C2-MTL 2013 took place in an old shipyard built in 1846 at the foot of Montreal’s Lachine Canal. Photo by Kristina Velan.

C2-MTL is a hard event to write about. As we explained last year, the event strives to “reinvent the business conference” by emphasizing interaction as much as information, experience as much as education and aesthetics as much as content.

Between formal sessions with big-name speakers such as Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson, makeup mogul Bobbi Brown and Whole Foods founder John Mackey, C2′s well-heeled attendees – tickets cost upwards of $3,600 – could take in a show by Cirque du Soleil (a major sponsor), participate in a hands-on workshop, or even do a little yoga.

Cirque du Soleil’s opening performance. Photo by Kristina Velan.

A Big Data workshop at C2-MTL. Photo by Kristina Velan.

Why not a yoga class between sessions? Photo by Kristina Velan.

As with any eclectic event, every attendee’s experience of C2-MTL was different. Still, we noticed some recurring themes and ideas emerging from the stream of tweets, Instagram photos and other C2-related social media activity.

Empowering women

At the first C2-MTL conference last year, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington was the only female speaker of note. This year, creative and successful women including Bobbi Brown, Diane von Furstenberg and MIT media lab director Neri Oxman drew some of the largest crowds and the role of women in business, design and culture was celebrated throughout the three-day event.

.@richardbranson thinks governments should enforce gender quotas on corporate boards #women #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

.@FastCompany’s @rsafian presents 100 most creative people in biz – chatted w/ #52 (Sandra Richter) earlier #C2MTL http://t.co/qBVUXA7DLW

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Now on stage: Tom Gentile, President and CEO, GE Healthcare. Talking about the innovation about the breast cancer screening #c2mtlNow on stage: Tom Gentile, President and CEO, GE Healthcare. Talking about the innovation about the breast cancer screening #c2mtl

— SID LEE (@SidLee)

May 21, 2013

Data versus intuition

Big Data was a major buzzword at C2-MTL 2013, with Intel’s Steve Brown and Bitly’s Hilary Mason both building their talks around the subject.

But it seems the Big Data backlash has begun as several speakers, including Branson and veteran Hollywood producer Barry Diller (also von Furstenberg’s husband), emphasized that  experience, intuition and gut instinct can’t be overestimated when it comes to making business decisions.

Big data helps you choose between A and B but doesn’t tell you what question to ask in the first place -@hmason #C2MTLBig data helps you choose between A and B but doesn’t tell you what question to ask in the first place -@hmason #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“It’s important to be hyper-aware of what your data is saying about the world.” – Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at #bitly #C2MTL

— Ariane Laezza (@arianelaezza)

May 23, 2013

Today’s marketers have to be more data-driven, but also more intuitive – Jim Farley. Yay intuition! #c2mtl

— Geoff Thomas (@the_gmt)

May 23, 2013

“I go by my gut, believe in breaking the rules and see possibility where others don’t.” -Bobbi at #C2MTL”I go by my gut, believe in breaking the rules and see possibility where others don’t.” -Bobbi at #C2MTL

— BobbiBrown Cosmetics (@BobbiBrown)

May 22, 2013

“I never get accountants in to look at our business ideas … You need an instinct based on experience.” – Sir Richard Branson #C2MTL
— Emma Jane McKay (@emmajanemckay)

May 23, 2013

Barry Diller sounding very Jobsian talking about “instincts” and “purity” – but is he part of dying breed in age of #bigdata? #C2MTLBarry Diller sounding very Jobsian talking about “instincts” and “purity” – but is he part of dying breed in age of #bigdata? #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Rebels with a cause

C2-MTL bills itself as “a business conference, only different” and that spirit of disruption and rebellion permeated the event.

Just for Laughs founder Andy Nulman brashly delivered an “improvised dissertation on creativity,” using slides he’d never seen before, after having criticized last year’s C2 speakers for being too conventional. Legendary industrial designer Philippe Starck, controversial former BMW designer Chris Bangle and, of course, Branson also brandished their roguish credentials.

