On its surface, last week’s inaugural Dx3 event was a coming-out-party for Canada’s thriving internet-based industries. But it turned out to be more of a fond farewell to digital itself.

Yes, you read that right, and no, we’re not about to turn in our laptops and fire up the printing press. I’m not saying that digital is dead – far from it ­– but in 2012 we may have finally reached the point where digital is no longer the next big thing, the bleeding edge or the Great Disrupter. Digital is the new status quo.

Plastic Mobile had more than eye candy at its booth

So long, silo

The most persistent (and counterintuitive) lesson of Dx3 was that digital no longer lives in a department or silo of its own. Whether they were referring to social media, web publishing or online retail, speaker after speaker delivered a version of this message.

In a session called “Selling Social to the C–suite” that outlined the worldview of the current generation of top-level executives (from their college days in the ‘70s, through the dot-com era and the 2008 financial crisis), Forzani’s Duncan Fulton explained (paraphrasing Facebook’s Steve Irvine) that “if it’s not social in real life, it’s not going to be social online.”

Similarly, in his second-day keynote, Retail Prophet Doug Stephens noted that “we’re not going to focus on technology for technology’s sake.” Meanwhile, in a discussion about “Social CRM” (or how brands are leveraging social media in customer relations) ­Twist Image President and digital thought leader Mitch Joel explained that “social CRM is just CRM.” In other words, social is the new black (which also happens to be the only colour Mitch wears).

Or as our colleague and columnist Arjun Basu put it (in his session with Sparksheet publisher Raymond Girard), “content is platform agnostic.” It doesn’t really matter if a product, strategy or piece of content is digital or not. As long as it works.

TV host Amber Mac conducted interviews on the trade show floor

Welcome to the real world

Digital has leaped out of its silo, and it’s landed in the real world.

In his retail keynote Doug Stephens argued that the line between the online and out-of-home worlds are becoming obsolete as Facebook becomes the world’s biggest marketplace, and everything from our fridges to our washing machines are connected to the internet (platform inter-connectivity was also a major trend at this year’s International CES, as we reported earlier this month).

Stephens used the much-YouTubed example of supermarket chain Tesco’s virtual store in a South Korean subway station as evidence that “we’re on the cusp of a digital landgrab” and that brands both online and offline should “start thinking about brick and mortar as a media point.”

Louis Vitton gets creative with QR codes

Place still matters

So it’s clear that the digital and real worlds are converging, but that doesn’t mean the planet is one big monolithic market. On the contrary, Dx3 demonstrated that place is as important than ever.

In a session on Jaguar’s success with location marketing, the company’s Canadian marketing manager explained how the venerable British car brand used mobile apps, QR codes and highly-targeted airport ads to cultivate a new generation of drivers.

Another international brand with location-specific lessons at Dx3 was Yelp, whose brand ambassador, Crystal Henrickson, offered session-goers lessons on how brands can engage customers – and respond to negative reviews – on the popular user review platform (“different audiences mean different cultures”).

But once again, when we talk about “place,” we’re not just talking about geographic locations.  In a session called “Is your brand game?” Patrick Scissons of Grey Canada explained how video game makers (whose audiences can range in the 15 million range – see “Call of Duty”) are monetizing through in-game billboards and virtual goods.

Digital marketing agency BNOTIONS held an app development battle...in a wrestling ring

The old media are new

This relates to our first lesson, the silo thing. Digital isn’t just about so-called “new media.” It affects all media. Doug Stephens talked about how TV is being “brought back into the loop” in the retail world. For instance, some providers are partnering with eBay to recommend products related to the TV shows people watch.

The Spafax guys talked about how brands like Benetton, John Deere and Michelin continue to leverage print in their content marketing efforts. And speaking of content, Dale Hooper of Rogers Media explained how the telecom giant uses its various print, online and broadcast channels to deliver audiences to advertisers.

As he put it, “it’s not an intersection between commerce and content. It’s a traffic circle.”

Another example of QR codes that are "more than a footnote," as one presenter put it

We’re only human

Here at Sparksheet we’ve been talking about the humanization of brands for years. At Dx3, this lesson related to everything from hospitality, to retail to Twitter.

In his social CRM session, Mitch Joel revealed how he once asked his favourite Toronto hotel for an extension cord so he could plug in his phone at night. They’ve had one waiting in his room at check-in every time since. Is it really so hard for hotel brands to keep track of their customers’ preferences?

Ultimately, the human element was what made this maiden event such a success. At its most basic level, Dx3 was all about getting people together for two days to meet, learn and do business face to face. It turns out digital is even more powerful in person.

Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy interviews Radian6 Marketing Director Jon McGinley

Sparksheet is Dx3 Canada’s official content partner. As part of our Sparksheet Events content services we launched a micro-magazine called the Dx3 Digest filled with original content about digital marketing, advertising and retail in Canada. Check it out at dx3.sparksheet.com

Update: Check out our Sparksheet review of Dx3, Digital De-Siloed: Five Lessons from Dx3 Canada 2012, plus photo roundups from Day 1 and Day 2 on the Dx3 Digest.

The Sparksheet team is heading to Toronto this week for Dx3 Canada, the first-annual trade show and conference about Canadian digital marketing, advertising and retail. The event takes place on Wednesday and Thursday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

As Dx3’s official content partner, we launched a special micro-magazine – the Dx3 Digest – filled with original think pieces and Q&As with top execs at Canadian brands like Roots, The Bay, Freshbooks and Casale Media.

Sparksheet will also have its very own booth on the trade show floor where you’ll find us shooting video interviews and promoting our Sparksheet Events content services. We’ll also be covering the full slate of awesome Dx3 conference sessions, which were expertly curated by our good friend Ron Tite.

The trade show floor is open to all so if you’re in the neighbourhood make sure to stop by and say hello (you can register for free online).

Sparksheet readers are also entitled to a discount on Dx3 sessions: Use promo code  “dx3sparksheet” when you sign up.

For topic-by-topic breakdowns of can’t miss sessions, check out our Dx3 Session Guides.

And to get to know Dx3’s big name exhibitors, speakers and stakeholders before the show, visit dx3.sparksheet.com

The CBC’s audience is incredibly diverse. How do you strike the right tone so that your content speaks to everyone from tech geeks to my Luddite grandma?

One of the things we learned early on about doing an audio show on technology is that focusing on just tech can make the show both difficult to explain and boring. So we really try to recess the nuts and bolts of it and focus on the human dimension. I think that’s part of what allows us to speak to those two communities.

We’ve also tried to develop things like our Twitter and online presence as a focus for people who want to engage more deeply with those questions. On Twitter, we can link to more material, answer more questions and participate in more of a dialogue with community members that may be into tech.

We can also facilitate conversations where there are no time constraints, so the conversation can get as woolly or as technical as people want, whereas on the air, we have a tight constraint of an hour a week.

The other thing we do is post almost all of our full-length interviews online. So we try to have a really tight and narrow conversation that can live on the audio version of the show, and then the conversation can get longer, more in-depth and more technical in the longer form.

You’ve mentioned having a love-hate relationship with technology and with what you call “armchair sociology” – how so?

I’ve been interested in technology for a long time; I even did my master’s degree in issues around the philosophy of technology.

But what I often find is missing is critical discussion. It’s an area that so routinely devolves into technophobes and technophiles, or technology determinist versus technology neutralists, whereas I think the reality is that it’s much more nuanced.

There are also things I love. I love playing with new software, I love looking into how new technologies have historically been introduced into societies and I love learning about the impacts they’ve had. But I often feel like our thoughts on the daily impacts of technologies are totally starry eyed.

The hate really comes from this idea that it doesn’t need to be discussed in a political way, because it really does. Right now, the pace at which technology is evolving is clearly outstripping our political and legal institutions’ ability to address [its impact]. Look at how difficult it’s been to even get any kind of discussion going on about copyright issues.

At Spark, you talk about everything from privacy, to publishing, to education, to copyrights, to robots. Are there subjects that come up again and again?

Every season seems to have a subject that always comes back. The first season, we always ended up talking about the virtual meeting the real, the blurring between online and offline. The difference between artificial and human intelligence and our human relationship to artificial intelligence and robots also comes up a lot.

We’ve done a few stories that have had to do with grieving and online communities, and they’ve provoked a lot of reactions. I think those stories aren’t covered too often because they kind of seem antithetical to each other in the same way that technology and spirituality do.

But they really aren’t. I actually think there are ways in which they can be paired really well.

You recently did a show about “gamification,” which has become quite the buzzword lately.  Do you think it’s just hype or are we seeing game mechanics playing a bigger role in how everything from content to retail gets monetized these days?

There’s already a bit of pushback on the term, but I do think that it’s a real thing, and that game mechanics are way too powerful. It actually kind of scares me.

There’s something very Skinner box about it and ethically, it has the potential to be really dubious. I sometimes create game mechanics to try to motivate myself or break a bad habit, and it can definitely be effective, and I do think we’re going to see it spread out to more and more areas. But it’s not a trend I’m super comfortable with.

You’ve been at the CBC since the 1990s. How do you think the station’s approach to digital content has changed since you started there?

I think that the CBC is focusing a lot right now on the importance of getting content into people’s hands however they want it. Even as a listener, I’m aware of how that’s changing things.

For example, there’s more community-based content in areas like the news, where I think it would have been pretty unheard of five or 10 years ago. But I don’t think I have a good enough sense of what the CBC is generally doing to really speak to that one.

How would you say the Spark community has evolved over the last four years?

It’s certainly changed in the sense that the practice of engaging with social media has really taken off. When we went on the air, things like Twitter were pretty fringy and geeky – most people just weren’t engaged in content creation. But I think that using things like Facebook got people used to the idea of posting their thoughts about stuff.

Now, we have a Twitter community made up of casual CBC fans who probably follow Spark along with a ton of other CBC shows. We also have those who are very passionate, very intensely focused, and another big chunk of people who just dip in and dip out whenever something strikes their interest.

Getting a handle on your community and understanding how you can better serve their needs is a big challenge for any kind of content creator today.

Would you say the show has changed as well?

The show has changed in that the way we even think of “the show” is changing.

I think that we’ve moved in a direction where it really becomes a conversation that then becomes distilled into this end product.

A big part of that comes from the sense that we have an ongoing relationship with the broader Spark community.

On behalf of the Sparksheet team, a heartfelt thank you to all our readers, contributors, advocates and friends for your support and engagement over the past year.

2011 was the year that Sparksheet evolved from an upstart marketing blog to a truly multiplatform magazine and it couldn’t have happened without your think pieces, Q&As, columns, comments and (of course) likes, tweets and shares.

So thanks again for your support and we’ll see you in the new year!

In 2007 she launched AdBroad, an AdAge Power 150 blog covering her corner of the advertising industry. Then, at SXSW 2009, she coined the term “brand fiction” to describe her unique hybrid of branded entertainment and fan fiction and launched a boutique content agency, Brand Fiction Factory, shortly thereafter.

The idea behind brand fiction is to give brands a life of their own on social media channels, growing the brands’ mythology along with their number of followers.

Her unofficial, Webby award-winning @bettydraper Twitter feed tops out at 31,000 followers, illuminating the inner life of the fictional 1960s housewife in AMC’s Mad Men.

Other Mad Men characters have Twitter profiles as well (some voiced by Ross, some by other fans), creating an ongoing conversation that draws on the show’s plotlines. This develops their personalities while giving new and die-hard fans something to chew on between episodes.

But “Mad Men on Twitter” extends beyond Twitter. Klein Ross and her cohorts even put together a Twepisode titled “Don takes Sally to the Beatles” that imagines how the characters in Mad Men would have experienced the legendary Beatles concert at Shea stadium if Twitter were around in 1965. There’s also a blog, Welcome to the Drapers. (Mad Men’s creator, Matt Weiner, and AMC have given their blessings but declined to officially endorse the project.)

During this year’s StoryWorld Conference in San Francisco, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Helen Klein Ross, who explained what brand managers and TV producers stand to gain by bringing some fiction (and fun) to their brands.

I’ve been working in this digital storytelling industry for over 15 years now so in my perspective, it means the same thing it did 15 years ago. It’s just the new word for it. What I like about transmedia is that it’s not about duplicating content; it’s about sticking to the essence of a story and expanding it to different platforms.

Coming from a public broadcaster angle at the BBC [editor’s note: Allimonos left the BBC last month to pursue a career in branded content], where we’re not purely concerned with profit, I see transmedia as the new art form of this century.

You’re known for developing BBC’s “mythology engine.” Can you explain what that is and how it’s being used?

As BBC’s multiplatform drama commissioner, I wanted to create this transmedia repository for everything to do with Doctor Who. The show is about to celebrate it’s 50^th anniversary, and it being the longest running science fiction show in the universe, a huge mythology has been built up around it.

So we constructed this reusable framework that we could apply to Doctor Who and to another iconic program, EastEnders.

Essentially, the mythology engine is a video-rich transmedia Wikipedia for TV shows with great mythologies. What’s great is that there are a few predetermined pathways through the stories, but the audience can still go in and play around like they would on the web.

Are there any stories that don’t work well across platforms?

With the BBC, I was mostly involved in fictional programs and figuring out how to extend them across the web, mobile, IPTV, etc., in a way that would reach millions.

Being public broadcasters, BBC needs to create content for everyone, so we try to avoid the niche. We’ve done a lot of experimental broadcasting but over the last few years, the BBC has been trying to ask, “what are the shows and moments that are really going to capture the attention of the nation in a non-TV format?”

That’s why we focused on Doctor Who as well as EastEnders, which deals with a lot of important social issues through drama.

For EastEnders’ 25^th anniversary, I got together with TV execs to create a spin-off drama, E20. It starts in the main program, where the drama centers around a community of people, and then it moves online for a couple of weeks until the characters move back into the show. So we had to help audiences navigate the content and move from one medium to the next seamlessly.

Was there an interactive element? 

We’ve created a Facebook following and some E20 characters are on Twitter. But it’s hard, because the tweets have to be really high quality and only one of the actors was really good at it.  Unlike the Mad Men characters on Twitter who aren’t associated with the show, this came directly from the actors.

If you’re going to extend a show in any way, you have to figure out what its DNA is, what its essence is as a brand. Then you can carry that over to different platforms and decide if there is anything new to be added to the mix.

With EastEnders we wanted to attract younger viewers and nurture young talent. So we did summer schools with young people, had young people writing the show and rejuvenated the cast.

Any other lessons about what works and what doesn’t from your tenure at the BBC?

A few of the more practical things we learnt were the dos and don’ts of online video. For instance, avoid appointment to view. We experimented with that early on and it never really worked; VOD (videos on demand) is the way people watch videos online.

Another is to acknowledge the medium. The Guild, an amazing Felicia Day series about gamers, is an example of that. Each of the episodes starts with her addressing the audience and camera, then moving into the drama.

I think what it says on a semiotic level is, “we’re not embarrassed of being online. This isn’t lower-production-value content, this is a genuine form in its own sense.”

An additional really good lesson is to avoid leaving multiplatform to the end and to be involved right from the conception stage. I think it’s about orchestrating and architecting an experience for the audience. It’s what you do before, during and after the TV moment and how you bridge the gap for audiences between episodes.

An example of what worked is Being Human, a drama about a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf who choose to share a flat and try to figure out how to live as humans. I was involved with that brand from the conception stage and we came up with a really great formula.

Beforehand, we answered the ‘how the characters came to be’ question by releasing prequels, then we released the show and then we captured the chat that happened around the broadcast through social media.

We also had a blog that went into how the series was made, and then we released the prequel, which was the bridge to the next series. I think that way of pushing the audience along timelines works well.

How do you navigate the various silos (and budgets) that are involved when you’re working across platforms?

There are a lot of dotted lines and different parts of the BBC, so my role is really to cut through the silos as a translator.

I learn and speak the language of the TV commissioners and execs, and then bring mobile, tech and R&D together with the TV partners to make transmedia that works.

I do have a separate budget, but no decision is made without the dotted line being involved, and without bringing the whole business together.

Is transmedia a niche product or can it have mass appeal?

Having worked for a very large broadcaster who, each week, would broadcast to millions of people, I think transmedia has the opportunity to go mainstream and massive.

With Doctor Who, we had four million gaming downloads within weeks, which basically matches what a regular episode would get. With Being Human, half the audience came through heavily marketed TV channels and the other came through our iPlayer and catch-up services.

I think transmedia is a great opportunity because brands really want to have an intimate relationship with their consumers.I’m excited that brands are seriously getting into commissioning content and that there are amazing international collaborative projects breaking through and reaching millions.

However, according to a collaborative study released by The Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism earlier this week, news organizations have yet to maximize Twitter’s potential. Instead, they’re using it as a promotional tool to draw users to their websites.

Researchers analyzed the main and subsidiary Twitter channels of 13 national and local news organizations (broadcast, radio, print, and online) and 13 of the most followed journalists  over the course of one week in February 2011, revealing their (mostly subpar) Twitter habits.

The self-proclaimed first-of-its kind empirical study of Twitter usage found that “news organizations use Twitter in limited ways – primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material.”

93 percent of the tweets included a link back to the outlets’ own websites and the most popular topics on their Twitter feeds mirrored the headlines on their own platforms.

In terms of prompting user responses, of the 13 outlets studied, only 2 percent of the total tweets solicited information from followers, and just 1 percent were retweets from sources outside of their own organizations. The hashtag function was also deployed minimally, with an average use rate of 20 percent.

