ever look through in their entire lives, so that’s why we need ways to filter it ourselves. Of course, YouTube gives you ways to filter it by topic and keyword, and they also give you assistance in filtering by showing you related videos that are more like what you just saw and then they’re putting the tools of curation in part in the hands of the viewer, but also in the hands of the content publisher and the person that uploads that video and decides to tag it.

What about the issues of the filter bubble that have been discussed recently? That perhaps too much filter is blocking access to information that we may need to know even if it’s not what we consume regularly?

I think that raises a lot of difficult and uncomfortable issues. Siva Vaidhyanathan spoke recently at edUi. His talk was all around the power of Google and what we recognize as that curatorial power, and he also shared an example of two people conducting the same search with the same keywords but doing them on two different devices or from two different geographic locations and how the content that showed up on the search results was very different because Google was making certain assumptions and the algorithm was basing its results on the results of past searches and what those different users have previously chosen from different search results. It also raises some big challenges around the issues of the echo chamber within our news environment. That more and more we self-polarize and tend to seek out news sources and support viewpoints that we already have – that’s really not that different from going to the search engine, having it either be cookied or that you log in to use it, and it says, ‘Oh, you again and I know the type of content you like and let me show you more of that’ because we’re getting more content within that echo chamber that supports our existing beliefs and our existing knowledge.

You talk about the idea of ethical content strategy. What does that mean?

If we go back to one of the core working definitions of content strategy, it’s that it’s fighting for the creation, aggregation, governance, and expiration of content in an experience. I think it’s easy to focus on the first two parts of it – on the creation and aggregation of content. What are we getting, where are we getting it from, that type of thing. But I think the ethical issues around curation especially focused on governance and expiration are important – you wouldn’t bring content into an experience if you were an exhibit designer and say “Okay, well we’re going to include this particular painting but we won’t think about how to get it back to its original owner after the exhibit is over” or “We’re not going to think about where it needs to go back in our own collection if we pulled it from our own archives.” Or, if content is no longer relevant to an experience – maybe an exhibit has been designed to speak to a particular current hot button topic in the news – the exhibit designer is not just going to abdicate the responsibility of maintaining it and making sure that it’s still relevant to that topic and current. Online, I think we face similar challenges. If we’re bringing content into an experience, whether by linking to it on someone else’s website or maybe introducing a blog post about it, we can’t then abdicate the responsibility of continuing that conversation. That’s why we say content strategy is a committeemen, not just a campaign.

I think the challenge that we face then is how do we link to something faithfully – link to the original source material or give credit to the original copyright and follow whatever rules for that particular originator are. How do we make sure the links aren’t broken over time? Or, if we’re introducing a concept or linking out to a particular item on a website or writing a brief blog post about it, what are we doing to moderate the comments on that blog post? How are we remaining faithful to the content that we’re curating, and how are we remaining true to the target audience so that we’re then bringing them into the experience and then allowing them to interact with that content?

So it sounds like it’s about being responsible and accountable.

Some of it is about the logistics of it – like making sure links aren’t broken. But then there are the other issues of what’s our governance plans. Or we’re writing this number of blog posts this week, so what’s our plan to engage in the comments of those blog posts? If we’re making the commitment to start to start engaging as a brand on Twitter, how frequently will be tweeting and listening to what’s going on there and reading tweets from others so we’re staying abreast of the conversation?

Now that content strategy is a bit more mainstream, what do you see as its current challenges?

I think there are still a lot of challenges around curation especially as that’s becoming more mainstream. Can I bring in some automated curated solution and check it off and say ‘Okay, I’m done with curation.’ We want to work with people to make sure they understand the implications. I think that closely ties to issues of sustainability and our love affairs with tools in the content management world as well. Where in many organizations, content management is still a problem that IT owns and choosing the new CMS is something that comes out of the IT department. They choose them based on features rather than workflow, and they don’t look at content management as a cultural issue that relates to their organization’s publishing culture. I see that as a challenge frequently with my clients, to encourage them to look at content management as everybody’s problem – that often times has cultural roots, not just technical roots. I guess those two are big for me.

I think more and more, we’re seeing the opportunities and challenges that responsive design and design for multiple devices can pose. The opportunities there are tremendous. How can we tailor our content for different devices for different screens and in multiple contexts, and how do we make sure that we have the information to do that in an appropriate and useful way, not in an annoying way. That’s an interesting challenge for us. Fortunately, there are a lot of opportunities and the beginnings of solutions out there through smart, structured content and metadata.