Failures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtlFailures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtl

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“I see sex on TV, sex in magazines and in the cinema, but not on furtniture. But where do you fuck?” – @Starckofficial #C2MTL”I see sex on TV, sex in magazines and in the cinema, but not on furtniture. But where do you fuck?” – @Starckofficial #C2MTL

— Francis Gosselin (@monsieurgustave)

May 21, 2013

Here’s that pic of @richardbranson in drag dressed as flight attendant #C2MTL http://t.co/surkk2PRn1

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

— (@null)

May 23, 2013

Nicole Vollebregt’s “Never be afraid to get fired” echoes @AndyNulman: If you don’t sometimes fail you’re not being creative enough #C2MTLNicole Vollebregt’s “Never be afraid to get fired” echoes @AndyNulman: If you don’t sometimes fail you’re not being creative enough #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“Sometimes we just have to take the risk without knowing the outcome.” – Chris Bangle #c2mtl #brand”Sometimes we just have to take the risk without knowing the outcome.” – Chris Bangle #c2mtl #brand

— Commerce+Creativity (@C2MTL)

May 21, 2013

If you’re not doing damage, you’re not doing anything interesting -Barry Diller #C2MTLIf you’re not doing damage, you’re not doing anything interesting -Barry Diller #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Politics, subversion – always be a a rebel. its a duty, always fight, always bring in a surprise. @Starckofficial #c2mtl #creativity #design — Aline Massouh (@alinemassouh)

May 21, 2013

‘There is no creativity without the risk of outright failure’ -@andynulman in improvised presentation on creativity #C2MTL’There is no creativity without the risk of outright failure’ -@andynulman in improvised presentation on creativity #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

Failures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtlFailures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtl

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Another recurring theme at C2-MTL was the notion that creativity doesn’t occur in a vacuum. This means keeping your eyes open and engaging with the world around you or, as Nulman put it, getting “off the floor and out the door.” In his talk, Ideo’s Fred Dust assured the crowd that they shouldn’t hesitate to steal ideas – so long as they made them better.

Philippe Starck explaining how he taps into everyone’s collective unconscious when designing products, shapes. #c2mtlPhilippe Starck explaining how he taps into everyone’s collective unconscious when designing products, shapes. #c2mtl

— Gary Singh (@gary_singh)

May 21, 2013

‘Not much point creating something if it’s not better than what came before’ -@richardbranson #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

“Build #empathy…Fall in love with the people you’re designing for” – Fred Dust @f_dust @ideo #C2MTL #inspiration #designer”Build #empathy…Fall in love with the people you’re designing for” – Fred Dust @f_dust @ideo #C2MTL #inspiration #designer

— Commerce+Creativity (@C2MTL)

May 21, 2013

‘I didn’t invent makeup, I reinvent makeup – how can I make it better?’ -@BobbiBrown #creativity #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 22, 2013

Defining creativity

C2-MTL is all about the intersection of commerce and creativity and so the question of what creativity means – particularly in a business context – came up a lot. Even “data is a creativity industry,” Bitly chief scientist Hilary Mason proclaimed.

Creativity is not room of nerf balls – it’s pressure, deliverables #C2MTL #Innovation

— Robert Yau (@RobertYau)

May 23, 2013

— (@null)

May 23, 2013

“We are responsible (for) our creativity. It’s a duty.” -Philippe Starck #C2MTL”We are responsible (for) our creativity. It’s a duty.” -Philippe Starck #C2MTL

— Susan Krashinsky (@susinsky)

May 21, 2013

— (@null)

May 21, 2013

 

#C2MTL: “Scientists can’t do storytelling? Bullshit!” Hilary Mason, chief scientist, bitly. And boy does she prove it!

— diane_berard (@diane_berard)

May 23, 2013

Arkadi Kuhlmann: ‘Information and how we share ideas is the glue that holds society together’ #C2MTLArkadi Kuhlmann: ‘Information and how we share ideas is the glue that holds society together’ #C2MTL

— Sparksheet (@Sparksheet)

May 23, 2013

Toms shoes founder Blake Mycoskie at #c2mtl taking about his moment of truth: seeing the joy shoes could bring. pic.twitter.com/Cn5UdUatlvToms shoes founder Blake Mycoskie at #c2mtl taking about his moment of truth: seeing the joy shoes could bring. pic.twitter.com/Cn5UdUatlv

— Rahul Raj (@rwr3peat)

May 21, 2013

Embracing the arts

Just as C2-MTL celebrated the role of creativity in business, it welcomed the art world into the conversation with opera and dance performances, a fashion show, an evolving photography exhibit (featuring C2 attendees as subjects) and even a live house band jamming between speakers.

At times the performances inadvertently served to underscore the difference between the attendees and the artists by framing creativity as “entertainment” rather than something intrinsic to the business world (the inclusion of artist-entrepreneurs like Starck and von Furstenberg was much more effective in bridging commerce and creativity), but they certainly kept C2-MTL from feeling like any other business conference.