So what outlet uses Twitter best? Apparently Fox News, despite tweeting a paltry 48 times. That’s small potatoes compared to top tweeter, the Washington Post, which topped out at 664 tweets in the same timeframe.

But when it comes to mastering the Twitterverse it’s not the number of tweets, but the number of followers that counts – and that’s where Fox News is gaining the most ground.

Between February and October 2011, Fox increased its number of followers by 118 percent, the highest of the 13 outlets analyzed in the report.

Fox also happens to use the retweet function most frequently (44 percent of its tweets), is second in its use of hashtags (50 percent of the time), and is most likely to solicit information from its followers (21 percent of the time).

Pew concludes that the mainstream media are treating Twitter as if Web 2.0 hasn’t happened yet. Before 2.0, publishers controlled everything and user engagement was minimal. This, in part, was because organizations didn’t want to lose their audiences.

Now these same outlets let users give feedback easily, exchange content, and find links to other sites; they realize, according Pew, that they have to give users what they want – even if they didn’t generate it.

And so, “it bears watching whether Twitter use for mainstream news organizations evolves in the same way.”

The bottom line: Major media outlets are not engaging with users as much as they could (and should) be. And as Fox News can attest, the more (human) interaction there is between readers and disseminators, the better the chances of Twitter success.

“What a relief to get up here and not have to explain what I do,” Gomez said, and was rewarded with enthusiastic applause and a deluge of retweets.

Billed as the first-ever conference of people engaged in transmedia ­– or multiplatform – storytelling, StoryWorld was a Dungeons and Dragons-meets-TED Talks gathering of filmmakers, writers, producers and marketers devoted to telling age-old stories in exciting new ways.

The spirit of collaboration and creativity in the Parc 55 Wyndham was palpable – no doubt the conference was a success – but I’m not so sure we’ve moved past definitions just yet.

Sure, everyone at StoryWorld agrees that “the story always comes first,” as the oft-repeated mantra goes. But what is the story, who owns it, and how do we tell it in a collaborative, fair, and profitable way?

Jeff Gomez (Image by James Duncan Davidson via Flickr)

Everything is a story (wait, what?)

The word “story” has gone mainstream, as John David Heinsen from Bunnygraph Entertainment pointed out in a Monday morning session. Let’s say a screenwriter, a producer and a brand marketer sit down at a table. Each may think they’re a storyteller. But they’re not talking about the same thing.

It turns out the words “story” and “storyteller” are fluid and their meanings depends on who’s using them.

Another example of how semantics are important (and confusing) occurred later in the day. Toward the end of a breakout session on “building buzz” someone used the word “brand.” Everyone groaned.

The speaker apologized profusely. But that’s essentially what people mean when they talk about a “story world” ­– a piece of intellectual property that has multiple extensions on different platforms. A brand by any other name.

Of course, the problem is that the word “brand” has become a buzzword. And if we’re not careful, the beautiful word “story” will become one too.

Story worlds are not new

Stories have been around forever (since cavemen and campfires blah blah blah) and so have story worlds. Think J.R.R. Tolkien (proudly invoked by Tricia Pasternak and Lenny Brown from Random House), George Lucas or, of course, Walt Disney.

In a Tuesday morning keynote Disney’s design director Orrin Shively noted that story worlds exist in the real world too; Disney has been creating theme park rides that expand on its branded universes (from Snow White to Finding Nemo) for decades.

What has changed is the variety of platforms available for storytelling, as well as their interactive potential.

Robot Heart Stories

Collaboration is key (but so is consistency)

A fundamental aspect of transmedia storytelling is collaboration – both with other storytellers and with the people formerly known as the audience.

We heard countless examples of transmedia stories “co-created” with fans, from Brent Friedman’s branded TV series Valemont, to Jim Babb’s playful Socks, Incorporated. Transmedia pioneer and Monday keynote Lance Weiler even collaborated with inner-city fifth-grade students on Robot Heart Stories.

Transmedia storytellers also collaborate with each other. While creative types often guard their intellectual property like Gollum guards his ring (sorry, two full days with self-professed geeks), multiplatform storytellers are like jazz musicians: happy to jam on each other’s tracks.

Novelist Sparrow Hall, for example, invites musicians, artists and videographers to riff on his short stories, which he packages into transmedia ebooks. Of course, collaboration requires trust, which means content creators are only willing to share their story worlds with collaborators who are on the same page.

A fundamental rule of story worlds is that they must be consistent across every platform and in each iteration. As Jeff Gomez put it in his presentation, storytellers need to “Show me you care about the story world. Show me it’s real.”

The same lesson applies to all (gasp) brands – whether it’s a magazine, an airline, or a TV franchise.

Collaboration is complex (who owns the story?)

Collaboration fuels transmedia storytelling but it’s also what makes it so incredibly hard to pull off.

In a Tuesday session called “Navigating the Silos,” panelists from Bravo, BBC and LucasFilm commiserated about the roadblocks involved with launching cross-platform initiatives within their own organizations (“I can accept that I.T. is a silo but there’s no excuse for Communications,” bemoaned former BBC content commissioner Rosie Allimonos).

So you can imagine how messy it gets when numerous copyright holders, licensers, and distributors are involved. A Tuesday afternoon session entitled “Co-managing in Collaboration with Stakeholders” attempted to navigate these complexities; it sort of hurt my brain (this probably shouldn’t have been scheduled as the last session of the day).

The key takeaway for prospective transmedia practitioners: “Get a lawyer.”

This question of “Who owns a story?” came up throughout the conference. Some, like “brand fiction” pioneer Helen Klein Ross (who has more than 31,000 followers as the unofficial Twitter voice of Mad Men’s Betty Draper) feel that once it’s released to the world a story belongs to the world.

Others, like Blacklight CEO Zak Kadison, insist a story’s creator is its rightful “gatekeeper.” While this question remains open, it made for one of StoryWorld’s most emotional and important debates.

Stories are good for business

In the end, there’s a practical reason for both Madison Avenue and Hollywood to embrace transmedia: There‘s money to be made.

As Innovative Artists’ David Tochterman put it, transmedia “gives buyers multiple ways to say yes.” Or put slightly differently by Universal McCann’s Jeff Bernstein, “If you’re a storyteller you have a tremendous advantage; you can design an experience that’s scalable.”

But perhaps most crucially – this was stated by multiple speakers – mutliplatform is good for business because it’s what audiences and customers expect. End of story.

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place October 31-November 2 in San Francisco. 

Even better, the winning piece (Print in Digital Clothing: The Problem with Magazine Apps) was penned by none other than Charles Lim, our esteemed creative director. Gotta love a design guy who can write.

The FOLIO: Awards is the largest international awards competition in magazine editorial and design.

Congratulations, Charles. Go team!

You define yourself as a transmedia author, producer and brand developer. How do you go about explaining what you do to someone who knows nothing about transmedia?

I tell people that I create experiences around a story. I’ll share that story with other artists and see if they would like to create an extension of it through their own medium.

I’ve also done the same thing with major brands. Whereas in the past a company might have had a major TV campaign, today they use transmedia: jumping from one media to the next to tell their story – in that case, the story of a brand.

You’ve just released a paperback book that includes music, video and artwork in addition to two short stories. Do you think readers can get a complete experience out of just reading the thing or do they need to engage with each medium to follow the story?

I don’t like experiences where you’re forced to do anything in a specific sequence. I want to be able to move around freely. When I created my type of transmedia storytelling, I wanted each of the elements to really exist on their own.

When I was in college, the movie Trainspotting came out and I heard the soundtrack being played at a club one night. I went out and bought the soundtrack to it, even before I had read the book or seen the movie, so in that way, the soundtrack was a way of letting me into that story world.

The actual book and movie came after for me, but even in that way, they lived separately from one another – they could be absorbed separately. I love books, but they just don’t have anything interesting going on! There’s nothing that takes a book further.

You had mentioned Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris as an example of a film that could be told through transmedia. What did you mean?

Midnight in Paris was a surprise hit; the story was great, and it was incredibly funny. But it also let us go back in time and hang out with these famous artists and writers. It lets you hang out in that universe.

There was an opportunity there, I think, for a transmedia experience. There was an opportunity with the music for a soundtrack that would let us revisit that story. There could have been episodic content online that offers more doors for you to walk through.

I think telling stories through transmedia is the type of thing that studios and advertisers are interested in, since you have stories that are continuing online, and that’s where you can get viewership. There’s a whole marketing system that can be built around that, and ways to generate revenue.

How have you brought transmedia storytelling into your work with brands like Bono’s (RED) campaign, CitiBank and Motorola?

The work that I did with those brands has informed the more creative work that I’m doing for myself. I think when we create our own art we say, “I want to try this out, this is an experiment.” But in advertising it doesn’t work that way, you don’t create something just to experiment. You create something to meet a goal.

You’re probably familiar with the (RED) campaign – Gap, American Express, Armani – all of these big brands had (RED) products. Motorola came on as the campaign’s technology partner and since Motorola deals with technology, we created an online calculator.

You could plug in the amount of money you had spent on a Motorola product and it would tell you how many people have been fed or clothed with the money you spent. It let you see how your donation translates.

We were also collaborating with different artists at that time. They were doing live events that were also awareness generators for the campaign. It was supporting those events, documenting the events with video, creating exclusive content for the Motorola site (download remixes, singles, etc.).

It was taking the (RED) story and telling it in many different ways so that people could connect with it. One of the reasons why the Red campaign was so successful was the transmedia element.

I’m curious about your own personal brand. You’ve been very open about things in your life that have affected your work, like your involvement with Alzheimer’s Awareness. Do you think this sort of transparency is part of what it means to be a “brand” in the digital age?

I think that there is value in transparency, whether you’re an artist brand or a larger corporate brand. Transparency is different for each, though.

For instance, there was a campaign that was created for Ford right after the bailouts that was all about how they were going to have to go back and fix what happened. Showing people what went wrong, talking about it, and being transparent about it, ended up being a year’s worth of content.

Over the course of the campaign, Ford came to be seen as this organic thing instead of a faceless, robotic, awful entity. That’s when a brand starts to transcend the marketplace. What we’re watching there is not a company. We’re watching something that represents ourselves, and that’s the most powerful level a brand can reach.

Sparrow Hall flanked by his collaborators - Photo by Lindsey Bourke

At StoryWorld you’ll be talking about “Managing Rights in a Participative Canon” with Sarah Hinchcliff Pearson from the Creative Commons and other experts. How does this topic relate to your work and how do you plan on approaching it in San Francisco next month?

Transmedia is often a collaboration, so you have to manage those relationships. You have to manage people’s trust in you. The amount of money I spent on legal fees on Two Blue Wolves, my first transmedia story, was more than I spent on any of the production!

That’s the reason why I wanted to speak about contracts at StoryWorld. To talk about my experience in getting those contracts where they needed to be, what that was like, and then helping by talking to the audience about what they should look out for and offering tips, resources, and things to think about as they’re creating their contracts.

What are you looking forward to most at StoryWorld?

I’m looking forward to seeing dialogues form between the brands and storytellers that are coming in from all sides of the industry.

This is the first time we’ve ever had a transmedia conference and it’s the first time for all these different forces to come together. I have a feeling people are going to be making amazing contacts.

It’s going to be eye opening for people that are working in toy companies, game companies, and entertainment companies to connect with people that are thinking on these multilevels of storytelling. I think people are really going to inspire one another.

Sparksheet is an official media partner for StoryWorld Conference + Expo, which took place October 31-November 2 in San Francisco. 

The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like a nod to newspapers, but you’re not really a news site. Do you consider yourselves a blog, an online magazine, an aggregator or something else entirely?

The reason we call ourselves an online magazine and not a blog is because we knew that when we launched, the business world was not completely familiar with the word “blog.”

In addition, our site features deeper and richer articles than a typical blog. All of our articles are at least 1000 words. We publish once a day, 24 articles a month, which is essentially the same amount of articles that are in a print magazine.

You’re the first person ever to tell me that we have a newspaper type of name. The name “Social Media Examiner” sounds like it’s socially important, it sounds like it’s established and that it’s been around forever.

The site has a particularly memorable look, with its jungle-themed design and cartoon illustrations. Where did that come from?

The site definitely has a unique visual display. Our mascot is this little guy named Scout, named by our user community in a contest during our one-year birthday celebration.

I wanted to have a site that was visually stunning, looked very professional, and that when people came to it they just assumed it had existed forever. In reality, even though we have more than 100,000 e-mail subscribers, we’re only 22 months old.

Many of your headlines include a question, a number (“4 Tips,” “5 Steps”), or a “How to,” making them very SEO-friendly. How much do search engines factor into your editorial process? Do you create content based on what people are searching for?

No, we do not. We only get 15 percent of our 900,000 page-views per month from search. We do not try to make things that appeal to search engines. We don’t ignore search engines, but it’s not our primary focus. Our primary focus is to appeal to people.

I have a background in copywriting so I know what a good headline is. We write headlines that people want to share, that people want to click through on Twitter or Facebook to read.

SME went from 0 to 100,000 subscribers in 20 months, and it’s all from social media. Our articles have titles that are designed to really draw people to the content. We’re about people optimization, not search engine optimization. We’re trying to optimize for the human mind.

In your latest book, Launch, you discuss the “elevation principle,” which goes something like this: Great content + other people – marketing messages = business growth. Why are “marketing messages” subtracted from this equation?

Edelman did a study and found that only a third of people trust businesses, meaning that 66 percent don’t. In the book, I postulate that part of the reason is that people think businesses are just out to take their money.

Everywhere we go, all we see are marketing messages. It’s permeating our culture and people are tuning out.

If you want your content to be received as a gift instead of a lure designed to convert someone into a prospect, then you need to put away those marketing messages. I don’t say “don’t do marketing,” but what I do say is not to embed those marketing messages into your content.

If your content has ads all around it then what you’re doing is sending people away from it, or you’re telling the people that all you really care about is getting conversions, not providing great content.

You practice what you preach because Social Media Examiner is an ad-free space. Of course, that brings up an obvious question: How does Social Media Examiner make money?

You’ll only see one ad on our site, which is for our own events. Once people receive our content and decide to sign up for more via our e-mail list, then they’ve opted into a secondary channel, which I call the backchannel. Through that channel I can embed some marketing messages. That’s how we grow our business.

We send out a daily e-mail blast to 100,000 people, 6 days a week. Inside that e-mail we have a 70-word description of the day’s article with a link. Underneath it we’ll have ads; some are from sponsors, others are for our own events.

Our sponsors are mostly social media-related agencies. Anyone who wants to be in front of social media marketers is the ideal sponsor.

How do you get people to sign up for your mailing list?

There’s a sidebar on the homepage where you can input your information. We also have a cookie mechanism whereby first-time visitors are prompted to subscribe with a one-time pop-up.

Chris Brogan says that “e-mail is the golden ticket,” and that’s true because a large e-mail list is more important than followers on Twitter or fans on Facebook. People have given us permission to communicate with them. E-mail is still the secret magic bullet.

Many other media brands have made the leap from print to web. You guys have made the leap from web to events. Any plans to extend the Social Media Examiner brand from web to print?

No plans. We’re new media in every way. Even our events are completely online. We don’t do anything in the old media kind of way. For me it makes no sense to go backwards. There’s a place for print, but not in my company.

Awards season is upon us and last week alone Sparksheet received an eye-popping eight nominations – seven for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards and one for the Eddies!

For the COPAs, which are presented by Masthead, we’re a finalist in the following categories (B-to-B division):

• Best Online-Only Site
• Best Web Design
• Best Blog
• Best Use of Social Media
• Best E-Newsletter
• Best Mobile-Optimized Site
• Best Article or Series (for our long-form feature on Cuba’s first branded film)

At the COPAs last fall we won a record four awards and we’d be honoured to do nearly as well this year.

We’re also super excited about our first-ever Eddie nomination. The Eddies are Folio magazine’s awards for international excellence in magazine editorial. Sparksheet is a finalist for Best Online Column or Blog (B-to-B) for our Creative Director Charles Lim’s blockbuster column Print in Digital Clothing: The Problem with Magazine Apps.

It feels great to be recognized both in our home country and internationally, and for everything from our editorial and design prowess, to our social media chops (kudos to our Community Manager Joey Tanny for the latter).

It goes to show that Sparksheet has become, in just two short years, a truly multiplatform magazine brand.

The 2011 Canadian Online Publishing Awards will be handed out on October 24 at The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. The 2011 Eddie Awards will be presented on November 1 in New York City. Hope to see you there.

Congratulations to the other nominees, including our talented colleagues at EnRoute, Experience, Fairmont and In magazines!

Pam Didner at Content Marketing World 2011/Photo courtesy of Content Marketing World

You were a speaker at last week’s Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland. Tell me, what does a company that makes computer hardware have to do with content?

It’s funny you asked. We did in-depth research on how consumers and IT managers view Intel. Words such as “innovation,” “quality,” “performance,” “trust,” “reliability” are used to describe our brand.

Once we start talking about “technology” and “innovation,” there are a lot of stories that we can tell. Imagine the content we can create or stories we can tell through the experiences that technology enables in people’s lives. We have more to do with content than ever before.

Computer chips don’t necessarily lend themselves to great storytelling. How do you weave the many, complicated things Intel does into a compelling story?

It can be very challenging to find the right story to tell. We look to our R&D department, which we call Intel Labs. Not sure if you remember the Intel Rock Star Commercial. We showcased Ajay Bhatt, who is the co-inventor of the USB drive. There are some amazing things our engineers are doing at Intel Labs. The stories are there, we just need to find them.

