Mark also started the Planningness conference last year. It quickly became a major hit with his fellow ad agency planners (the people who figure out what  the strategy/plan for what a company should do with their brand or message — before handing the case off to the “creative department”).

Mark also taught Rassak’s Dylan Thomas in ad school… and Dylan’s been giving Planningness a little helping hand from the beginning with their website.

This year Mark asked me to come out to Planningness and run a workshop on digital community organizing — a big topic for a lot of brands. The Planningness format is cool — after a talk by the speaker, the audience breaks into groups and has to solve a problem posed in the talk.

I brought my little Kodak flip-like video camera and got some nice little clips of the groups in my session. You can see them below after my slide deck. My talk was on leveraging social networks to organize commnities. My assignment for the attendees was to pick a group they care about and think hey they could teach them tools so they could better organize their own communities.

Planningness 2010 … Barak Kassar, Rassak Experience

BTW, Mark blogs here at Planning from the Outside.

Check out these three videos made by an “ad agency” (of sorts.. they, like us, are quick to throw in the “of sorts”) named Jigsaw in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA. The videos are for the BloodCenter of Wisconsin. These do a great job communicating. They show real people who highlight a message the center wants to get across. They are dramatic. They are persuasive.  Time to give blood!

Could your business or organization benefit from telling stories like this? Not every organization deals with life-and-death drama as a blood center does. But, very often, there are smart ways to tease out what is interesting in (or often around) your organization and tell your stories in very compelling ways.

As always… comments welcome at facebook.com/rassakexperience. Join our community there.

The iPad is undeniably a sweet little sliver of a new media paradigm. Well… it’s not that new. I, and a number of people, have been experimenting with presenting and working on a tablet for years (an HP for me). But Apple made it good — or certainly good enough.  And being the geniuses that they are, it seems new to the world — and therefore it IS new to the world.

Traditional print media people  (books, magazines, newspapers) LOVE the iPad… They see themselves in it … and why not? One of the beauties (perhaps a dangerous beauty) of the iPad is that it feels so much like paper. So, in that way, it’s a great transitional technology. It allows very smart “traditional media” people (the paper kind) who didn’t “grock” tech before — at the level that would let them start to free-associate about possibilities and begin to self innovate  –   to start thinking about what they could do. And it excites them.

This is fantastic!

But.

A good number of smart traditional media companies are launching straight into iPad apps …  and quite a few are jumping blithely over a set of tech/media innovations that preceded the iPad innovation: And that is the social/sharing aspect of media. Social media/tech is CRUCIAL to building media businesses .. to marketing, branding, product development. It is actually quite a lot more subtle to develop for. “Porting” print content to the iPad is still very much within the comfortable paradigm of an expert creating content for a market — one-to-many.

The iPad media apps (e.g. Flipboard) that were developed fresh by people who cut their media teeth in the social era are fantastic examples of  applications that takes full advantage of the knowledge and innovation-thinking that’s been going on for the last several years — it’s “papery” and very very social (another good example is this from the Guardian in the UK) .

A number of other applications simply don’t. They have papery goodness… but just aren’t social. So the content ends up in a person hands… and then it just sits there. That reader is an end-node in a traditional one-to-many distribution schema that might appear beautiful on a new beautiful device, but is missing out on a big big part of the media revolution — many-to-many networks. This limits growth — a lot.

We could see a lot of media innovation investment going toward replicating old models on a new screen — because the screen is so compelling (and it is!). I’d like to see the companies investing in this area weave people who really get social media onto their teams.

That’ll lead to incredible leaps forward, real innovation.

I don’t want to read too too much into this… but I was struck by the image accompanying a decent amount of the online coverage of Craig Ventner et al’s synthetic cell that’s been global front-page news  over the last week. Artificial life tends to spook people — not give them the warm fuzzies. And yet this cartoony photo is warm, fuzzy, even cute! Was it a deliberate choice to include this photo in the Science magazine article released by the team of biologists?  They are business people too, and they have an interest in making their news accessible/human/soft/unscary to lay people (regulators and donors are often lay people as well) — so a human touch (even a subconscious one — in the form of perceived doe-eyes and mouth) is valuable.

My almost-teenage son was very excited last night. He and some friends made a tribute music video of a song by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.  They posted it to YouTube.  He was thrilled that the video received three “honors.” The video was ranked as most watched, top rated and most discussed — in a specific category, in a specific geographic region.

Good community organizers understand the desires of their members. Great community organizers leverage those desires to grow and engage their communities.

YouTube — one of the most fascinating community platforms — has leveraged technology to do just this. At least 100 community members multiplied by a huge, huge, huge number of categories and geographic regions were “honored” (great choice of word!) with feel-good feedback on their work yesterday. And this happens everyday. This is certainly not the only reason that 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute (source, YouTube).  But it certainly helps.

PRACTICAL TIP: Even if you don’t have the technology built into your community platform, do something (anything) today to honor members. And honor them for something that will encourage an action that will grow and further engage members in your community.

P.S. Check out the video… my son plays Bieber :-)

The brochure of the exhibit

Last Saturday I checked out an exhibit called “Hide, Skin as Material and Metaphor.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. While I cant’ say I liked the work visually, it certainly struck me as interesting on a number of levels.

It really got me thinking about skin… and really what the skin of our companies are.

Brands are definitely a skin. And they often are something companies hide behind—a manufactured image beamed over TV or ads that can bear little connection to the reality.

Social/digital/community media is changing this.

When people become the carriers of the brand in a very active way (employees, customers, partners) the skin of the company changes a lot.

For people in charge of branding, that’s a wonderful or scary thing. Or both.

BTW, the museum is in a really cool building.. the customs house at the foot of Broadway, almost at the lower tip of Manhattan. According to a plaque outside, customs duties were the main source of US revenue before the income tax was instituted. And most customs duties came through that building.