— (@null)

May 22, 2013

Opera de Montreal’s opening performance. Photo by Kristina Velan.

The walkway to C2-MTL’s outdoor plaza was made out of a shipping container. Photo by Kristina Velan.

Check out our C2-MTL gallery on Facebook for more photos of the event. You can see our complete C2-MTL notebook on Spundge, the content curation tool we used to create this story.

Image by Jerry Bauer via The Huffington Post.

A lot of us think of sales as sleazy and slimy and manipulative because for a long time, most of what we knew about sales came from an age of information asymmetry.

The seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller has more information, the seller can rip you off. This is why we have the principle of “buyer beware.”

I think that’s changed. We’ve gone from a world of information asymmetry to one closer to information parity.

This transition – from buyers who don’t have much information, not many choices and no way to talk back, to [buyers who] have lots of information, lots of choices and all kinds of ways to talk back – has changed the game, moving us from a world of “buyer beware” to one of “seller beware.”

And this all happened in the last ten years, thanks to the internet and social media?

That’s been a big force. I think sales has changed more in the last decade than it did in the previous five decades combined. The shift in the information balance between buyer and seller is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

You focus on two industries in the book that aren’t usually front of mind when you hear talk about sales: education and health care. Why is that?

I was trying to explain why people are reporting that they’re spending a lot of time moving, persuading and influencing people. You’d get this pretty high number in the U.S. at least, 41 percent [of workers surveyed].

One of the things that really jumped out at me was where the jobs were. If you look at the U.S. labour market data, the jobs are coming from education and health care services.

Talk to any teacher and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, that’s what I’m doing. I’m selling the idea of paying attention in class, I’m selling the idea of doing your homework.” And in some ways, medicine is, “I’m selling you on the idea of quitting smoking, I’m selling you on the idea of exercising more,” and so forth.

One word we hear about a lot in the digital content world these days is “curation.” You suggest that curation is the key to being a successful salesperson or brand as well. Can you unpack that?

I actually resisted using it because it’s so prominent in the world of content. Folks in online businesses have heard that word a gazillion times but most civilians have not.

The idea is this: It used to be that having access to information was some kind of advantage, but now everybody has access to information. If I want to know the GDP of Sweden, I can find it in ten seconds. So having access to information doesn’t matter. What matters more is being able to take that information and make sense of it, not only on your own behalf but also on behalf of other people.

Is that related to your idea of “problem finding” versus “problem solving”?

Frederic March in the 1951 film, Death of a Salesman

Yes, it’s an important concept, too. If you know exactly what your problem is, then you can find a solution without a salesperson, without anyone else. If I know my problem is that all I need to do is find the GDP of Sweden, I don’t need any help.

Where I need help is if I’m asking the wrong question, or if I’m wrong about my problem. There has been a move from problem solving to problem finding, from solving existing problems to identifying problems people don’t realize they have.

In the sales context, if you know exactly what your problem is, you don’t need a salesperson. So problem solving still matters, but it matters relatively less. Problem finding is a more valuable skill.

Are we seeing the roles of what’s traditionally seen as a consultant versus a salesperson blurring?

Yeah, and that’s been happening for a while. There’s a whole move towards what’s called consultative sales. I think what’s really going on is something that others have written about as well, which is this move from selling products and event services to selling insights.

It’s particularly true in business-to-business sales. One of the things that comes out with all the interviews with B2B salespeople is how much you need to understand the customer’s or prospect’s business, and so it is tiptoeing a little away from peddling products and a bit towards management consulting and generating insights.

Have you got any pushback from actual professional salespeople when you say that we’re all in sales? Should they be worried about their industry being disrupted by amateurs?

It’s a great question. There’s been a little bit of that, but less than I would have thought. Where I’ve gotten some distressed emails is from salespeople who say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe that people have such a dim view of sales!”

Part of the argument of the book is that we should take sales more seriously – that sales isn’t the glad-handing, slick, somewhat duplicitous profession it’s stereotyped as, but that it requires a great degree of intellectual sophistication and insight.

So for everyone who says, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re allowing people to say sales is so grim,” I have a couple more who say, “Wow, I’m glad you’re taking sales seriously.”

With a speaker roster that includes Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Diane von Furstenberg, and an elite group of c-suite attendees (tickets cost upwards of $3,600), the event is sure to generate plenty of online buzz.