Intel is a multiplatform company, and it’s also an international one. How do you create content that works across geographical and cultural boundaries? Which platforms work best for which audiences?

I’d like to address that at the B2C and B2B levels. B2B is much easier to scale, especially since our target audience is IT managers, whose challenges tend to be similar across regions. Most IT managers battle similar issues such as security threats, Windows upgrades, downtime, etc.

In addition, IT managers tend to be the no-nonsense type of guys. B2B content and creative are easy to scale.

Cultural differences play a much bigger role in B2C, especially on creative development. During the creative development and storytelling stage, we engage with geographies. From time to time, we customize multiple versions of the same content to meet different geographic needs. For example, for the Intel Rock Star commercial we have a Chinese version featuring a prominent Chinese engineer from Intel China.

Can you talk about how you’ve leveraged social media to promote Intel products around the world?

Social media is part of the overall integrated campaign, especially in North America. We leverage Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – wherever it makes sense.

Outside North America, our various regional offices need to make the call on how to leverage local social media. Social media does require subject matter expertise and some regions just do not have the resources to do that.

You were involved in creating Intel’s online IT Manager Game, a simulation of an IT professional’s average day in the office. With social games going mainstream, is it only IT professionals who are getting in on the fun or have you seen other, more surprising demographics participating as well?

IT Manager Game was first launched in May, 2006. We are currently designing IT Manager Game 4.0. The game has more than 120,000 registrants in 16 countries. There is no paid media promoting the game, so it’s been a purely viral success.

We specifically target IT professionals. The player profile: men under 40 working as IT managers or in IT support/Help desk for big, small or medium-sized companies.

You’ve said that marketing and innovation are “BFF”, but that current corporate practices of putting marketing at the end of the process often put them in more of an “it’s complicated” situation. Can you unpack this analogy for us?

All marketers can relate to this situation: A product group hands over an almost-finished product and expects last-minute marketing magic. At Intel, we follow a process called the “Marketing Life Cycle.” We move marketing upstream.

Marketing is engaged with the product group 24-36 months prior to the product release. Our marketing research and branding teams work in tandem with the product groups to provide input on product features, research and brand strategy during the product definition stage. This gives us enough time to create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

How can marketers be more like magazine editors, as you’ve suggested?

Social and search are rewriting the rules of engagement. Our audience is out there constantly searching for information and evaluating new technologies, even when they are not purchasing.

We need to engage with them on a timely basis. Most importantly, we need to engage with them on the topics they care about, yet in an authentic way. This requires some level of planning, especially when multiple marketing functions are involved.

The first step is to have an editorial calendar which rallies the different teams. Once you know what topic you would like to use to engage with your audience, the next step is to build a story that’s both relevant to your audience and your company.

In a way, it’s very similar to publishing a magazine. You have the theme for that edition, then you build stories around it.

We chatted about “branded journalism,” the relationship between content and design, and why Sparksheet calls itself a magazine (as opposed to a humble blog). Here’s an excerpt:

Can corporations fund or push innovation in the publishing space while still adhering to journalistic ethics? 

There’s definitely an opportunity for corporations to foster and finance innovative journalism. Of course, they’ve always done this by underwriting radio and TV shows and placing ads in newspapers. In some ways, branded content is just an extension of this. Where do journalistic ethics fit in? It all comes down to transparency. So long as corporations are clear about their role in the content—as well as the limits of what they are willing to cover — I don’t see a conflict.

Check out the interview and stay tuned for Karyn’s forthcoming think piece on Sparksheet!

We’re still really interested in how brands are using content to reach the elusive consumer in transit – the Transumer – wherever they may be. But that “wherever” can be in the air, at home, in the office or anywhere else in the world.

That said, we know that many of you are intimately involved in the airline/inflight media world ­– and we want to make sure there’s enough relevant content out there to keep you inspired.

So as part of our Sparksheet Events service, we’ve launched a special micro-magazine called Sparksheet@APEX built around the 2011 Airline Passenger Experience Expo in Seattle. The site’s mission? To explore the connections between the inflight world, and the content, media and marketing universe.

On the site, you’ll find exclusive Q&As with the airlines, content distributors, hardware manufacturers and inflight entertainment and communications experts who make the industry fly. You’ll also find a bunch of classic Sparksheet stories updated and reframed for the APEX crowd.

Once we land in Seattle, there will be plenty of blogging and live-tweeting from our @sparksheet_apex account.

So if you’re an airline aficionado, check out the site and let us know if you have any APEX stories to share.

If you’re not – don’t worry. The usual Sparksheet and our various social media channels will continue undisturbed. But, of course, you’re welcome to stop by.

apex.sparksheet.com

How do you maintain Playboy’s unique voice, outlook and culture across so many disparate media, from print and video, to Facebook and Twitter?

It’s a challenge to ensure that all of our mouthpieces are aligned in terms of voice, tone and messaging. Back in the day, the magazine was it.

Now we have constant external communications on TV, radio, Playboy.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Ustream, TheSmokingJacket.com and other communications vehicles.

Each of these platforms must stick to the brand’s identity and [they] are constantly monitored to make sure they’re on-brand and in line with Hef’s vision and our editorial director’s ideas.

That said, each platform communicates and publishes differently and may also have separate audiences, so the way they represent/interpret the brand may differ slightly.

What’s the goal of Playboy’s social media activity, and how do you measure success?

We have a number of goals in social media. First, building celebrity for our Playmates and models. Years ago TV was the only way for a Playmate to make the major step from centrefold to household name. Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy are prime examples, but since we know that every Playmate with some charisma and a story to tell isn’t going to end up on TV, social media is the way to grow their audience.

Each new Playmate goes through our social media training and is introduced to our fan base (5 million+ on Facebook, 250,000 on Twitter) when her issue comes out. Within days she’ll have a thriving fan base of her own and we’ll work with her to create content and identify digital influencers to interact with. There are over 90 Playmates actively using Facebook and Twitter with a combined following of over 2 million, giving Playboy the sexiest army of digital brand advocates in the world.

Second, increasing engagement with our fan base beyond the pages of the magazine. We create specific content franchises for each platform in order to properly use each channel and not just post content for the sake of having a presence on a certain site.

Third, generating revenue. A few years ago, managing social media for a brand was mainly focused on growth, engagement, listening or some other buzz term. Monetizing was a nice-to-have but certainly not a primary objective.

Now once we reach a certain scale, revenue is a must in order to justify the existence of jobs like mine, right? True success in this space is quantifiable.

How would you describe the quintessential Playboy reader, and have your perceptions of him or her changed as you’ve engaged with readers online?

In terms of our social media audience, it spans beyond just the obvious, which is the guy who appreciates beautiful women.

Some of the other types we see include people that love the brand and its history, women that became fans after watching The Girls Next Door on E!, women who are aspiring Playmates, and people in search of men’s entertainment and lifestyle content.

We all know that Top 10 lists and sexy photo galleries are good for traffic, but Playboy has made its reputation on long-form articles and in-depth interviews. How do you attract eyeballs without sacrificing the quality of your content?

It’s important for us to recognize that there are many different types of people that come to Playboy.com via many different entry points. For example, if someone gets to the site to check out the latest Playmate, how can we make them aware that there’s a great interview or gaming feature they’d be interested in?

Or if they got to Playboy.com from a site that linked to an interview, how can we keep them on site to enjoy the eye candy? The “link-bait” may bring in more visitors, but the “long form” is what will build a true audience for a site.

With the Playboy mansion, you guys were pioneers in extending the “magazine experience” into the real world. Do you think being involved with things like events and nightclubs is an increasingly important part of what it means to be a magazine in the 21^st century?

Absolutely. Playboy allows consumers to interact with the brand and experience the Playboy lifestyle through parties and experiences at the Playboy Clubs. In 2006, we opened a multi-faceted entertainment venue in Las Vegas. More recently, we’ve opened Playboy Clubs in London, Cancun and Macau and look forward to continuing the expansion.

The Playboy brand has always been representative of “the good life” and we have always offered exclusive opportunities to enjoy that good life via nightclubs, parties and special events.

Playboy.com features a mix of free content and premium stuff. Do you think you’ve struck the right balance between the “open web” and “walled garden” approaches to online content?

Playboy has a number of web properties that aim to reach different audiences. Playboy.com includes a mix of girl features, entertainment stories and longer articles.

The Smoking Jacket, Playboy’s safe-for-work site, includes shorter posts, lists, “quick hits” that you’d want to pass along to your friends, and non-nude girl features. Playboy’s subscription sites offer extended girl content.

Our sites aim to attract different readers and viewers; we work to give fans a variety of content, both free and paid.

When people think of Playboy, they obviously think of your founder, Hugh Hefner. How have you brought Hef’s considerable legacy and personality into the online space?

Hef is extremely active on Twitter and it has become a part of his daily routine. People always ask if it’s really him, and it is Hef on his iPad from the Playboy Mansion. A lot of his tweets are answering fan questions, good or bad, so Twitter truly is an engagement platform for him.

Photos courtesy of Playboy

You will author Q&As, write Engagement Checkups and update The Sparkbeat on a weekly basis. You will also be involved in day-to-day editorial stuff like researching photos, navigating our CMS, and researching story ideas.

Because we’re a small team, you’ll also be expected and encouraged to bring your own unique skills, talents and interests to the table. Journalism students, recent graduates, and anyone with relevant writing and editorial experience will be considered. Design skills and social media chops are always a plus!

Think you’re our guy or gal? Here are the details and instructions on how to apply.

It may be too early to tell, but that doesn’t mean the internet isn’t abuzz over this story. Here’s a roundup of some of the commentary from around the web:

Forbes’ Adam Hartung:

Google is now stuck defending & extending its old businesses – search, Chrome O/S for laptops, Google+ for mail and social media, and Android for mobility products. And, as is true with all D&E management, its costs are escalating dramatically.

Gary Liberson in The Huffington Post:

Google just became another Qualcomm. You may not have noticed, but by buying the Motorola mobile phone portfolio, Google can now integrate its Android operating system with Motorola’s underlying mobile phone technology. This hardware plus software change means there is going to be a stronger licensing relationship with companies like HTC and Samsung. Which means Google will be able to collect more of their dollars in licensing fees.

Ben Parr (Mashable’s editor-at-large):

For Google, the Motorola acquisition is a series of gambles. Google is gambling that regulators will approve the deal. It’s gambling that Motorola’s patents will be enough to force a stalemate in the Google-Apple-Microsoft patent wars. And finally, it’s gambling that it has the capability to create the software and hardware for a phone that can truly rival the iPhone.

TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid:

I don’t know why Google acquired Motorola as opposed to simply licensing its trove of patents. My hunch is that it had more to do with fending off a threat from Microsoft than it had to do with Google’s hitherto unforeseen hardware ambitions.

MIT Technology Review’s Erica Naone:

…as people increasingly access the Web via mobile devices, the acquisition could also help Google remain central to their Web experience in the years to come. As Apple has demonstrated with its wildly popular iPhone, this is far easier to achieve if a company can control the hardware, as well as the software, people carry in their pockets.

If we’re working on a Q&A with Roger Ebert, we’ll go find a photo of Roger Ebert. If the post is about sexy advertising in Russia, we’ll use a screenshot of Paris Hilton, of course.

If nothing is readily available, or if Charles has some time on his hands, he’ll cook up something custom – a colourful infographic, a funky Venn diagram, or an image of Kanye West in Twitterland, for example.

But on that March day we were stumped. The image would complement a column by our colleague, Arjun Basu, about the evolution of the term “content.” In the piece, Arjun argues that “we live in the world where almost everything is content,” from Nike shoes to the New York Times, to nacho chips. He calls this “The Content Revolution,” which is what we called the post.

It was an intriguing argument, but it didn’t bring to mind any particular image. If content is everything, and everything is content, then how exactly do you visually represent “everything”?

We tossed around some ideas. Maybe we could create a tree, the Tree of Content, with all sorts of “content fruit” hanging from its branches. iPhones and magazine articles and shoes and stuff.

Or maybe content is a planet, a faraway planet, with a bunch of mini content moons revolving around it.

Then again, the content revolution might take place underwater, in an uncharted ecosystem where different species represent different types of content. The content is the water, but it’s also the fish and the seawood and the anemone (thank you, Finding Nemo). Or something like that.

A slightly more literal idea, which Charles actually sketched out at some point, was to show a file folder with the word “publishing” crossed out in favour of the word “content” (referring to certain industry shifts that Arjun discusses in his post).

The folder would have three sub-folders labeled “print,” “web” and “social” fanning out of it. Or perhaps the mother folder would be labeled “publishing” to show that publishing is now just one of many branches of content (there’s that tree metaphor again). Anyway, that idea turned out to be too hard to realize. And too confusing.

The image we finally settled on is a mosaic featuring all sorts of things – a book, a piano, a crowd of people, some paintbrushes and plane tickets – that might play a role in the content revolution.

It’s an elegant image, but I’m sure we could have done better. What do you think?

Tell us: What does content look like? How would you illustrate content?

New Marketing TV is produced by The Pulse Network, which also encompasses Chris Brogan’s New Marketing Labs social media agency and the Inbound Marketing Summit, a two-day conference that we’re looking forward to being part of in September. Much thanks to Bill and his team, who are very much on the same page as us as far as content is concerned!

Part I

Part II

As you know, we’re big believers in making content accessible to people wherever they may be – at home, on the go, or even in the air. So the Sparksheet iPad App is just one more platform for you to access our award-winning think pieces, Q&As, videos and other original and curated content.

Unlike some other magazine brands (you know who you are), we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel with a flashy-but-clunky app that puts design before content, and print before digital. Besides, Sparksheet.com – our newly redesigned website – is already optimized for the iPad and all sorts of different screens and mobile devices.

The Sparksheet iPad App keep things simple, searchable and clean – just the way we like it. Let us know what you think!

Ann Curry @140conf - Image by bjmccray via Flickr

Ann Curry takes her role as anchor to heart. Curry believes that television news anchors are responsible for holding down the journalistic principles of truth and accuracy in a world where the real-time news cycle often leads to error and misinformation.

Opening with a tongue-in-cheek impression of her Japanese mother, Curry charmed the crowd into a tweeting frenzy at last month’s 140conf.

During her 10-minute talk, entitled “Journalism in the State of Now,” Curry boldly declared that today’s journalists find themselves “where no generation has gone before.”

In particular, Curry addressed social media’s role in igniting social activism and spreading knowledge. She said that Facebook and Twitter offer people a platform to express their hopes and frustrations, or what she calls their “beautiful outrage.”

We caught up with Ann Curry backstage to chat about the changing state of news journalism and how she approaches her role as anchor across multiple platforms.

Ann Curry @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You’d think these things would be obsolete by now. But, as I theorized on the 140conf stage in front of 800-plus people (not to mention the thousands who tuned into the webcast), face-to-face events like 140conf have only become more meaningful in a connected age.

As humans, we like to get together to share stories and ideas and conversations with people from around the world. The problem is that as soon as the curtain goes down, all of these stories and ideas and conversations fade into the ether – save for a photo or two. That’s why we partnered with 140conf curator Jeff Pulver to keep the conversation going before, during and after the event.

Before the conference, for example, we caught up with Funny or Die marketing director and conference speaker Patrick Starzan to chat about the online video website’s viral success. We also ran a short think piece by 140conf opera singer Ja-Naé Duane.

Then, while the conference was going on, our “ground team” at Sparksheet HQ was glued to the “backchannel” in order to curate a stream of the most interesting audience tweets in real time. Meanwhile, I shot some exclusive backstage videos with the likes of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and Today Show anchor Ann Curry. Stay tuned for those in the coming weeks.

For now, here are some key takeaways from two eclectic, content-filled days:

Cory Booker @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

The web is a big tent

Have I used the word “eclectic” yet? Because there really is no better word to describe Jeff Pulver’s events. In keeping with the micro nature of Twitter, 140conf consisted of about 90 10-minute talks spread out over two dizzying days.

The lineup included everyone from tech-savvy farmer Steve Tucker and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra, to radiation oncologist Krupali Tejura and Newark mayor Cory Booker.

It was an important reminder that when we use terms like “users” and “audience” and “readers” and “consumers,” what we’re really talking about is people. All different kinds of people. Everywhere.

Jeff Jarvis @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Slow down

It’s funny. According to the 140conf tagline, this event was all about “exploring the state of now” and taking stock of what’s happening on “the real-time web.” But one of the main lessons of the conference was that we all need to slow down. Fast.

The problem with the web’s hurried pace is that it doesn’t leave much space for verification. That’s why media scholar Dan Gillmor is trying to launch a “slow news” movement, where citizens join journalists as “active consumers” of the news who approach so-called facts with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Case in point, NPR news curator Andy Carvin recounted how he helped unmask an American activist who spent months posing as a Syrian blogger called “Gay Girl in Damascus.”

The hoax fooled mainstream media outlets for months, but media critic Jeff Jarvis suggested, in a separate talk, that the onus of verification rests on readers as well as journalists. “I’m not asking you to question the article,” Jarvis said, “I’m asking you to question your assumptions.”

Cathy Brooks @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

Listen up

While media pundits like Carvin, Gillmor and Jarvis talked about slowing down, several other 140conf speakers encouraged us to put away our smartphones, tablets and laptops  ­­– and listen up. Storytelling consultant Cathy Brooks, for example, began her talk with a tongue-in-cheek spoken-word piece that implored the audience to “shut up and breathe.”