Tell us about your book. It looks great!

It’s called Content Strategy at Work because one of the things that I think we’re always crying out for in our profession are more case studies, more discussion around the ROI of content strategy, and more war stories about things that go well and things that don’t and what we can learn from them. Over the course of the book, I met with brand managers, content strategists, project managers, IAs, and social media consultants in a wide range of agencies, large and small, digital agencies as well as more traditional marketing and advertising agencies, corporations, non-profits and government agencies to talk about their approaches to content strategy on different initiatives. We got some really good discussion and case studies, and we approached it from perspectives outside content strategy.

That’s another thing. As content strategists, we have our conferences, we meet with each other, we drink with each other, and those are all fabulous things and I’m thrilled to be able to contribute to that. I want to open the door a little bit and invite some other folks into our party and say if you’re a designer, an IA, a UX person, an SEO person, a social media strategist, a salesperson focused on business development – what do you need to know about content strategy? How can you bring it into your own practice, partner with a content strategist, or take a look at what they’re doing and incorporate it into your own work? That’s it in a nutshell.

Variety: The Name of the (Social) Game

Cody Shankman — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:18:00 -0500

As any earned media enthusiast knows, the most important aspect of a digital campaign is having a diversity of sources. Facebook is nice but if you can find a way to include Twitter your content will have better reach. Youtube is always fun but incorporate a Tumblr account and suddenly you’re rolling in impressions. Now you want include Google+ as well? Friend – we may have a future together.

Each platform brings a unique approach and opportunity for brands to present their voice. As certain kinds of content flourish in different arenas, it is especially important to make sure to have diverse means by which to distribute this information. It is for this reason that I would like to see a more widespread adoption of foursquare brand pages.

The Content Strategy Questionnaire: Margot Bloomstein

Sadia Latifi — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:11:00 -0500

We recently had the pleasure of chatting with brand and content strategist Margot Bloomstein, author of the upcoming Content Strategy at Work, which you can preorder here.

I’ll be posting my longer conversation with Margot shortly, but wanted to whet your appetite first with Margot’s responses to the first-ever Content Strategy Questionnaire! (Think Proust questionnaire but much, much nerdier – and less about your childhood.) Without further ado, here’s Margot and her survey:

What is your favorite content strategy deliverable?

The message architecture. Without communication goals, how can you attempt to communicate?

What is your least favorite content type? Your favorite?

My most favorite is whatever is most appropriate for the specific target audience and brand.

What content creator, dead or alive, do you idolize?

Kurt Vonnegut was pithy, insightful, and smart. We ask that of most content creators, but few respond.

The quality you most admire in a client?

Boldness. We cannot always wallow in perfect information, but when we can act quickly and with courage, the world can move on. And it’s HTML—we can always change it later.

Who are your content strategy heroes/heroines?

Jeffrey MacIntyre carries the torch with diplomacy. Karen McGrane is savvy and generous enough to share her wit and wisdom. And I learn a tremendous amount from museum exhibit designers, who practice many aspects of content strategy in physical spaces.

To what content strategy faults do you feel most indulgent?

I do love to indulge in a good dirty martini. Is drinking a “content strategy fault” or merely a defining characteristic?

Who is your closest content strategy companion on a project?

A friend in need is a friend indeed… and I try to keep open dialogue with designers, project managers, social media strategists, and the clients alike. My time shifts depending on the phase of the project and its focus.

What is a brand and/or website you love, when it comes to CS best practices?

I’ve been drinking a lot of tea lately. Time and time again I go back to Adagio.com, the website for Adagio Tea. It serves as a hub for their broader web presence, encompassing blogs, video, and microsites. Whether you explore user-generated content, instructional copy, or seasonal shopping lists, you’ll find a consistent and brand-appropriate experience that evolves over time in a sustainable manner. I touch on Adagio briefly in Content Strategy at Work.

What is your favorite word?

Modernity.

“Content is king.” Does that phrase need to be phased out or is it a keeper?

I’d prefer a gender-neutral alternative—and a catchphrase that encourages greater democratization of work, responsibility, and accountability. After all, the web is less a kingdom and more of a kibbutz.

Charlie’s Web

Greg Kepler — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:05:00 -0500

A few months ago, I started having this little fascination with spider webs. I was just wondering how they work and how they were built. At the same time, I befriended a little spider that made its home on the driver’s side mirror on my car, called Charlie. Charlie was great and he hung around for a few weeks and taught me a good bit about spider webs. For one thing, they’re very strong. Each strand that’s created is reinforced by the next strand. Sometimes strands double up. Sometimes he even misses a connection. Sometimes he creates this y-shaped connection. Unfortunately Charlie is dead. Or he ran away.