This is our notebook of interesting and inspiring blogs, tweets, Instagram photos and other C2-related content from around the web, powered by our friends at Spundge.

C2-MTL

The Sparksheet team curates the most interesting and insightful content around C2-MTL 2013.

c2-mtl, #c2mtl, c2mtl, @sparksheet

View “C2-MTL” on Spundge ]]> http://sparksheet.com/c2mtl2013/feed/ 12 http://sparksheet.com/ctrl-alt-delete-google-hangout-with-mitch-joel/ http://sparksheet.com/ctrl-alt-delete-google-hangout-with-mitch-joel/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 20:25:03 +0000 Dan Levy http://sparksheet.com/?p=17134 It gets harder every year to think of an industry that hasn’t been disrupted by the internet. Brands big and small are finding themselves sandwiched between a dead (or dying) business model and an uncertain future.

Blogger, podcaster and Twist Image president Mitch Joel calls this state “purgatory” and in his new book, CTRL ALT Delete, he argues that it’s time for businesses and individuals to “reboot.”

Mitch has been a friend of Sparksheet since the beginning and he joined us for a Google+ Hangout to talk about his thoughtful and thought-provoking book, which comes out on May 21.

Our conversation covers everything from screen shifting and mobile marketing, to how to have “safe sex with data” and why the world should be a little more “squiggly.”

What does that mean? Watch the Hangout below:

As Sparksheet’s editorial intern, you’ll work with our content and design teams to create and curate content across our award-winning platforms. You’ll also be involved in day-to-day editorial stuff like researching images, navigating our CMS, and coming up with story ideas.

Because we’re a small team, you’ll be 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 the right person for the job? Know someone who is?

Check out the details and apply now (Deadline: April 15).

We are exponentially growing our computing power and we’re filling it up with our videos, texts and tweets. All of our digital lifestyles have a physical presence out there and that physical presence has to be powered by non-renewable energy resources.

The paradox is that the more efficient you make it to communicate with people and to send things, the more you’re going to do it. So instead of consuming less you actually consume more.

A key part of this is something called “the rebound effect,” whereby you have a lower carbon technology but you actually have a higher C02 output, simply because you’re using it more.

An email is 1/60th the carbon footprint of a letter, but when was the last time you sent a letter?

The prevailing wisdom is that because digital doesn’t kill trees and because content is stored in the intangible “cloud,” our environmental footprint is lighter than it was in the print age. Are you saying that because we’re actually producing and consuming more, it ultimately evens out?

I think the cloud actually is a more “environmentally friendly” way of communicating, we’re just doing it on a massive scale. One of the big questions is, after five, ten or 30 years, what do you do with all this data? Do you let it gracefully decompose over time? That’s why things like snapchat are pretty interesting.

Facebook has built five data centres in the last two and a half years and people are sharing 300 million photos a day on Facebook. A year ago, it was 200 million. This boggles the mind. And that’s just Facebook.

You’ve called data centres the “factories of the information age.” Can you describe them?

Think of a massive warehouse. That’s basically what they are. They’re just a giant room with columns and columns of servers. The other half of them are made up of cooling towers and cooling pipes in order to draw away all the heat from those servers.

They are basically the size of three Walmarts and they can have a draw power of anywhere upwards of 40 to 50 megawatts, which is basically the amount of power needed to run a small town.

Large data centres tend to be situated in rural areas where energy is cheaper. This Facebook data centre is located in Prineville, Oregon in the U.S.

They are sited at places where land is cheap and energy is cheap. They tend to be former industrial areas, or economically depressed areas, or farmland out in Western North Carolina, Oregon, Iowa and Oklahoma.

Dublin has become a giant European hub, and it’s because they have cheap energy – 84 percent of their electrical grid is from fossil fuels. Microsoft has got centres over there, HP, Dell, and a few other cloud servers are over there too. Amazon’s got a data centre in Dublin as well.

Globally, it’s been estimated that there are 500,000 data centres and obviously they’re not all these warehouse-sized ones. It’s mixed, Google has been estimated to have about 36.

Why the lack of information and transparency about how many data centres are out there?

The basic lack of transparency is from the competitive-edge standpoint.

If you were to divulge your amount of C02 and I know where you get your power from, then I know how much power you’re drawing in, and from that I can estimate how many servers you’re running, and how big your business is.

Some technology companies are making an effort to harness renewable energy sources like solar to power their data centres. Which companies are at the forefront of that?