In an informative talk on how to interview famous people, film journalist Warren Etheredge explained that “the first step in having a conversation is preparing yourself to listen.” Etheredge said the only interview question he prepares is the first one – the rest flow from listening to the person’s answers.

Social marketing expert Ted Rubin even coined a new buzzword for the value of listening to our customers and peers: Return on Relationship.

Ian Spector @140conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

You can’t plan everything

Another term bandied around quite a bit at 140conf was “serendipity.” Indeed, many of the presenters had stumbled upon online success (or at least celebrity) accidentally.

Ian Spector, for example, launched a website in 2005 filled with funny “facts” about actor Chuck Norris. To date, the site has received more than 250 million views, and spawned a bestselling book series.

In a different vein, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley spoke of the many unexpected ways merchants and brands use the location-based platform. But the theme of serendipity was summed up best by former news anchor Anita Cochran in the title of her ten-minute talk: “What, I’m a brand?”

The Lupus Ladies of Twitter @140Conf - Image via Flickr: bjmccray

All good things

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the many speakers who took the 140conf stage to talk about how they are using the web to help people.

From the “Lupus Ladies of Twitter,” who used social media to raise awareness and build support for a groundbreaking new Lupus drug, to Hollaback’s Emily May and her crusade against street harassment, these inspiring people reminded us that the web is about more than ROI or ROE or ROR or any other catchy acronym.

It’s about people from all over the world getting together to do good things. Sort of like 140conf.

Funny or Die features a mix of original videos and user-generated stuff. How do you strike a balance between content creation and curation, and does one type of content inform the other?

Our goal is to always get our best content out there. When we started we were only producing exclusive content, about one video a week. Now we’re doing about 25 videos a month.

Obviously it’s important for us as a brand to be creating content, but the curation is also vital; whether it comes from friends of Funny or Die or our homepage editors scouring the Net on a daily basis to find the funniest stuff out there.

At the end of the day it’s about making our audience laugh and want to come back. That’s not something that can be done solely by pushing our own content.

In the last couple of years you guys have established yourselves as specialists in branded entertainment. Is it a challenge to create content that has to reflect both the Funny or Die brand and someone else’s?

The branded content is a big part of our business and revenue stream. These campaigns are developed by the same team that creates our original content. Depending on the deal with the brand, it’s then featured on our homepage.

In terms of the challenge, it really depends on the brand. Some brands are great and have a genuine understanding of the Internet and its capabilities. Even with guidelines in place, the objective is always to make a funny and effective video.

Other brands are more conservative and put a lot of restraints on the creative process, sometimes resulting in a less-funny video. There is always the challenge of making a suitable video for the brand while maintaining the integrity of what they’ve come to Funny or Die for in the first place.

You’ve said that you’ll work for any brand as long as it’s done transparently and the Funny or Die writers have total creative control. But have you ever been approached by a brand that’s just unspoofable?

For us, there’s no brand that’s unspoofable. In fact, the ones that might fall into that category actually end up being the most spoofable.

When Mini Cooper approaches us to do a collaboration, it’s a lot easier than if, for example, Intuit comes to us. It’s hard to make tax software funny. But there’s never been a case where we’ve had issues coming up with ideas or have questioned whether or not we were the right fit for a brand.

We’ve done a lot of thinking about what makes a video go viral online. Have you come close to identifying the secret sauce?

My caveat would be that if anyone says that they know the components of a viral video then they’re lying. I do, however, think that there are some underlying elements.

A viral video has to have a universal theme, something that everyone gets. The content must affect the viewer at an emotional level. Take Susan Boyle, for example. Otherwise, it has to have a laugh-out-loud or shock element. Ultimately, viral videos are things that people want to discover and share with their friends. People want to be the ones discovering that video. Influencers and people who share videos a lot are those who get the videos quicker, and that adds to the virality of a video.

We have a promotional strategy for all of our bigger videos. Obviously we spend a lot of time developing our social media accounts – Twitter (2 million+ followers), Facebook (900K+ followers), Tumblr, etc. - but we also have an outreach program to bloggers. That helps expose the content to those outside of our community.

A lot of your user-generated content consists of spoofs of advertising campaigns like the much-imitated Old Spice spots. Do you have a sense of how these spoofs affect the brands themselves?

With any successful campaign the next logical step is spoof-making. The people who make these spoofs are looking for attention. There is already a focus on these campaigns, so the best way of drawing attention over to you is by making a quality spoof. I think it’s a smart strategy, especially for young productions teams, and hopefully they have something to follow up with.

I can’t speak for the brands, and I guess it depends on the spoof, but I think that’s something that would continue to draw attention to the campaign. I would think most brands would be excited about that. Imitation is a form of flattery. Brands need to understand that they don’t have control of the online world. Online, the users control the brand.

Funny or Die has a presence on pretty much every digital and social platform. How do you maintain a consistent brand voice across each one?

I have a team of three people and we control all of the social media channels. Our approach to each of the platforms is different because each community is different. We do maintain a consistent voice, but we have different content calendars and strategies for each platform.

The overarching theme is that we always want to be communicating with our followers, having a two-way conversation. We want to make sure that they feel part of the community and that they own a little bit of the brand.

The latest episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis features embedded hashtags that link the video to Twitter. Do you think this sort of cross-platform storytelling is where things are headed online?

I’m really glad you noticed that! We’ve developed a large presence on each of the platforms, but now we’re trying to figure out how to integrate that more with the Funny or Die experience. The embeddable hashtag is one of our attempts to drive engagement.

I actually got the idea from watching TV that displayed a hashtag in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. I would follow the hashtag and see what engagement it drove, which made me think, “why wouldn’t we do that for our own videos when our viewers are actually online?”

It’s a way for us to cross-promote our content on different platforms, integrating the social experience with the content and shaping the conversation.

Funny or Die seems to have become a platform for certain celebrities to relaunch their brands or rescue their reputations. I’m thinking of people like Lindsay Lohan and Chris Klein. What do you think it is about the site that makes it a “safe space” for celebrities to make fun of themselves?

You can look at Funny or Die as an online SNL model. We have access to incredible writers and directors who make the whole process super easy and quick. It’s also a very safe environment. We always operate in the best interest of the talent. None of our videos are ever mean-spirited in tone.

For example, in 2009, Lindsay Lohan was facing a media firestorm. She called us on a Tuesday, we had scripts to her by Thursday, we shot on Sunday, and the video was up on Monday. All of a sudden it seemed to reframe her in the public mind – for that week, at least.

Funny or Die wasn’t always this type of space. We really had to build up our reputation as a place for celebrities to change public perception.

Finally, we can’t talk about Funny or Die without talking about Will Ferrell. How much of a role does he have in the site these days and how much do you think his unique brand is intertwined with that of the site?

Will definitely checks in from time to time. We’ve hired the right people to ensure that his and co-founder Adam McKay’s voices are maintained. They actually brought in our head of creative, Andrew Steele, who was a head writer at SNL for 17 years.

Will’s involvement was super important coming out of the gate, especially when the Internet was still foreign to most people. Will was already an Internet celebrity, so it helped us leverage collaborators. We didn’t start out with people knocking down our doors to make a video with us.

I think that Funny or Die is something that Will is proud of because it has built itself into its own brand. We can make deals now without playing the Will Ferrell card. But the brand itself is still representative of Will and Adam’s original vision.

They started the site as a creative sandbox for all of their friends to play in, and that’s sort of what it’s become and what the attraction is.

Patrick Starzan will be speaking at 140conf, which takes place on June 15 and 16 in New York City. As the event’s official content partner, we will bring you original 140conf-related content before, during and after the conference. Sparksheet readers are entitled to a 25% discount on registration with promo code “sparksheet” - http://nyc2011.140conf.com/

We’re also nominated for Best Digital Design, which is especially exciting on the heels of this week’s big redesign. Our exceptional peers in this category include The Walrus, Toronto Life and OpenFile.

In related news, our publisher, Raymond Girard, will be speaking at the MagNet conference this afternoon about the origins and evolution of Sparksheet. Details here.

Although Sparksheet’s readers and contributors come from around the world, it’s always a thrill to be recognized in our own backyard. If you’re in the Toronto area this week, come by and say hello!

UPDATE: We won silver for best digital design! Much thanks to the judges and to all our supporters.

Our new design will allow us to bring you more content in more diverse shapes and sizes than the traditional (if you can call “new media” traditional) reverse-chronological-order blog format allowed in the past. Here are some of the major changes:

The Sparkbeat

If you’re reading this post, you’ve found your way to The Sparkbeat. We’ll be using this space to let you know what’s going on here at Sparksheet.

This is also where you’ll find our “curated content” – our unique Sparksheet-y take on the most relevant media and marketing stories around the web. As usual, the idea is for this to be a two-way conversation so we hope you’ll post lots of comments and suggestions for what we should be covering.

Columns

Our new columns section will allow us to showcase our most prolific and popular contributors. For instance, TNS Australia’s Carolyn Childs will continue to cover the space where travellers, brands and technology intersect, Alphabird’s Alex Rowland will share his expertise on the world of branded video, and ThinkState’s Gunther Sonnenfeld will wax analytic about “the business of storytelling.”

Of course, we’ll also continue to bring you our signature Engagement Checkups and insights on The Transumer, the elusive consumer in transit.

Tags vs. categories

We’ve had a major rethink about how we categorize and tag our content. In the past, we’ve felt that some of our categories have been a bit too generic (“publishing”), too esoteric (“return on engagement”), or too ambiguous (“relationships”).

Another challenge is that most Sparksheet posts don’t focus on just one topic or industry; they’re all about the unexpected connections between them.

In the new design, we reserve our categories for the different types of Sparksheet posts (Q&As, columns, etc.) and use a limitless number of tags to identify the different topics we cover. You will be able to sort through our most popular topics on our homepage, just below the carousel.

Feature articles

One of the more exciting additions to the new Sparksheet is our monthly “blogazine”-style feature articles. These in-depth pieces will incorporate the best of both print and web design standards and are our way of backing up Slate editor David Plotz’s assertion that long-form journalism is alive and well on the web.

Check out our inaugural feature, Brand New Havana, where we go to Cuba to do what may be the world’s first branded entertainment travel story.

Events, videos and comics….oh my

Other additions to the Sparksheet universe include a dedicated page for our SparksheetTV videos, and a hub for all our events-related content. And inspired in part by “marketoonist” Tom Fishburne, we’ve humbly launched our own cartoon series, Sparksauce, which offers a whimsical take on the wacky world of agencies in the digital age.

Credits

First and foremost, major props for the redesign go to Charles Lim, Sparksheet’s super-skilled and incredibly efficient Creative Director. Charles is also the guy who creates all the slick custom images and infographics on the site. Watch out for his new design column in the coming weeks.

Huge thanks also go out to the extended Sparksheet/Spafax Interactive team, which includes community manager Joey Tanny, editorial interns Erin Rubin and Dani Aaron, content strategist Elaine Lim, content manager Ian Gamache, editorial advisers Arjun Basu and Charlene Rooke, production manager Jamille Barreto, proofreader Jonathan Furze (what other marketing blog has a proofreader?), Spafax CEO Niall McBain and, of course, our ever-supportive publisher, Spafax Interactive president Raymond Girard.

And, last but not least, thanks to all our amazing contributors and readers who have made Sparksheet what it’s become in just two short years.

And as I follow the flock of package vacationers through the terminal it becomes obvious why: in this sunny time warp of an island, there is no branding. No ads for business-friendly hotels or glitzy casinos. No HSBC-stamped jet bridges or Visa-sponsored airport lounge. You don’t realize how many messages are vying for your attention until the messages stop and you’re left looking at off-white walls and fading airport signage.

We make our way down the escalator to customs and I start to wonder if I should just follow my fellow Canadians to some sandy all-inclusive; throw in the proverbial towel and fold out the beach towel. And that’s when I see it: the only ad in the airport. It’s a picture of a dark, handsome bottle with a red circle and two words written on it in white: “Havana Club.” The same brand that invited me to Havana and, as it turns out, pretty much the only brand in town.

Brand history, brand culture

The words “Havana Club” mean something different depending on where you are in the world. They were first stamped on a bottle of rum in 1878 by a 31-year-old Spanish immigrant named José Arechabala. After the 1959 revolution, Arechebala’s distillery was seized and nationalized by Fidel Castro’s new government. The family was exiled to Spain and eventually settled in the United States.

In 1994, the Cuban government relaunched the brand under a joint venture with French spirit conglomerate Pernod Ricard (there are stories of Castro keeping Pernod’s general manager waiting in his office into the wee hours of the morning). Shortly after, rival rum distiller Bacardi partnered with the Arechabala family and began distributing its own “Havana Club” label.

In this sunny time warp of an island, there is no branding. No ads for business-friendly hotels or glitzy casinos. No HSBC-stamped jet bridges or Visa-sponsored airport lounge.

For more than a decade the two companies have been entangled in a protracted trademark dispute, complicated by international law and the United States embargo against Cuban products. As it stands, both brands sell rum under the “Havana Club” name: Bacardi in the U.S. and Pernod everywhere else.

Since reviving the brand in 1994, the Franco-Cuban company has positioned itself as “Cuba’s cultural ambassador,” says François Renié, Havana Club’s global communications director and my tour guide for the trip. In 2007 Renié launched Havana Cultura, a multimedia website dedicated to showcasing contemporary Cuban culture. Eventually the site was spun out into a series of international events, a trilogy of jazz-fusion recordings produced by British DJ Gilles Peterson, and a grants program that supports young artists around the capital.

Havana Club’s latest project – and the reason they flew me down here – is a film called Seven Days in Havana. It consists of seven interwoven shorts directed by a gaggle of Spanish-speaking filmmakers, including Puerto Rican movie star Benicio Del Toro in his directorial debut. The film was written by Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura and, given Havana Club’s hands-on role in its development, represents a unique experiment in branded entertainment.

From Berlin to Havana

I didn’t expect to spend my first night in Havana touring the city with a movie star. I’m seated at the bar at El Floridita, the birthplace of the frozen daiquiri and one of Ernest Hemingway’s many “favourite haunts” (a bronze statue of the writer leans an elbow on one end of the bar). On the stool next to me is Daniel Brühl, a German-Spanish actor who starred in the nostalgic Cold War comedy Good Bye Lenin! and played a Nazi sniper in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Brühl, diminutive and charming, starts work on Seven Days in Havana tomorrow and is spending the evening hitting up several of Havana’s iconic spots for a German GQ photo shoot. I’ve been invited to tag along.

Actors Daniel Bruhl and Melvis Santa with director Julio Medem

Between sips of his daiquiri, Brühl tells me how excited he is to work in Cuba, having made his name in a film about communism but being too young to have experienced the Berlin Wall himself. He describes the bar, with its uniformed barmen and colonial air, as a “time warp” and later tells me that he “didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see the country now because it might change very soon.” This desire to bear witness to the city before it becomes unrecognizable seems to be shared by tourists and locals alike. With a fading Fidel, an influx of foreign money and a growing tolerance for private enterprise (plus a relatively dovish president in the White House) the smell of spring is in the air. There’s also the cruel notion that the crumbling art deco mansions and 60-year-old American cars that lend the city its colour can’t evade the scrap yard forever.

Old Havana, new Havana

The next morning I stop by the film set at the Riviera Hotel, a colourful mid-century modern gem built by American mobster Meyer Lansky. It’s the production’s final week and they’re shooting the first scene of “The Temptation,” Spanish director Julio Médem’s contribution to Seven Days in Havana. The film involves a love triangle between a Cuban singer (played by local musician Melvis Santa), her Cuban boyfriend, and a Spanish record producer (played by Spanish-born Brühl) who offers her a shot at a European singing career. The scene begins with Santa and Brühl’s characters meeting at the hotel bar. After some whispered flirting he kisses her and hands her a plane ticket along with the key to his room. Between takes, Brühl admits that “it’s not so bad kissing those lips over and over,” but says the characters’ relationship “doesn’t go any farther,” suggesting Santa’s character ultimately decides to stay put.

Like previous Havana Cultura projects, the film’s creators seem to be struggling with an impulse to reinforce our romantic, but not entirely healthy, notions of Havana, and a desire to refresh the city’s brand. Based on a classic Cuban novel, “The Temptation” is a “metaphor for the Cuban dilemma,” according to Médem. “Does she stay here where she is from, or does she pursue money and success elsewhere?” Médem says that the fact that this century-old story works in a contemporary context demonstrates that the city’s present is inextricably linked to its past. Fabien Pisani, one of Seven Days in Havana’s Cuban producers, describes the film as a “love letter to Cuba” and a chance to “make a film about Havana in Havana instead of Miami or Santa Cruz.” But while self-consciously avoiding Havana’s cultural and physical clichés (Buena Vista Social Club, vintage cars), the filmmakers are also trying to “capture the city before it goes away, before buildings change or crumble,” says Pisani.

In this sense, Havana Club may be an even better ambassador than it realizes. By shining a spotlight on the present, both city and brand can’t help illuminate its own complicated past.

Actor/director Benicio Del Toro (centre) near the Malecón

A branded film

Havana Club was involved with Seven Days in Havana from the beginning, Renié tells me in the Riviera lobby after we’ve watched the actors shoot the kissing scene at least a dozen times (I may never again be able to watch a Spanish film without imagining a curly-haired director yelling the words “actiones” and “corta” between scenes). The company commissioned Padura to write the script and leveraged its Havana Cultura relationships to get the city’s young talent on board. “What’s great about Cuba is we have access to any artist we want,” Renié says. “Everyone is a free agent.