To show what I learned, I started this little processing sketch to just see if I could make a simple spider web. The math for making some sort of simple perfect spider web isn’t hard, but it’s also not that interesting to look at either. As perfect as some spiderwebs look, there is a actually a lot of variation to them. They are an example of what a lot of generative artists always look to replicate from nature, the balance between the predictable and the random.

Once I got the web working in processing, I had an idea to use my webs in the context of an html site, which meant I would have to move it to Javascript. I’ve kind of avoided javascript for a while, but more recently wanted to explore it a bit, so this served as the perfect first javascript project. I originally started by just exporting the processing sketch as a processing js sketch. It didn’t wuite work since I was using the toxiclibs library for the physics environment. Even if it did work as I thought it should, I feel like it would have been cheating. So instead, I went through some javascript canvas tutorials by Keith Peters and restructured the project as pure javascript. I still ended up using processing js for the canvas drawing and I also ended up finding a version toxiclibs that was ported to javascript. The major difference with that was that I had to target the specific toxi namepsace when using any part of the toxiclibs library. No biggie.

Go here and play with it a bit. It’s not perfect, but I’ve got some other things I want to explore and need to move on. I don’t plan on abandoning it altogether though. I’d like to go in and add some dimension to it and bring it into the more efficient 3d environment of webgl. Also, I’d like to explore and push the webs farther in a more interesting direction visually. It’s also begging to have some more interactivity brought to it. Hopefully this will end up making it into some other project in the future.

As a disclaimer, I’m not much of a web front end kind of guy. I’ve from the world of flash and just like to make pretty looking stuff. From what I’ve found, this is slow as hell in firefox, but plays reasonably well in chrome. Let me know if you have any comments on how to improve this. All comments are welcome. I think.
Originally posted at http://www.thegrego.com/2011/12/06/charlies-web/

Finally, an Awesome Social Media Analytics Tool

Noah King — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:38:00 -0500

Back in April I wrote a blog post about how effectively measuring the success of social media campaigns was frequently sought after but seldom achieved. Fast forward only eight months and it appears that a noble contender has finally arrived on the scene with the promise of delivering the social media analytics we’ve all only dreamed of. What’s this truly awesome company called? Actually, it’s called awe.sm.

If you’re familiar with bit.ly, the popular url shortening service, then you’ll easily understand how awe.sm works. Essentially, awe.sm creates and tracks custom, shortened urls for links that get broadcast on social media networks. Maybe it’s a link to your new blog post, new product landing page, or the download page of your latest software release. When people click on this link, in addition to getting forwarded to the full-length URL on your site, awe.sm tracks all the information of the interaction and stores it. After the tweet or facebook post or tumblr share has been shared over and over, these recorded interactions leave a breadcrumb trail that tells the entire story of who did the sharing, when it happened, and most importantly, what the effects were.

To get a sense of what a huge improvement this is, take a look at the paltry amount of information you get from a bit.ly tracked link. We launched an awesome screen saver earlier this year with a custom bit.ly link, and here is the page with the tracked statistics of how the link performed: https://bitly.com/l6vsHH+ Sure, there’s some information there, but not enough to draw any real conclusions.

Awe.sm takes link analytics about twenty steps further, providing true insight on a digital campaign. Awe.sm claims to map how a message spreads across a network and even show a social media campaign’s added value as an actual dollar amount. Can they really do all that? I’m not sure, but I’m willing to try the 30-day free trial to find out.

"That intellectual rigor and the corresponding data trail, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of..."

Matthew Scott — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:29:28 -0500

“That intellectual rigor and the corresponding data trail, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of players worldwide, makes StarCraft an unparalleled resource that scientists are only now tapping for the study of attention, multitasking, and learning… Recent experiments on computer games are beginning to suggest that players develop skills that could be useful in other contexts—skills that might allow those individuals to cope better with certain types of information overload. Thousands of these gamers are now contributing to a project under Blair’s watch, called SkillCraft, to learn what separates experts from novices and everyone in between. By all appearances this study of StarCraft players is the world’s biggest experiment on how expertise develops and, ultimately, on how we learn.”

– How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise, a fascinating read in the vein of Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, a vision for how gaming makes us better and can change the world (via curiositycounts)