Google is on the forefront as far as sourcing and renewable energy for data centres goes. They’ve been a huge investor in sustainable energy projects. They say they’ve invested over a billion dollars into it.

What they’ve done is purchased two 20-year power purchase agreements from two Iowa wind farms. It’s good for the wind farms because they’ve got that baseline purchase agreement for the next 20 years, which stabilizes the price.

Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, located in Oregon, is one of the largest in the world and was opened in September 2012. Google invested $100 million in the project. Image via wikipedia.org

There was a lot of backlash against Apple in mid-2012 from Greenpeace over a giant billion-dollar data centre in North Carolina. Since then, they’ve built two 20-megawatt solar panel farms, each the size of 76 football fields, or 100 acres.

HP is doing it as well. GreenQloud is in Iceland and Iceland’s electricity grid is powered 100 percent by green energy.

I think there’s a certain advantage in purchasing renewable energy as opposed to non-renewable energy. The amount of data out there is growing so fast that they have to build these huge facilities and green energy is a stable energy source.

With natural gas and coal you’re going to get more fluctuation in the price over time. You’re going to have a land grab, basically, for this power, so it’s more of a stable energy source for the very long term.

Do you think there’s just too much content, too much data, being generated? Is the problem one of production or consumption?

I think what’s really curious is that we used to express ourselves through consumption, in the clothes we wear and the things we buy.

Now I think we’re in an age where we self-actualize through the likes and through producing content. I put something out there and then in order for me to get affirmation from it, people also have to produce a like.

So basically that content now is literally the history of people’s communication. It’s the cataloguing of that. And it just grows and grows and grows.

Image via David Bellona.

We’re so used to hearing all this “engagement” and “interaction” by what Jay Rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience” framed as a positive thing. But it’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

It’s a paradox on many levels. The Information Diet by Clay Johnson came out last year and he writes about how the information you get from sources like OK! Magazine or content farms is fast-food garbage, as opposed to carefully curated, edited content.

We’re becoming content fiends. But what point do you stop? You snack here, you snack there, and before you know it, an hour is left. What are you getting out of it?

You’ve created a site called Tweet Farts, which tracks the carbon footprint of hashtags, and you’ve also created the concept app, Canary, that lets people monitor and compare their digital carbon footprints. How can design help us move forward?

Canary is a conceptual app created by Bellona that lets users compare with their friends the amount of CO2 they are generating on social networks.

There a lot of behavioural concepts we use, and a lot of it has to do with psychology tricks, things like defaults. As a designer you can take some of these “tricks” and you can bake that into a design or a user experience to nudge a user in a certain direction.

With Canary, the idea is to raise awareness of the problem and then give people a tool that enables them to either increase or decrease their online interactions and set benchmarks.

So users can personally offset their carbon footprint by supporting renewable energy projects or limit their interactions with cloud-based services that are sourcing their energy from non-renewable resources.

In the physical world, whether we choose to recycle something or throw it away, we’re typically so far removed from the process that we don’t see the consequences of our actions.

There’s something very unique about being able to see the immediate consequence of a digital interaction, no matter how small.

Title image adapted from bigstockphoto.com

In his own words

David Bellona on the mysterious global fleet of data centers:

You’ve called Coca-Cola Journey the biggest rethink of the company’s online presence since you launched your website in 1995. Your last major redesign was in 2005. How has Coca-Cola’s approach to content evolved over the years?

Prior to Journey, we viewed our corporate website as a static information point. It was designed to connect people to corporate information as quickly as possible, and we never deviated from that.

Today, with Journey, our focus is on storytelling. You can still find investors information or job postings easily, but we’re putting the core of Coca-Cola – our brands and their connection to our consumers – front and centre.

The New York Times referred to Coca-Cola Journey as an example of corporate storytelling, as opposed to brand storytelling, with its emphasis on the company’s history. Do you see a difference?

I think they are the same. The Coca-Cola Company is inextricably linked to our brands, and our brands – like the company – have rich histories.

And while we are absolutely committed to telling our brand stories, we’re telling some terrific company stories too.

The Coca-Cola Journey home page is image heavy, with links to stories about the company’s corporate culture in addition to its various brands.

How does Coca-Cola’s online voice differ from the one we’ve been hearing for decades on TV and billboards? One of the buzzwords folks throw around when talking about digital communications is “humanization.”Is that a big part of it?

Every day, Journey is written, laid out, and produced by some pretty terrific humans. I hope our voice and passion is coming through.