While a bottle of aged Havana Club rum may show up in a scene or two, Renié tells me that the brand’s involvement with the film isn’t about product placement. Like other Havana Cultura projects, it’s about supporting Havana’s young artists and reinforcing the brand’s status as the city’s unofficial cultural curator. “We’re hoping the movie will make people fall in love with the city,” Renié says, “and we are the city’s ambassadors.”

The film’s creators seem to be struggling with an impulse to reinforce our romantic, but not entirely healthy, notions of Havana, and a desire to refresh the city’s brand.

Branded films have been made before. Douglas Scott, president of branded entertainment agency OgilvyEntertainment, points to Gatorade’s 2007 teen soccer drama Gracie. The film pretty much broke even, Scott says, though it was criticized by one reviewer as playing out “like an extended television commercial…given the very suspicious prominence of Gatorade bottles throughout.” Scott also points to Eurostar’s Somers Town as an example of a successful branded film because the train company was incorporated into the film in a way that felt organic to the story. But Havana Club’s project may be unique in its emphasis on the brand’s values, rather than its rum. “What they’re doing is really the holy grail,” Scott says. “It’s not about the product or even the brand, but about what the brand stands for.”

In a press package sent out before the trip, the film’s producers state that “Usually, we wouldn’t have thought about such a partnership. Brand [sic] and independent movie producers’ universes don’t meet that often.” But when I ask the film’s Cuban producer, Spanish director and German star how they feel about working on a “branded film,” they all seem perplexed by the question. “For me Havana Club is an investor,” says Pisani. “It’s very difficult to raise money for a film in Cuba.” Médem describes Havana Club’s involvement as a “natural collaboration,” saying that he had “no obligation to put a bottle in the film” and “no problem with the brand’s involvement.” As for Brühl, he says he thinks it’s a “great thing” if a brand wants to support local films. Besides, he adds with a smile, “they put a bottle of rum in my room.”

I’ve come here to do a story about branded entertainment but it becomes apparent that these three men don’t see Seven Days in Havana as branded entertainment at all. That’s because the film couldn’t credibly be made without having the rum brand on board. Havana Cultura has been so successful that brand Havana and brand Havana Club and have effectively become inseparable. This sort of “branded curation,” where a company makes itself indispensable to an existing culture or community, is what good advertising is all about, says Gunther Sonnenfeld, an expert in branded storytelling. “It’s not about shoehorning a brand into a story, but using story to develop a brand, Sonnenfeld says. “It’s about putting the narrative before the brand and seeing what comes out of that.” In Havana Club’s case, what has come out of Havana Cultura is a situation where the brand is shaping the city’s story as much as the other way around. The question is whether this case represents a uniquely Cuban throwback to a less competitive time, or a glimpse into the future of branding.

The bar at El Floridita

The only brand in town

On my last night in Havana I meet Renié for dinner at a foreign-run restaurant overlooking the Malecón, the seaside esplanade that locals call their “outdoor sofa.” Internationally, Havana Club is aimed at 25- to 35-year-old “cultural mavens,” he tells me between bites of lemon chicken. These are “young people who like to have fun but aren’t just looking to get drunk,” he says, alluding to archrival Bacardi’s customers. In Renié’s view, the two schools of rum drinkers can be distinguished by their musical tastes as well. In Europe, a “Havana Club bar” will tend to play jazz, soul, reggae or hip-hop while a “Bacardi bar” would favour lounge or house music, according to Renié. That’s why Bacardi’s main competitors are vodka brands such as Absolut (another Pernod Ricard property) while Havana Club “competes with beer” for the attention of more refined bar-goers.

But that’s everywhere else. In Havana, it’s hard to see how any brand can compete with Havana Club, which appears to anchor every mojito I drink during my five days in the city (and that’s quite a few). When we leave the restaurant Renié hands a tip to a parking attendant whom I notice is sporting a red Havana Club vest. I point it out to Renié who proudly states that the uniforms “may be the only advertisements in the city.” Except for the airport, of course. As I head to my gate the next morning I spot another Havana Club banner hanging from the rafters and decide to snap a photo. Then, out of nowhere, two official-looking men in suits approach me and point to the camera. I show them the picture, and after a moment, they wave me off with a smile.

So what exactly is a marketoonist?

Marketoonist is a business I’ve been slowly incubating over the last ten years before I even knew what the business idea was. I started out working in marketing and doing cartoons as a hobby.

The cartoons started to gain their own momentum, and over time I’ve started to focus on creating cartoons about marketing and have this weekly audience of about 100,000 people that read them.

A marketoonist is really shorthand for a way a brand can communicate with its customers using cartoons, and cartoons are “content worth sharing” in their own right – they’re funny, but they also have a subtle connection to what the brand stands for, so it can supplement or augment the way a brand or business communicates with those customers.

You’re a card-carrying member of the marketing community, having worked on both the brand and agency side, but most of your work seems to be devoted to smashing the industry’s sacred cows. Do you see yourself as an outside critic, or an inside observer?

I like to float back and forth. If you think about the overall category of marketing, there’s a very broad spectrum all the way from the snake oil salesman to marketing as a force for encouraging positive behaviour. What I like to do with my cartoons is put up a mirror for marketers to see themselves in a different light and potentially make changes or re-evaluate the way they do things.

Ultimately I subscribe to the Seth Godin school of marketing – that marketing is merely a remarkable story well told. That implies that you have to be doing something remarkable but also that you have to tell that story well and authentically.

And so a lot of my cartoons poke fun at or exaggerate when that doesn’t happen, but then I try to use my blog posts to show positive case studies when it’s done well.

Having been a marketer, I don’t want to critique marketing without putting myself under the magnifying lens because I’ve certainly been guilty too – I don’t see myself as a critic that’s immune to these things.

I always want every cartoon to make fun of myself and not just somebody else. When you get a collective laugh, people see themselves in the cartoons and I think that’s a positive thing.

Some of your recent cartoons poke fun at concepts like brand storytelling. Do you think brands can ever be taken seriously as content creators?

They can but they have to raise themselves to a higher standard. The big goal for a brand is to think less about their brand promise and more about their brand purpose – why are they actually there as a brand.

If your brand purpose is higher than the actual products you’re trying to sell, you can write content about that brand purpose and consumers will be interested because it will have actual, innate value to them.

If you broaden and extend what a brand stands for to a larger brand experience, and you’re creating content that’s larger than the features and benefits that you sell, then publishing becomes a natural extension of what you do. You transform yourself from being a product company to being a service company.

Your latest cartoon depicts a brand executive who seems to fundamentally misunderstand Facebook, and in the accompanying blog post you suggest that “many brands bring an advertising campaign mindset to social media.” What do you mean by that?

Social media shouldn’t be treated as a campaign because it’s an enduring part of the brand experience, not just a one-off with a beginning and an end. It’s more akin to a call centre where customers always have a connection to a brand.

I did a cartoon once that showed a legal review of a tweet. After all the red ink the tweet was far longer than 140 characters and the brand missed the event they were trying to tweet about by a week! If brands think of Facebook as a form of external communication like other forms of corporate communication they miss the dialogue and consumers can really tell.

It comes up again and again both for proactive marketing but also for reactive marketing when there’s a crisis. Brands often fall down in crisis management, take far too long to respond to customers, and that just fans the fire.

I’m reminded of your Brandtube cartoon in which an executive declares that in order to get the brand back on track all they have to do is produce a viral video. Are brands suffering from a case of inflated expectations when it comes to what social media can do?

I think they are. Everyone’s familiar with the success stories on social media, so there’s an expectation that you can just do a viral video as if it’s creating an FSI [free-standing insert] or an in-store display.

You can’t create viral media; you can create enough media with the potential to become viral. There’s a feeling that social media have a direct effect on sales when in fact it’s a far more indirect effect. If you have a long conversation over time, the indirect value is incredible. But the results are much harder to measure.

At the end of the day, I see social media predominantly as being about long-term investment and building an infrastructure. For example, a lot of brands look at their call centres as cost centres and try to minimize the amount of time that people talk to consumers. Zappos was the first one to break that and had a contest for who could stay on the phone the longest. The winner was something like six and a half hours.

You could ask what’s the ROI of the phone call, but symbolically, to say that we’re an organization that will spend that much time with a customer, it creates an incredible effect on the rest of the organization to want to go above and beyond on every consumer interaction.

It’s not a cost centre, but a value creation centre. That’s the same shift with social media – it’s an investment you make with many indirect returns.

A lot of your cartoons have to do with the creative process, and how the structure and bureaucracy of agencies sometimes get in the way of innovation. Does that come out of your own frustrations, and what are some ways we can overcome these institutional hurdles to produce more good ideas?

That definitely comes from my own experience, but also what I’ve seen everywhere. You very often have an idea that is fairly remarkable, but in the course of bringing that idea to life, the idea suffers a “death by a thousand cuts.”

The end result is often something that is mediocre, safe, and predictable – the edges have been sanded off the idea. That happens again and again whether it’s launching a new product or creating a piece of creative.

One way to break out of this is to create an organization that has the capability to make ideas stronger over time. When I worked at Method, we had floor-to-ceiling white boards on every vertical surface – we called it the Wiki Wall.

Rather than have a brainstorm once a quarter, we had an idea happen out in the open. Someone would start an idea on the corner of a wall and anyone within the organization had the ability to add to that idea. We weren’t allowed to say “Yes, but…,” only “Yes, and…” As the ideas went from inception to launch, they became stronger because everyone was adding to it.

That’s a very different approach than most companies take: leave the brainstorm and go back to the real world of the office where sacrifices are made and peace treaties are forged.

I’m creating a lot of cartoon material on that because it’s such a rich area, and it’s more crucial now than ever. In the 1950s you’d launch broadly appealing, fairly mediocre products and drive awareness through advertising. Nowadays, with the number of new products launched every year, the stakes are much higher and you need to have a remarkable product at the outset to have a chance of surviving.

There’s a great quote from the founder of Geek Squad that “advertising is a tax for unremarkable thinking” and so it pushes more that remarkable thinking to occur early on in the process rather than later.

What do you think cartoons can communicate about our world that words or other media cannot?

Seth Godin posted one of my cartoons a while ago and his main takeaway was that cartoons have this incredible power of connectivity between the reader and the cartoonist.

In having just a few simple lines, readers have to connect the dots themselves and make the connection with why the cartoon resonates with their situation. So there’s a bit of call and response.

The comments section of any cartoon that I post is often more interesting than the article that I write because people have their own interpretations and they apply it to their own situations in a way that I could never envision.

Cartooning has a long and rich history, and yet if you talk to many cartoonists, they’d say that it’s never been worse because of how newspapers are failing and the traditional paths to cartooning are broken. But cartoons have been described as the greatest loyalty engines ever created.

Nowadays, who needs loyalty engines? It’s brands. So when I look at the power of cartoons and how it can be applied to where we are today, the future is incredibly bright.

Photo by Eva Blue via Flickr

Magic. Mystery. Emotion. These are words that come to mind when I think of Cirque du Soleil’s gravity-defying shows. But they have very little to do with conventional marketing, and even less to do with social media, which is all about openness and clarity and direct communication between customers and brands.

During his talk at last month’s Tomorrow Awards, Guibert explained how the multinational Cirque brand connects with customers without diluting its core brand themes of emotion, humanity and creativity. In particular, Guibert said that Cirque:

• never uses superlatives in its press releases or promotional material. Instead, the brand focuses on emotional words like “wonder” and “journey.” Said Guibert: “If you oversell you can only under-deliver”;
• always features eye contact in its posters to emphasize the universal human appeal of its shows;
• puts every act of every show on its website for people to experience and share.

This last point is surprising, as one might expect Cirque du Soleil to preserve the magic of its performances by limiting content to ticket buyers. But Guibert said that, after a period of debate within the company, it became clear that sharing content is the best way to connect with both loyal and potential customers. We sat down with Guibert after his talk to learn about the importance of content and emotion for Cirque du Soleil.

Stop worrying about making “good ads” and start thinking about how to make advertising “good.” That was the core message of Cindy Gallop’s inspiring, TED-esque talk at last month’s Tomorrow Awards conference.

Gallop pointed out the irony in the fact that the creator of Mad Men – the advertising world’s pet TV program – was at odds with his network bosses over the fact that they wanted him to integrate more advertising into the show.

“People love advertising in particular,” Gallop said, pointing out that everyone has a favourite TV commercials or jingle, “but they hate advertising in general.”

That sense of frustration convinced Gallop, a former Chairman at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, to ditch traditional advertising for the wild west of Web activism and entrepreneurship. Her first solo venture, Make Love Not Porn, broke down some of the myths people have about sex due to the proliferation of Internet pornography (warning: link is not quite safe for work).

Her current project, IfWeRanTheWorld, is a simple Web platform that brings together people’s good intentions with corporate good intentions to turn them into “collective actions.” We sat down with Gallop after her talk to chat about why “the future of branding is action,” as she puts it.

Robert Wong (in plaid) with his black-clad fellow presenters

Everybody knows Google. Everyone uses Google. And unless you work for Microsoft or Yahoo or maybe Facebook, chances are you love Google. Which means that Robert Wong, creative head of Google’s in-house advertising agency, has the easiest job in the world, right?

Well, sort of. When I cheekily asked him this question, Wong explained that Google’s routine presence in our everyday lives can actually make it a challenge for the brand to resonate with people on an emotional level. That’s where story comes in.

During his talk at the Tomorrow Awards last month, Wong presented Google’s “Parisian Love” ad, which first ran during the 2009 Superbowl. The heartwarming spot tells the love story of an American man and a French woman as it unfolds through the guy’s Google search queries, from “study abroad Paris,” to “how to assemble a crib.”

Wong used the spot as an example of how Google tries to exceed people’s expectations through a mix of surprise, empathy and creativity (which he wrapped up into a neat, Googley algorithm). We sat down with Wong after his talk to chat more about the story of Google Creative Lab:

Slate has always labeled itself an “online magazine,” even as a whole ecosystem of blogs and content websites and tablet newspapers has sprouted around it. How is Slate different from the Gawkers and HuffPosts and Daily Beasts, not just in terms of what it does but what sort of publication it is?

There’s a lot of overlap across media these days. There are traditional newspapers that are doing lots of TV kinds of journalism, there are TV journalists who are blogging or who have strong web enterprises, there are magazines, such as Slate, that publish at a pace that makes them much more like daily newspapers, and there are websites like the Huffington Post, which occupy lots of different niches all at once. You would be hard-pressed to classify them as any single thing.

Within that universe, Slate has certain distinguishing qualities that have to do with sensibility. It’s a place that aspires to do very intelligent, witty, important, and entertaining journalism about the news of the day. We’re not primarily a commodity news site; although you can get lots of news on Slate, it’s much more analytical, trying to get conceptual scoops about the news rather than the latest, small iteration of what congressman did what to whom.

I have to ask you about last year’s New York Observer piece that suggested Slate was having trouble keeping up with younger, more nimble online publications. In the piece, Gawker’s Nick Denton suggests that “there’s a limited audience” for the sort of “smart centrism” that you guys produce and indeed, you guys don’t so much break news as pour cold water over it. Is being the Web’s “voice of reason” a winning strategy in the current online news environment?

Yeah, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the Observer piece, which I thought was wrong on so many different fronts. If you look at our traffic, if you look at our advertising and other sources of revenue and our general influence, all those are moving in the direction we want them to move.

What the Observer piece didn’t recognize was that we’re fairly straightforward and clear-eyed about the challenges that we face and that web journalism faces. We talk directly about what those challenges are and about the kind of things that we don’t do as well as we ought to do, and we’re working like demons to improve those things.

Slate has a reputation for not being very interested in aggregation, but you actually pioneered this type of web journalism with Today’s Papers, which has morphed into The Slatest. How important a role does aggregation – and its sexier younger sister curation – play in what Slate does?

It’s important. As you rightly point out, today’s papers pioneered this and did it extremely well for a very long time. In recent years we’ve been experimenting with different forms; we’ve had The Slatest for a long time now and the model we have for it isn’t working perfectly. But there’s a lot of stuff that Slate does that is built around aggregation and curation. We get traffic and revenue from that.

One of the wonderful things about Slate is that it has always been and will always be home to an enormous amount of individual thinking. While we’re also in the business of making sure our readers know about all the ideas that are floating around the Web, what distinguishes us is that you will always get new and provocative ideas.

A lot of journalists are up in arms these days about content farms, which churn out content based on what people are searching for. But in a way this strikes me as a very rudimentary type of service journalism, and not that different than the sort of stuff you do with The Explainer. Where do you see companies like Demand fitting into the journalistic ecosystem – are they something more than a parasite?

I don’t have a strong sense of Demand media because they’re not who I think is the great competition for Slate. Journalism designed solely around search engines is journalism that I’m not interested in, that most readers aren’t interested in and, as search gets more and more sophisticated, that search engines themselves won’t be interested in.

Everyone has to think about responding to the interests of readers – tracking them and using whatever tools we can to see what they’re interested in – and then creating journalism that reflects those interests.

Huffington Post is at the top here with great technology and pretty good journalism. There are institutions like Demand, which have also done this quite well but with mediocre journalism. Then there are sites that are focusing on search, but where that attention is never the sole purpose of journalism; where the journalism exists because you know that readers are interested in it.

How much are Slate writers and editors encouraged to think about stuff like SEO when crafting a piece?

If there’s a story that we want to do just because we want to, we go ahead and do it. But when we’ve done it, we look to figure out what people are searching around this topic, what they are going to be searching for, and how we can ensure our menu lines and the various things that search engines pay attention to reflect how readers are actually searching.

Sometimes we see that people are looking for such and such topic on the Web, and if someone has a great angle on it, we decide how to do the story. So of course we keep an eye on it – it would be a mistake not to keep an eye on it.

Slate produces a bunch of very popular podcasts, including the Culture and Political Gabfests, which you’ve started to parlay into live events. Are these sorts of brand extensions increasingly part of what it means to be a magazine in the 21st century?

Podcasting is the most valuable connection that we have with our readers. The audience that we reach is an incredibly devoted, interesting, engaged audience. They’re hardcore Slate readers and they’re incredibly attractive in every way – actually they’re all good-looking too – so it’s been a fabulous success as a way of connecting with readers. As a business, it’s increasingly successful because advertising is very lucrative on there and sponsorships can be very profitable.

Events are an extension of our brand and we’re looking for new ways to integrate them with what Slate stands for. We have a wonderful partnership with New America Foundation and Arizona State University called Future Tense, which is a series of events and editorial articles that we’re doing around technology and public policy.

Then we’ve done live Gabfests and we also do events around The Hive, which is a popular crowd-sourcing feature. We ask our readers to think about how to solve a particular problem such as childhood obesity, pick the best ideas and do events around that. Usually writers have some role in these events – I’ll host or one of my colleagues will host and we’ll turn out a really interesting, smart conversation.

You launched Slate Labs last summer in order to experiment with multimedia journalism and technology. How’s that experiment going, and what has it taught you about the importance of data in journalism?

It’s going really well. We have this young team led by Chris Wilson, who is a brilliant young journalist and programmer, and we’re trying lots of things.

Readers really love them, we love them, and advertisers sometimes like them, so they can pay for themselves. Just as there’s a Slate sensibility that exists for articles and the kind of stories we do, so, too, is there a Slate sensibility for how we represent data.

We try to find subjects where we can bring Slate’s distinct, skeptical, quizzical, amused take to data, and we’re working on that all the time. Some of the projects we’ve done have really nailed this, and some are more traditional, but that’s the ambition.

When Jacob Weisberg stepped down as Slate’s editor in 2008 he wrote that he was taught “not to linger too long in the editor’s chair.” What do you want to accomplish before you pass the torch to someone else?

One of the things I really want to improve is this use and visualization of data. Another is trying to make Slate the home for ambitious long-form web journalism. We’ve institutionalized that with a project we call the Fresca Fellowships – because I used to drink a lot of Fresca.

The idea is that every writer and editor on staff has to spend a month or six weeks a year not doing their regular job, but instead working on a long, ambitious project of some sort – and the results have been amazing so far.

Emily Bazelon, our legal editor, worked on a project about cyber-bullying that focused on the case of Phoebe Prince, and showed that everything we think we know about it is wrong. Timothy Noah did a wonderful series this summer about the rise of inequality in America. And Chris Wilson, who does our data visualization, did a fantastic series about a totally unknown story where the military used social networking theory to capture Saddam Hussein.

In terms of what I want to accomplish, there are certain goals we have about how successful Slate is as a business that I’m aimed at. Editorially, I want the number of our readers to grow and the nature of readers to remain the same brilliant, good-looking, wise, well-educated people that they are. Then there is the nature of the journalism we do. There are things I want to do more of and things I will work relentlessly at to improve.

Do you think story can really play a role on a screen that’s meant to be engaged with in terms of seconds?

I think it depends on the concept and on the story you are trying to convey. If you attempt to capture people’s attention by expecting them to watch something in 15 seconds, you’ve fundamentally failed.

If you go back to creating an old-school style of press ad in terms of a stopper – something that has stopping power when you walk past it – that glance only takes a second to understand. Then you can roll into a story where you’ve got their undivided attention.

You have to be very aware of your audience and be clever about how you communicate. Through digital outdoors, you still need to get people’s attention, but you have additional benefits including interactivity, built-in cameras, and eyeball detection.

This was used in a great Amnesty ad about domestic abuse: The violence went away when someone looked at the poster, and it started again when the person looked away – just like it does in reality.

The digital billboard is still being used and created for like a poster, but it’s not a poster. It’s an interactive format, it’s a server, it’s a wireless connection, it’s a touch-screen device. You have to think about it as a content management system. You have to think about the possibilities that the medium can deliver, and then you can create stand-out campaigns.

You’ve worked and won awards in both the online and offline marketing worlds. Do you foresee a world where the two will go hand in hand?

We just created a campaign for one of our clients where users can create things on Facebook that feed to outdoor screens. So we’re now taking online content and placing it in offline environments.

This type of campaign is exciting; it can drive revenue for the client and generate fame for the product, and it creates a need for advertising, which could ultimately include branded content from television sponsorships and programs.

Ultimately it depends on who your audience is. If they’re 65-70, which the majority of the world is going to be soon, then some of those people might be more interested in passive media like television. There wouldn’t be much point in doing a Facebook campaign for them.

Once you understand where your target audience or customer is, then you can develop a campaign and select the media that will interact with them in their space. We don’t expect them to come to us; we place a lot of our content where we think they might be.

I always say, “Never technology for technology’s sake.” The technologies should enhance the ideas and, ultimately, deliver a better experience.

But whether you want to call it aggregating, curating, or simply old-fashioned editing, how we sift through the ever-growing digital trove of professionally produced and user-generated content seemed to be on everyone’s mind at this year’s SXSW.

Sharing the floor with the Guardian’s media reporter, Jemima Kiss, Katz discussed how the Guardian is seeking to strike the right balance between original reporting and curated content on its digital and print properties. Tellingly, the Guardians’ last few hires haven’t been journalists, but “community managers” tasked with scouring the Web for sources and stories.

After the session, I asked Katz to expand on the role curation plays in the new journalistic age:

For Matt Williams, CEO of mega-popular social news aggregator Digg, content is increasingly curated through communities. Williams said people “expect serendipity, timeliness and personal relevance when reading the news,” and look to their friends, influencers and social networks to filter content for them.

Williams, who took over from Digg founder Kevin Rose last year, said Digg is moving “in a direction that’s much more serendipitous and personalized.” To me, these seemed like opposite editorial approaches.

Personalization makes me think of the highly-customizable news experience offered by digital apps like Flipboard, while serendipity brings to mind the eclectically curated experience of leafing through a newspaper or print magazine.

I sat down with Williams after the session and asked him to explain:

It seems fitting to end our little exploration of curation with the guy who wrote the book, Steve Rosenbaum. An Emmy award-winning television producer, Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net – an online video aggregation tool – and the author of Curation Nation.

In his book, Rosenbaum argues that businesses and publishers need to sift through the Web’s clutter to curate meaningful experiences for their audience. I caught up with him in the SXSW media lounge and asked him what role brands will play in the age of curation:

Austin Convention Center by adamjackson1984 via Flickr

Anyone who has been to SXSW can sum it up with one word: Huge. At any moment there are dozens of panels, parties, meet-ups, showcases and sessions to attend on topics ranging from design and advertising to the future of journalism.

Because we’re interested in all the above at Sparksheet, I’ve spent the last few days bouncing across Austin to participate in conversations about every aspect of the media and marketing universe. I’ve discovered that while the jargon may differ from industry to industry, the major issues are pretty much the same. Here are some lessons and observations from the past few days:

The old battle lines are being redrawn

In his book The Chaos Scenario, media critic Bob Garfield argued that both brands and journalists are being threatened by the ‘new media apocalypse.’ So it was fitting on Saturday that Garfield moderated a panel on “Brand Journalism,” featuring representatives from JWT, Pepsi and GMD Studios.

While a typically skeptical Garfield questioned whether brands can do “real journalism,” JWT’s Kyle Monson and David Eastman insisted that brand journalism is about making advertising more like content, not vice versa. Pressed by Garfield to name some examples of great brand journalism, Eastman pointed out that “if this were something brands did well, we wouldn’t be having a conversation about it.”

Later in the day, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen held court on the other side of downtown Austin about the enduring animosity between journalists and bloggers. Rosen argued that it’s time to stop worrying about who is a real journalist; what matters is preserving “acts of journalism,” regardless of who commits them. Instead of “bloggers vs. journalists,” Rosen suggested we start thinking of content in terms of “raw vs. cooked” or “institutional vs. individual.” How about branded and unbranded?

No matter the platform

At SXSW, designers, journalists and marketers all seem to agree that from the consumer’s perspective, content should be platform agnostic.

In a Saturday panel called “The Great Paywall Experiment,” The Wall Street Journal’s Chief Product Officer, Daniel Bernard, insisted that “content has to be available anytime, anywhere the user is.” Bernard said that the Journal originally charged separate prices for its print, online and mobile products but discovered that readers wanted the freedom to move from one platform to another without being charged at each point.

On Sunday morning, The Guardian’s Deputy Editor, Ian Katz, pointed out that his newspaper’s (impressive) coverage of the recent Middle East revolutions was scattered throughout various live blogs, Tumblrs and Twitter feeds, raising the question, “Does it matter where we publish news?”

Apps are disruptive

While users may not be picky about platform (as long as content is available where they need it), SXSW has made it clear that the growth of mobile is changing the game for publishers and advertisers alike. In his “Awesome Internet Design Panel,” Jeffrey Zeldman proclaimed that apps have introduced “beautiful design ideas” like simplicity and customization that can “percolate” into the non-mobile space.

In the “Great Paywall” panel, Daniel Mandell, the director of business development at Wenner Media (publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal) suggested that the App Store model of paying for content a la carte has given brands the opportunity to “retrain” users to start paying for content.

The year of the paywall

Speaking of paywalls, after a decade of debate over whether content “wants to be free,” it looks like premium content is poised for a comeback. Wenner Media’s Mandell spoke about Rolling Stone’s decision to charge for access as the music magazine “dipping its toes” into the world of paid content. But Mandell acknowledged that “content has to be rich enough for people to dip into their wallets.”

From Jay Rosen’s perspective, paywalls are “not an ideological issue, but a practical one.” Rosen said that paywalls would make journalism more like private newsletters, an industry that informs a special class of citizens rather than the public at large (sounds like an ideological issue to me).

For Typekit’s Mandy Brown, who spoke on Jeffrey Zeldman’s design panel Sunday evening, whether or not people will pay for content is indeed a practical issue.  Digital consumers “need the process of paying for content to be as simple and quick and natural as everything else we do” online, Brown said.

Live doodles of Christopher Poole keynote by inuse pictures via Flickr

Playing together

Perhaps the overriding theme of SXSW so far ­is that all this interacting and engaging and creating should be fun. Saturday’s keynote speaker, Seth Priebatsch, explained how companies are adding a “game layer” to our online interactions. In yesterday’s keynote, Christopher Poole, founder of the popular and controversial message board 4chan, argued (contrary to Mark Zuckerberg) that the anonymous nature of online play breeds creativity and collaboration. Later on, Publicis’ Marci Ikeler drew out lessons from 4chan for advertisers, insisting that – like 4chan’s dedicated members – brands need to invite customers to “co-create experiences that are meaningful to them.”

In a Saturday panel called “The Sharing Economy,” representatives from ridesharing company Zimride, renting community Rentalic and experts from Shareable magazine and Latitude Research explained how sharing with strangers online (think craigslist and Netflix) has empowered us to share offline.

And that’s what SXSW is all about: Tech geeks from around the world getting together to connect, collaborate and share some real-life fun.

You serve as editor-in-chief of Watch!, CBS’ glossy entertainment and lifestyle magazine. Where do you see Watch! fitting in to the media landscape – is it an industry publication, a consumer magazine, a fancy promotional tool for CBS’ TV lineup?

It’s interesting because it started off purely as a promotional vehicle. What we found in the first year was that people really responded when we started doing Q&As and stories about our celebrities from a more editorial standpoint.

So we made a very concerted effort to approach it as an editorial product and as a consumer product. We offer our readers content around beauty, health, wellness, food – all kinds of expert information. And I’m very happy to say today I think it is right up there with consumer-oriented publications like People or Us.

Before we had this magazine, we would develop all this great photography and these press kits and what not and then we would just give them away to other journalists, to daily newspapers or magazines. You’re giving them stuff, and they’re going to present it the way they want to. This removed the filter and allowed us to talk directly to the people we want to reach.

It’s been a rough few years for the print magazine industry. How has Watch! weathered the storm in terms of circulation and subscriptions?

We’ve actually been growing. One of the advantages is that we have very little overhead. We’re not a weekly or a monthly, we’re bimonthly. And 90 percent of it is done by freelancers. We also have the world’s best sales department selling the magazine – to have the CBS sales people supporting it and talking it up to clients is invaluable.

What role does the Web play in building and monetizing the Watch! brand? How has the magazine’s content changed and evolved in the digital age?

We really haven’t. Right now our website is primarily a subscription generator. We have TV to tell people to subscribe, and they go to our website, and the website feeds the addresses, and we send the magazines out.

We’re obviously interested in any platform that helps us promote the brand. We haven’t refined our digital strategy yet, but it is definitely something we’re hoping to do in the next year – to really embrace social media and video and more interactive elements.

You launched Watch! in 2005, when the media world was a very different place. What would you do differently if you were launching Watch! today? Do you still think you’d invest in a glossy print publication?

Yes, because I think our viewers are a little more traditional. They don’t want to go online for everything. A lot of people sit at their desk all day and click on blogs and what not, and it’s really nice to have something tangible in your hand. We actually upgraded to a better paper stock last year, so we’re a hundred percent about the printed product.

Our editorial philosophy really targets that working mom who comes home and just wants a couple of hours by herself. Our motto is “escape into entertainment,” so we do a lot of glamour and fantasy and big photo shoots, and having that printed glossy product which someone can curl up on the couch with and read is really what we’re aiming for.

You started your career as a newspaper feature writer and then as a media reporter. Do you see the lines between journalism and corporate communications blurring in a world where everything is content?

Well, I mean it’s kind of a big question. I’m very fortunate to work for a company that is a content company. CBS in every division is creating really compelling and engaging content that people want to read, want to watch, and want to listen to. We’re just following that mandate.

There’s a lot of content competing for the same audience’s attention, and that’s what we always consider when we’re doing the magazine. We’re actually on newsstands and have to sell copies of a magazine, so we can’t just do what the network wants to promote.

We have to think, “What do readers want to read about, who are the stars that are going to sell copies, who are the most popular people on TV?” That’s what helps us sell subscriptions or helps us sell copies or sell ads. We can’t be just a shill for the network.

You know, someone could easily pick up Entertainment Weekly, People, or Us Weekly. We have to be just as, if not more, original and compelling and provide real value whether our content is “branded” or not.

Jeremy Murphy will be speaking at this year’s Custom Content Conference, which takes place March 23-25 in Charleston, South Carolina. Sparksheet readers are entitled to the member rate discount with promo code SPARK.

Dan Ariely by poptech via flickr

You talk a lot in the book about the need to design better products and systems that take into account human limitations. Are you generally positive about the role of technology and branded products in making us behave more rationally?

Am I generally optimistic? Not really about brands. The commercial world is creating many incentives for companies to get us to behave badly. It’s very hard to think about the company who would want us to save for retirement or to consume in 30 years.

Companies inherently want us to spend money now. I think what technology is actually quite good at is creating the infrastructure for a large number of people to try and fight these incentives. So from that perspective, I’m optimistic.

What products have you seen lately that you’ve been impressed by and what are you still waiting for someone to design?

There are many products that I am waiting for people to design. I am a big fan of the phone because it can connect our good intentions to the way we actually work in the world. We can all sit at home and have lots of good intentions. The question is, do we execute them? And the answer we have to admit most often is no.

The phone is a very interesting thing in that it’s with you both when you make the plans and when you execute them. If we can get our phones to be more aware of what we are doing, of our initial plans, and of the mishmash between them, I think there could be some wonderful opportunities.

What about what you call the “IKEA effect,” the idea that people find deeper enjoyment and value in things that they had a hand in creating? By doing so much of the legwork for us, has technology made us less happy? (If not less smart, as Nicholas Carr contends).

I think that’s an interesting question concerning the optimal role of our involvement with technology. If you’ve created something or have been a part of it, you will be more likely to listen to it.

It’s a continuum between convenience on the one hand and motivation to participate on the other. I think the issue with technology is determining the golden point of connection.

For example, it’s four o’clock and I have a problem with eating cookies. Now I’m at Starbucks and the phone reminds me of my pledge. Perhaps it shows me a photo of how I might look in 30 years if I keep on eating like this.

My personal problem involves time management. I think, again, it’s one of those things where we all like to be productive and efficient and then we get to the office and look at our e-mail and Facebook accounts. There is a great opportunity for fixing things in that direction as well.

Do you think the Internet has made the “Not-Invented-Here Bias” (our tendency to be more attached to our own ideas and creations) less powerful? After all, aren’t we in the age of curation, open-source collaboration and Wikipedia?

I think it’s a question of, “What do we need to do to feel that something is ours?” We were able to show in the book that people could simply unscramble a sentence and feel like they had written it themselves. Just the fact that you had to unscramble the words and reconnect them suddenly made you much more proud.

So the barrier to feel that something is ours is actually quite low. If you talk about Wikipedia, I think that the people who curate it actually think it is theirs; they don’t think they are curating it, but that they’re creating it.

Another interesting concept for marketers in the book is the “Hedonic Treadmill” – the idea that people inevitably adapt to and fall out of love with things once they’re no longer new and shiny. Now, it’s easy to see how this is good for marketers and brands, but not so much for debt-ridden consumers. So here’s my question: Do you ever fear that your research and tips are going to be used for evil instead of good?

Very much. If you understand something about how people work, you can use it for good and for bad. I think there is a risk of people really doing the wrong thing and making lots of money from it. If you look at the world as a zero-sum game, it’s a very depressing thing because it means that everything you make, other people lose.

But I think there are many opportunities to provide real value where everybody benefits. Let’s say you started a company that helped people to lose weight or to waste five percent less of their time at work. Now we can create real value.

The sad thing about behavioural economics is that you understand how inferior and fallible people are compared to what you want them to be. The good news is that it means that there are places for real improvement.

You spend a lot of time touring the world speaking to business executives about how their bonuses might actually be making them less productive, or telling doctors that the methods they’ve been using for hundreds of years are wrong. What’s it like being the bearer of bad news?

What I usually try is not to be the bearer of bad news, but the bearer of data. It’s not me telling you how things are but saying, “Look, this is what people believe in general.  Here is the data.”

What do we want to do given this data? How do we want to update or change our understanding? I think that by trying to remain objective and not idealistic, and by saying that it’s basically all about data, it becomes a little simpler.

As someone who spends a lot of time touring the world, what frustrates you most about air travel? How can brands make the experience more rational?

For me the biggest thing is uncertainty. I never know if the flight will take off, and when – or if – I will get to my destination.

If I know what to expect I can plan for it. Airlines are taking bigger precautions by making flight times longer so they arrive on time. This is a good trick because it helps us schedule more effectively.

And then, of course, there is the rudeness. If you’re in a situation where things are not going well, it would be very nice to deal with someone who is empathetic. But the whole experience of flying is a continuing struggle.

How have you applied your research to your personal and professional life? In the same way that a fitness trainer might be expected to have six-pack abs, do people expect you to be Mr. Rationality?

Not so much. Partly because I admit my irrationalities in the book. And it’s clear that they give me lots of sources for ideas. But people do approach me for help with difficult decisions they have in their lives. They expect me to have a different perspective.

I can’t turn off the behavioural economist in me. I have never tried to turn it off; I try to share it with people. We could be standing in line for something and asking questions about what is really going on and why we do certain things. I am continually fascinated by people.

Actually that’s one of the main benefits of social science – we can ask questions about our own lives and realize how little we know about the subject.

Love Content is all about celebrating media that exist on screens outside of the home, which is nothing new in the marketing world. After all, billboards have been around forever. So why now?

Although digital billboards have been around for a while, they haven’t really represented much of a creative opportunity. Up until now, they’ve mostly been seen as an opportunity to put more posters up on the same screen.

What’s changing is (a) the technology, which is enabling billboards with rich media and high resolution graphics and (b) the rise of other new digital formats which offer a host of creative possibilities. Digital media are now appearing everywhere, opening up new communication channels and challenging creatives to go back to the drawing board with their campaigns.

Eventually the success of these digital media will depend upon creatives rising to this challenge and creating engaging content that drives adoption. The Love Content site and gallery is all about celebrating and promoting that work.

At Sparksheet we’re obsessed with the idea that people are in a unique headspace when they’re out of the home and on the go. How should marketers take this into account when creating content for the consumer in transit?

The key point here is that DOOH [Digital Out of Home] is not just one category or “one execution.” Transit is just one of many digital out-of-home categories and it encapsulates many different types of consumer mindset.

From sitting on a plane to racing through a terminal, there’s a whole host of mindset considerations that are unique to the moment. Dwell time is a key consideration ­as it defines the dynamics of engagement. Beyond that it’s all about context – creating for the specific environment and ensuring all messaging aligns with the opportunity to see and watch.

The idea of “dwell time” is one of the most unique and fascinating aspects of DOOH storytelling. How does dwell time affect content?

Dwell time impacts the ability of the creative to tell a story. The beauty of digital (as opposed to a poster) is that the creative can control the order in which the viewer sees  information. The longer the dwell time, the more opportunity there is to engage and the cleverer and more entertaining that story can be.

In micro-dwell environments, it’s all about just catching the viewer’s attention for a few seconds. As dwell time increases it becomes more about rewarding the viewer for their attention – a “return on attention.” This puts pressure on the creative to entertain – either with arresting images or good storytelling.

How do creatives take into account dwell time in different contexts and environments – say, in an airport lounge versus a city square?

Mindset and dwell time are intimately related. Going on holiday is better than going to work, queuing to check-in isn’t as relaxing as enjoying a coffee in an airport bar.

Environment is critical to mindset and effective advertising should always be targeted to align with a specific viewer mindset.

Whether it’s on an airplane or in a doctor’s office, digital signage risks being seen as visual pollution unless it’s useful to the viewer. How can brands make sure that their screens serve the consumer rather than distract them?

In our cluttered world, consumers already encounter thousands of messages every day. The beauty of digital is that it enables much more effective targeting of those messages. Health care messaging is likely to be more relevant to people in a doctor’s office than plastered all around town.

Digital actually offers the chance to reduce the clutter by offering multiple messaging from a single point. It also guarantees higher-quality presentation. Unlike tatty posters, digital is as perfect at the end of the campaign as it was at the beginning. Plus, designing the technology to ensure that things like brightness can be adjusted automatically to better match ambient conditions helps reduce overspill.

From our smartphones and tablets to our computer monitors and TV sets, a lot of us spend most of our day staring at screens. How does the way we use our personal screens affect the way we interact with digital out-of-home screens? How does it affect the way brands are designing them?

Certainly a key trend has been the move towards portrait presentation of most digital out-of-home media formats. This differentiates the format from TV and the Internet and aligns it more with the growing smartphone market.

Portrait offers an exciting point of difference for media on the move and the connection between DOOH and mobile is a love affair that, combined with QR codes and near-field communications, is set to redefine interactivity and marketing at the point of need.

In a “flattening” world, how do brands design screens that can engage consumers across geographic, cultural and linguistic lines?

By focusing on specific targeted user groups. Global brands and trends transcend geographical divisions. By focusing media to address those users, you celebrate the similarities and not the differences between people.

As Love Content’s official media partner, Sparksheet brings you a series of original think pieces and in-depth Q&As on how brands are telling stories through digital out-of-home media.

Yes, social media helps our patients feel safer and better informed. Social media allows us to break down the perceptions and barriers that may exist and aids us in delivering our services directly to the user.

We have had viewers from all around the world view our videos and even schedule procedures based on our in-depth information. With our YouTube page, we feature videos from our Emery King Medical Video Library, which chronicle a number of various medical procedures done at our hospitals and tell the stories behind them in a  “fun but informative” way.

Who is your primary audience for this content: the wider medical community or patients of the hospital?

Our primary audience is both patients and medical practitioners. People are empowered to go online and research for themselves in today’s society. We want to provide the most accurate and trustworthy information possible so our patients and future patients can make informed decisions about their healthcare.

Medical practitioners use it as a teaching tool for other medical practitioners. Emery King does a wonderful job of describing and translating the video so that any and everybody can understand and enjoy the video.

You also use these new channels to reach out to hospital staff with handwashing videos and the like. How has the DMC’s staff responded? And how have you made an effort to get a variety of stakeholders (from orderlies to doctors) involved?

Our internal staff’s response to our YouTube videos has been great so far. We haven’t had a great deal of resistance from any group of people. The Handwashing Dance video went over very well. Employees loved to do it and were happy to see themselves, their fellow co-workers and even their bosses in a fun video.

Some of our recent videos include a wide variety of hospital staff, including the “Monday Morning Hustle,” which features the accounting department and their weekly exercise routine, and “Behind Sinai-Grace Today,” which was a special behind-the-scenes look at a weekly internal video broadcast that one of our hospitals puts together.

We’ve just started an “introduction class” that’s open to all employees to learn about the basics of social media. Our hope is that our employees will take a liking to our social media efforts and as a result become positive ambassadors for the great medical work being done here at the DMC.

Privacy is obviously a huge concern with hospitals. Have you had any pushback from administrators, doctors or patients on privacy grounds? How do you find a balance between transparency and privacy?

We follow HIPPA guidelines in regards to patient information. If we decide to follow a patient, doctor, or administrator’s story, we always make sure to get their full permission (through use of a publicity release form).

The DMC’s ER wait time tab on Facebook allows patrons to check ER wait times for each of the DMC’s facilities. What sort of effects have you seen it have on the ER?

Our ER volumes have definitely gone up since the multimedia launch of our ER wait time campaign. We of course don’t want a huge number of people getting injured and rushing into our ER, but since this is sadly the case we wanted to offer patients a way to check the wait time in our emergency rooms to reassure them that they won’t be waiting an ultra-long time in our hospitals.

We have a “29 Minute Guarantee” that we always try to stick to in getting people seen by a doctor as soon as possible. People have slowly been telling us that they appreciate the fact that we’re informing them about their wait times instead of finding out about it at the last minute once they’ve already arrived.

What kinds of results do you anticipate from these projects? How do you measure return on engagement?

Since social media is still relatively new for us, we don’t have a set standard on how to measure its effectiveness just yet. We always have a “call to action” on our various accounts and pages that leads viewers to our main DMC phone number or website.

We monitor and track our social media sites and can determine if viewers click directly to our website and even use it as a referral to see one of the DMC specialists.

An example of this would be when we covered a live surgery via Twitter. Our social media team was inside the operating room during a minimally invasive Birmingham hip replacement surgery and with permission from the patient, we covered the step-by-step procedure in real time, in an effort to educate potential patients and the medical community.

Two weeks later, we found out that someone who needed the same surgery saw our live coverage on Twitter and called DMC to make an appointment to get the surgery done.

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Emily Gannett on treating events like digital campaigns:

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Ben Grossman on using content to humanize your brand:

Branded storytelling expert Michael Margolis on the power of narrative:

Consultant David Knies with a few examples of great branded storytelling:

Marketing is about stories (and so are we)

We joined forces with BrandsConf as the event’s official media partner because we feel as though Jeff Pulver’s view of brands is very much in line with our own. Sparksheet is all about telling the stories behind brands and branding, and storytelling was one of the day’s most powerful and pervasive themes.

As brand strategist David Knies – the first of roughly 50 speakers ­– put it, “marketing is how you tell the story of you brand.” Get Storied author Michael Margolis suggested brands borrow a page from superhero comics and draw upon their “origin story” to carve out their niche.  As he put it, “Narrative is how you find the invisible lines of connection” between a company’s past and present.

Oxford Communication’s Ben Grossman explained how brands can humanize themselves without relying on any specific human beings to tell their stories. He suggested brands move beyond logos and icons to create avatars that engage consumers with nearly human qualities in the brand’s name, ala Quick Chek’s ‘Q’ avatar.

One of the day’s most surprising speakers was Sam von Trapp, a descendent of the singing Sound of Music clan who spoke about using his family’s famous story to market the von Trapps’ Stowe, Vermont inn.

Brands are created from the inside out

Most marketing conferences are all about how brands can tell and sell their stories to customers. At BrandsConf, several speakers pointed out that brands need to get their stories straight internally first. JWT Inside’s Robert Fieseler noted that we are living in a “post-WikiLeaks world,” in which “anything electronic is public.”

In other words, businesses need to foster a corporate culture that employees can buy into and that’s in synch with their own personal values and identities. The transparency theme was also explored by passionate marketing veteran Hank Wasiak who insisted that a brand should be an open book that’s open for inspection 24/7.

Care about your customers

From the onstage hugs to the backstage camaraderie, it was evident that BrandsConf was a warm and friendly environment. The people at Jeff’s conferences clearly care about each other so it’s not surprising that they also care about your customers.

Several speakers stressed that it’s not enough for brands to “reward” or “engage” customers. In one of the day’s funnier talks, Freshbooks’ Saul Colt suggested good branding is like a great first kiss – sometimes awkward but always unforgettable.

Wunderman’s Nick Moore talked about the need for brands to create “an affinity” with their audience before bothering to engage. Meanwhile, search marketer Ric Dragon suggested being the sort of brand “you’d want to take home to meet your parents.”

Find the customers who care about you

Of course, caring about customers isn’t just touch-feely stuff. It’s also really good for business. The idea is to win the hearts and minds of people who will go to bat for your brand. Business strategist and customer loyalty expert Carol Roth advised businesses to reward “the senders as well as the spenders,” that is, those influencers and advocates who won’t stop referring people to your brand.

Technology “tinkerer” Gilad Lotan showed the crowd how to use online tools like “data sculptures” to visualize “your invisible audience” and to identify the surprising relationships between its members. Likewise, CareOne’s Nichole Kelly explained how the debt settlement firm created community forums for customers to discuss their experiences and commiserate with each other.

Nothing beats face-to-face

For me, the highlight of BrandsConf was getting to meet the many incredible people who have contributed to Sparksheet in the last month or so, whether in the form of a Q&A, blog post, comment, tweet or fleeting online conversation.

Technology has made it easier to connect with people around the world than ever before, but there is still no substitute for connecting face to face. As IRL Productions founder Emily Gannett put it, “the most resonant conversations happen in real life.”

Emily explained how her agency has used real-world events and tools – from Foursquare-themed pool parties to QR codes – to amplify online conversations.

In a similar vein, social media strategist Lynne D. Johnson pointed out that brands need both interactive tools and flesh-and-blood human beings to interpret online data. And Tribal DDB’s Eric Weaver insisted that “you don’t need a social media strategy;” instead, brands should strive to make every element of their business more social.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who stopped by the Sparksheet table to say hello and leave us your business card. At the end of the day we asked Jeff Pulver to draw from our big box of cards and crown the lucky winner of a brand new iPad. Congratulations to Stephanie M. Cockerl of nextSTEPH.com!

Sesame Street is an old and beloved brand and new media are, well, new. How did you find your voice on these still-emerging platforms? And how do you make sure it’s consistent within the larger brand?

Moving to newer mediums is nothing new at Sesame Workshop. We’re more than just a TV show – and have been from the start. Books, LPs (!), magazines, home video, etc. are all part of Sesame’s rich history in media. Maintaining a consistent voice across media is a hallmark of the institution.

The show is targeted at toddlers, most of whom haven’t gotten around to setting up their Facebook or Twitter accounts just yet! So who are you trying to reach and why?

That’s the subject of my @BrandsConf talk, but the short answer is parents, both present and future. We know from research that children learn better when an adult is present. In fact, a lot of our content is written for two audiences – the children, of course, but also the parents. That’s why we have celebrities on the show; it’s not as if the children know who these visitors to Sesame Street are.

Grover made a splash on YouTube recently with his parody of those viral Old Spice ads. Sesame Street characters have also spoofed Mad Men and other grown-up pop culture stuff in recent years. Why is it important for you to engage adults and how big a role does nostalgia play in the popularity of the brand among older demographics?

Sesame Street has spoofed grown-up pop culture stuff for our entire history; it’s just that we don’t remember the parent-directed features of Sesame content that we consumed as children, because it was invisible to us.

And engaging adults is fundamental to our success. I watched the “Smell Like a Monster” spoof with my three-year-old on my lap, both of us enjoying it (albeit for different reasons), and two months later, we’re still able to carry on a brief conversation about it. It’s pretty amazing.

How much room do you have to improvise in your engagements with online followers and friends? Your tweets seem very polished, almost as though they were written by Sesame Street writers (especially when you’re tweeting in character as Elmo or another member of the Muppet cast).

The characters tweet for themselves – I just help them with the keyboard.

In all seriousness, a show writer authors the character tweets, with rare exception. I’ve improvised a few times, on rare occasion making a tiny edit to add some temporal context that couldn’t have been written beforehand. And there are a few tweets I’ve written entirely myself (e.g. a couple Count von Count ones because I like to make math jokes).

@BrandsConf is all about exploring the human voices behind brands on social media. Do you ever find it difficult to separate your personal and professional identities? Or is this point moot given that you’re often tweeting from the perspective of a furry monster?

It’s funny; I don’t think humanizing a brand is, necessarily, the same as putting an actual human personality behind it. Maybe we’re an exception, but look at it this way: Elmo is definitely “humanized,” to any meaningful definition of the word. But he’s not a human –  he’s a monster, or, if you want to be a spoilsport, a puppet.

You can humanize something in many ways.

At the moment of writing, @SesameStreet has 278, 244 followers on Twitter, but is only following one account – the Sesame Workshop. Is it fair to say that you currently use Twitter as a broadcast channel rather than a two-way communication platform?

Definitely, and by design. We’re not a service provider like, say, an airline or cable company, so we don’t have to use Twitter as a conduit for customer service. And it’s not really manageable to have Cookie Monster, Big Bird, Oscar et al replying to people on Twitter all day (although it would be fun to try for a day or two).

I definitely monitor all replies sent to us, though, and we look for other ways for people to interact with our characters. For example, we did a fan-driven interview of Elmo timed around the launch of the 41st season of Sesame Street; that went up on YouTube at the end of September.

There’s been much debate over whether the Internet is ultimately making people smarter or stupider (see Shirky, Clay vs. Carr, Nicholas). Given that Sesame Street is fundamentally an educational program, what do you think? Do you see these new tools and platforms – from YouTube, to the iPad – as beneficial to children or distracting?

I’m a big Clay Shirky fan and a firm believer that we should, as individuals, find a better way to use our cognitive surplus (or, some of it) than the things we typically do. (For what it’s worth, I find Carr interesting as well.) The reason why, though, goes back to something Sesame Workshop’s founder, Joan Ganz Cooney, observed almost half a century ago: It’s not if children learn from media, it’s what they learn.

Learning happens whether we like it or not. But the medium isn’t the problem; the content is. My kids love the iPod Touch and play games which are generally educational and built for their age bracket. They’re playing, they’re learning, and they like it. It’s a great combination.

A child’s cognitive surplus – that downtime outside of school or the similar – isn’t going to be applied to writing Wikipedia. It’s going to be best applied playing in a way where productive learning is the intended byproduct.

How has Sesame Street used these new media and technologies to educate children beyond the TV show?

We have a few iPhone applications, a fantastic child-oriented website at SesameStreet.org, an eBook store, a YouTube channel, a Wii and DS game coming out, a robust home video collection, and more. We want to reach children through media; we will be wherever they are.

What are you hoping to get out of the conference? What are you most looking forward to hearing and talking about?

I’m approaching it with an open mind. The best stuff to learn is the stuff you never would have expected to.

@BrandsConf takes place on Thursday, December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

Looking down the list of @BrandsConf presenters, your name stood out as someone who, as an educator and academic, is neither representing a corporate brand nor working for an agency that does. What drew you to a conference about the humanization of brands?

I think that going to college has become like going to McDonalds: It’s convenient, it’s expected, it’s right in your neighbourhood. As a professor who’s taught at four very different major brands or institutions, my experience has been that if college was a brand, students would quickly stop buying it, because it’s not giving them what they want.

There’s really no other context – except maybe the music industry – where people make money from people who don’t get anything back from it, qualitatively speaking. Students spend four years expecting to get a degree that will get them a job.

That’s the only incentive for a majority of students. And we’re not really helping them do that. Right now they’re being trained to be consumers of their own education instead of being consumers and active participants in their own life.

Are you suggesting educators should start thinking more like corporate brands, or less?

What’s the guy’s name, Ray Anderson [CEO of Interface Global], he was in that film The Corporation. He took his enormous textile company and his employees on, and together they restructured the entire company to make it sustainable – it was an overhaul of the entire company, and productivity went sky-high as a result. I think we should all think of that model.

The landscape has changed with the Internet. Jobs that exist right now, we all know, are not going to exist very soon. There are all kinds of new jobs developing, and most of the faculty has not been trained in the new model, and aren’t interested in new technology. They aren’t interested in engagement or honesty.

The advancement of knowledge is coming from collaboration in the open-source domains – yet somehow none of that collaborative or community-oriented interaction is impacting the way people think about education. What we have ended up with within the institutional model is a situation that is not unlike that of the music industry: a couple of stars who are supposed to make up for the whole system.

So Michael Jackson or Prince are supposed to make enough money to keep the whole industry working. The Harvards and the Yales and the Stanfords do great things for our country while the rest of these institutions are sorting people out to be labourers.

It doesn’t have to be like this. All of the social media platforms that exist now are helping us realize that if there are 6.5 billion people on the planet, there’s probably enough room for everyone to do something that they love and make money off it.

You like to say that people need to agree to be offended. For example, you were outspoken about Twitter’s decision to pull a series of posts with the hashtag #thatsafrican, after an article on the Huffington Post suggested Twitter was “becoming racist.” Do you think constructive dialogue exist online, where there’s so much opportunity for misunderstanding and miscommunication?

Yes and no. If you take a look at any of the comments on YouTube, you think “Oh my god this is not possible!” The comments are just flame after flame after flame. It’s ironic, because, as an educator, part of my job is to tell people that there is this thing called listening. And one of the benefits of social media, at least on Twitter, is that you spend a lot of time listening to people.

People say that, you know, only 19 percent of people are actually putting out new content, but the flip side of that is that the other 80 percent of those people are listening to people they would have never encountered if they weren’t on Twitter.

For example, people get to be privy to black conversations that would have previously been off the radar. Last week I had to block somebody for the first time, and it was somebody commenting on the For Colored Girls movie that’s coming out. The film is creating a lot of stir online in the black community.

A black man sent me a tweet that said “I want you to read my blog,” and the blog was all his opinions on the film – and he admitted he hasn’t even seen it, nor does he intend to. I asked a friend of mine, who is also on Twitter, if she knew him and she told me he had sent her something similar, and she had blocked him long ago.

At first I decided I wouldn’t block him, because of my motto. But the conversation just immediately went south. If I disagreed with him, he would start flaming me. Eventually I just said, “You win.” I am not going to force a dialogue with someone who isn’t interested in a dialogue.

But the technique of being able to hear someone who doesn’t agree with you is the only way to be able to expand yourself and your network. Otherwise, you’d just be working with the people you went to high school with. You don’t have to agree with them, you just have to listen to them: “Agree to be offended and stay connected.”

As an ethnomusicologist, you’ve studied the unique ways that African-Americans communicate through everything from hip-hop to schoolyard games. Do you think black people use social media differently than others?

That’s a great question. Sometimes I liken this to that Verizon commercial: You come with your network of people behind you, your way of talking, thinking and feeling, you bring that right online with you, and you’ve got your little crew behind you. People that you agree with.

What’s happening is that we are finding out that our crew and tribe don’t have to look like us. There’s a ton of people worldwide who identify with our lifestyle – the culture, the food, the music – who were not raised in our network. And all of the sudden you start making new connections.

And not only do you have pushback from the opposition, you have pushback from people who are simply curious. “Do you really believe that? Is that really the way black people think?” There’s a forum for questions like that. And that’s totally new.

These conversations that used to take place only with our closest allies – the underbelly of what we talk about when we talk about ourselves – these things are all online now. It’s all open. The problem is that this sort of openness is not reaching the classroom, the faculty meeting, or the State senate.

We’ve been to a bunch of social media and business conferences, including the Supernova Forum in Philadelphia this summer, where several speakers noted the lack of racial and gender diversity. Is it important for you as an African-American woman to represent at these events?

Yes, yes. You know, I’m a TED fellow as well, and it’s the same there and all the social enterprise conferences I’ve been to. Deanna Zandt has said that social media give us access to each other, and so let’s mix our DNA. The way that our species develops is through mixing our DNA. We’ve learned this through the royal families and blue bloods of Europe, when they all married each other. It was not a good thing!

The results you get on Twitter and other social media, they allow you to replicate and mediate this diversity. But the structure of these conferences often replicates white privilege. And we should be concerned about this.

What are you hoping to get out of @BrandsConf? What are you most looking forward to talking and learning about?

I want to engage people who are there. I’m always trying to steal design contexts from other industries. I want to see if that concept of redesign that works elsewhere can make education seem new.

I always thought that it was a gimmick when you would go into a grocery store and see that All-Brand or Tide had a “new and improved” formula. That was before I understood brand marketing and design. The truth is that once I’ve been exposed to something for a long time, its effectiveness begins to wane. So you have to change the brand slightly, to keep people buying. What do we do in education like that, that’s going to give it some new vim and verve?

We can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and do a complete overhaul, but what if we look at the untapped resources in the classroom? How will the experience be altered if you consider that there might be students who are experts on what you’re talking about?

There’s a revolution that’s needed, and it needs to be real-time. I want to initiate that, and engage in that, because the way things are, both students and faculty are not benefiting or learning. And what kind of branding is that?

@BrandsConf takes place on December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

Lisa Allen Brown is Manager, Emerging Media at Boston's Logan Airport

Airports are really interesting as far as brands are concerned. They’re both local and international, public and private spaces, tied to a specific city yet also separate brands in their own right. Given all that, how do you establish and maintain a consistent voice that is uniquely Boston Logan’s?

It’s been a challenge for us; we first got into the social media space in early 2009, and before we jumped in, we were thinking exactly that – how do we establish a voice? But it’s happened fairly organically. We have a team of people here who work on social media, but we all have other full-time jobs and responsibilities outside of social media.

We’ve been committed to being transparent with our customers and providing them with basic information about the airport, but are also injecting some personality. We’ve tried not to take ourselves too seriously, but also maintain a consistent message which we’re putting out through other channels – through our traditional PR channels, and through our advertising campaigns.

For example, our CEO will tell you that safety and security are our number one priority – we keep messages like this in mind while we’re communicating, but also try to inject a bit of humour and keep things light. Our followers seem to respond pretty positively.

How would you describe that voice?

We’re a Boston airport, so we have a lot of hometown pride, as most Bostonians do. We have a bit of edge to us too – maybe some of us have no problem telling a follower that we don’t want to see them wearing their Yankees hat at the airport! Our voice is reflective of Boston, and of the fact that we love travel and aviation. I think these things come through in our personality.

Airports don’t sell tickets like airlines do, so what exactly is your mandate, and how do you measure success or return on engagement with what you do on social media?

Mostly, we’re trying to get our message out. Our mandate is not necessarily simply selling tickets, it’s also giving our customers reasons to choose us over some of the other regional airports. We have a lot going on: Between all the new low-cost carriers and our fare sales that we promote, we’ve been able to be very competitive.

Social media has changed the way our customers look at the airport. We try to increase awareness about what our airlines are doing, by providing information about new routes and sales, but we also promote our concessions. Obviously any increase in popularity or passenger numbers of the airport comes back to MassPort who operate the airport.

They use traditional metrics, like any other company, to measure these things, but we also have to measure success in a lot of different ways – we consider the positive response we receive on Twitter and Facebook, for example. It’s not as simple as “we’re an airport, we’ve sold so many tickets this month.”

Besides being a brand in itself Logan is also a hub for other brands, from international airlines to the airport Burger King, which you tweeted about recently. Can you talk about your relationship with other brands that inhabit your space? Do you team up for specific promotions or partnerships?

We have a team here that reaches out to pretty much all of the airlines to partner with them using social media tools. We actually have a micro-site that we’re using for certain promotions – we did a contest with American Airlines, An American in Paris, which was a contest where people had to create their own videos to win a trip to Paris.

We’ve worked with Virgin America on a Twitter trivia contest, with JetBlue on an All-You-Can-Jet pass contest, and so on. With the concessions, we do have certain things we’ve established, such as a Twitter list of all our restaurants and shops. A lot of these restaurants and shops are national brands that have specials that sometimes are happening at the airport, and sometimes are not.

Watching these brands on Twitter helps us zero in on what they’re doing, and we can then post these updates online. We also are fed promotions by the concessions’ promotion companies, which we either post on Facebook or retweet.

One of the challenges of being the official spokesperson for a brand is balancing your own personal voice with that of the organization. Has this been a challenge for you?

Yes, I think it can be a challenge. I have both Twitter and Facebook, and – I think a lot of people do this – I have a disclaimer that states that my opinions are my own on my personal page.

I read a story about a reporter who was fired recently for tweeting on his official account something that he’d meant to tweet on his personal account. I think that is a lot of people’s biggest nightmare. Other than that, though, it hasn’t been too hard. I think as long as people conduct themselves with personal integrity, it doesn’t need to be a problem.

How much room are you given to improvise when it comes to solving a customer’s problem or simply engaging on a human level?

We’ve been pretty lucky in that respect; some airports have to go through a lot of red tape, but because we’re not city owned it’s a little bit different for us. If we see a customer post something online who needs an answer, we can just answer them. We try to answer as quickly as we can, and we don’t have to run every answer we give up the flagpole.

There are about five of us that contribute in different ways, but there are really only two or three of us who post every day, and a few other people who help out. We’re all in the communications and marketing department. We have a very forward-thinking boss who let us establish our Twitter and Facebook back when it was still considered risky for brands to be using them as platforms.

What are you hoping to get out of @BrandsConf? What are you most excited to talk or learn about?

There’s a lot of talk about social media, but no one has directly addressed this aspect of it: the humanizing of brands. I have some real interest in that. From looking at the current @BrandsConf agenda, it looks like there will be a lot of interesting speakers, but I don’t see a lot of brands on there. A lot of agencies will be there talking about their brands, and I’m interested to see how that plays out.

I think Boston Logan, as an airport brand, has sort of a unique niche in this market. We’re excited to share how we’ve come to this point, and learn from everyone else about where this is going in the next few years.

We’re also trying to get an idea of trends, and where things are headed. It will be interesting to see how people get a handle on mobile – mobile is huge – and whether or not it makes sense to devote time to apps, or if these are the sorts of things which will lose their lustre.

We are mostly hoping to get a feel for what other people are doing, which will be really helpful in developing a strategy for the future.

@BrandsConf takes place on December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” – http://brands2010.140conf.com/register

by @jeffpulver via Flickr

Jeff Pulver is the founder of the 140 Conference, the VON Coalition and Vivox, and the co-founder of VoIP provider Vonage.

Why another social media conference focusing on brands, and why now?

I am fixated on one thing: the humanization of brands. I announced this conference when I was in Los Angeles doing the 140 Conference because that’s where it hit me for the first time ever: Corporations now have to hire people to represent them from the human side, whether they like it or not.

It was the growing popularity of Twitter that forced corporations to have a public face. And now, if you’re not listening, your competition is. So the question is, how do people deal with these realities? I don’t know all the answers, so I thought by convening a conference, we could try to explore that.

More than anything else, I think we’re going to create a fraternity and sorority of people whose day jobs have been turned upside down because nobody went to school to be a brand ambassador.

Also, it’s not like this is just hitting one industry; this is hitting every industry. What I’m doing as a one-day event could very well be a three-day conference with multiple tracks, but I had to start someplace.

The reason it came together so quickly is that I realized this phenomenon was really a 2010 thing. Brands hit critical mass on Twitter in 2010, so why not address these things now?

What are some of the challenges brands face now that they need a real person – or a team of people – to be their face and voice on social media?

Well, if you work for Disney as a mascot, and say, you’re Goofy or you’re Mickey or Minnie Mouse, people see you and they relate you to the brand. And some people actually love you because of who you represent.

In other words, people often extend their love of the brand directly to the person who represents them without any indication of who that person really is.

I had this experience at SXSW – you walk around, and you see people and say, “Oh you’re with JetBlue, you’re Virgin America, oh you’re Southwest – I love you.”

So if you’re a company the question is, how do you stick your DNA into this person to make sure they’re speaking up properly all the time? Are they allowed to connect with your customers, and are these their customers or your company’s customers? What’s the nature of those relationships?

Who’s following up on what you’re saying? Because truth be told, I don’t believe Richard Branson is running the Virgin account.

It’s the fans that are driving the brands now, not the brands that are driving the fans. And when you start building walls around what the brands are allowed to do and not do, it takes away from some of the creativity.

But if you’re the owner of the brand, you should have the right to determine how the brand is used and how it connects with its audience. So it comes back to the question: Who do you hire to represent you? Do you hire a recent college graduate to be your online brand ambassador, or do you hire a skilled PR person who has years of experience?

These are the sorts of questions we’ll be exploring.

I know that you see social media like Twitter as a way to connect to individuals on a personal and meaningful level. Do you think brands can play a role in creating these spaces for people to connect?

What I think is fascinating is that brands today can do one-to-many marketing in a one-to-one way. It’s sort of like standing on a street corner and speaking: Anyone can stop to listen and you can talk to each and every one of them.

To me, this isn’t about media. It’s about communications, and it’s about connecting. At the end of the day, it’s really about being able to be heard, and about applying what’s been heard to effect change or to take action. While so many people talk about social media, I’m much more focused on social communication, and how these tools enable social communication to happen.

If you look at how the these platforms are changing things, they’re really changing the relationships between customers and corporations, corporations and their vendors and distributors, and between corporations and their employees. And they’re driving conversations that would never otherwise happen.

Can you think of some examples of brands that have become more “human” through their use of social media?

On many different levels, yes. If you take a look at Kodak, they now have a chief blogger and they engage with people on a regular basis. That’s an old company engaging in new things.

I’m also a big fan of The Today Show – and now if I’m watching The Today Show, I could tweet a comment and all of a sudden someone responds. Or what about when I tweet “Good morning” to the US Air Force and the Air Force tweets back, “Good morning.” That’s cool.

You established your own personal brand as an expert in Voice over Internet Protocol, which has been in the news lately with the recent Skype integration on Facebook and the newly launched Google Voice. Do you think VoIP – that is, speaking and listening through the Internet – will play a big role in the way we communicate online going forward?

I still think voice is the killer app. Other things will come and go, but at the end of the day, people like to talk – there’s something about voice that allows people to communicate effectively and get things done that they couldn’t do without hearing voice.

But I think having the ability to use these platforms is one thing, having a need is something else. Just because you have an engine, doesn’t mean people want to use your engine to go place to place.

So does Facebook need to have voice embedded into it? No. Is Facebook a better experience if people can talk through it? I think so, but the interface that we need for something to be successful on Facebook, I don’t think it’s Skype. And I don’t think we know yet what it is.

Why don’t you think Skype is the best fit for Facebook?

There’s nothing about Skype that makes it Facebook friendly. In my experience, if you try to do something and it’s not natural, the traction will never be there.

I think that voice could work on Facebook; the question is whether or not the Facebook community thinks it needs voice. Something will be successful if you identify and solve a problem that people have, rather than taking a solution and applying it to a problem that doesn’t exist.

In addition to @BrandsConf, you’ve organized 140 Characters conferences and smaller, less formal events around the world. Why is connecting with people face-to-face so important in the digital age?

I believe that the more virtual we become, the more we need things face-to-face. Conferences and events have the power to reinforce relationships we establish online, but they also allow us to take advantage of ones that are waiting to happen.

@BrandsConf takes place on December 2nd in New York City. As official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you original content around the event’s theme, the humanization of brands, and in-depth interviews with conference presenters. Our readers are entitled to a 30% discount on registration by using the promo code “sparksheet” –http://brands2010.140conf.com/register