Journey seeks to reach a digitally-savvy, globally-aware, and socially-connected reader, and we hope we’re communicating in a way that smart, fun, and even a bit fearless. We haven’t figured everything out yet, but we’re getting closer and better at it every day.

The revamped website includes posts that don’t reference Coca-Cola’s brands.

You’ve said you want Journey to be a “credible source” of information and most of the content on the site refers directly to Coca-Cola brands or partnerships, though you occasionally run general interest pieces. How do you strike a balance between promoting your products and simply providing customers with relevant content?  

We are finding the right balance between covering Coca-Cola, which is our job, with providing shared value to our readers, which is also our job.  I’m not sure we’ve found the sweet spot yet, but we’re working on it.

We definitely intend to produce more pieces like “Hire Power,” and our goal is to always provide something valuable back to the readers who elect to spend some time with us.

You told the Times that your digital communications and social media team has been re-formed in the last year to look more like an editorial team at a long-lead magazine.” How so?

Coca-Cola Journey aggregates posts from multiple networks into a tumble-style blog for each brand.

We are 100% focused on creating great stories (editorial, art, etc.) and syndicating those stories to the widest possible audience.

We believe that great social media work has great content at its core, and someone has to create that content. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: “there has to be a there there.”

When Coca-Cola Journey was launched, you wrote on the site that “more than 1.8 billion times a day, every day, people express their love for our brands by purchasing one of our products.” Do you really believe that buying one of your products and expressing love for your brands are the same thing?

Yes, because I don’t believe that many folks buy products from brands they don’t like. Every touch point with the consumer is an opportunity for engagement.

There will always be critics who contend that at the end of the day, Coca-Cola is selling different versions of what Steve Jobs famously called “sugar water” (referring to Pepsi), and that any sort of content marketing is an attempt to, well, sugarcoat the public health implications of that. How would you respond?

They should get in touch with us. If a critic wants to author an opinion piece for us, and be open to a counterpoint from Coca-Cola, we will publish it.

Coca-Cola’s Ashley Callahan will be speaking at the sixth annual Custom Content Conference, which takes place April 9-11 in Chicago. The focus this year will be on results, ROIs and upcoming trends. Sparksheet is an official media partner.

Nobel Laureate, Dr. John Mather and Northrop Grumman engineer Scott Willoughby speak to a crowd, backed by a model of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Image by NASA Webb Telescope via Flickr.

Any comprehensive roundup of South By Southwest Interactive ought to begin with the caveat that it is impossible to deliver a comprehensive roundup of South By Southwest Interactive.

With hundreds of sessions, exhibits and networking events (read: parties) happening simultaneously throughout Austin over five days, SXSW Interactive is an entirely unique experience for every one of its 25,000-plus participants.

That said, every year a handful of themes and memes manage to rise above the noise – at least for me. Here are my five key takeaways from this year’s event:

It’s not the platform, but how you use it

In last year’s SXSW roundup I noted how there didn’t seem to be any buzzworthy new app or social media platform to break out at the event the way Twitter famously did in 2007.

This year I hardly even heard anybody talk about Twitter – or Facebook or Instagram for that matter. SXSW 2013 may have been the first SXSW to coincide with a papal conclave, but it seems like the interactive industry has officially become platform agnostic.

Or, as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti put it in his keynote, “The railroad tracks have been built – now the question is, “What’s worth sharing on them?”

One of the most telling moments occurred after Google senior developer Timothy Jordan demoed the much-hyped Google Glass prototype, revealing how partner brands like Evernote, Path and the New York Times are already designing apps tailored to the wearable, headmounted device.

Jordan passionately argued that “by bringing technology closer, we could get it further away.” The device seemed to work flawlessly and the use cases Jordan presented were compelling, but the SXSW crowd was mostly unimpressed.

During the Q&A, someone brusquely announced that although the device’s hardware is impressive, there doesn’t seem to be a single thing he could do with the device that he can’t already do on his iPhone. The crowd burst into applause.

On one hand, the crowd’s cynicism made me think of comedian Louis C.K.’s famous rant that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” On the other, I was heartened to see that people no longer seem to be blinded by the “bright shiny object” syndrome.

The lesson for me is that it’s not about the platform anymore; it’s about what you can do with it. It’s no surprise, then, that some of the platforms people did talk up this year are utilitarian – workflow apps like Evernote and TeuxDeux (designed by keynoter Tina Roth Eisenberg, AKA Swiss Miss) and Nextdoor, a platform for community organizing.

Digital is physical

I’ve written before about the “click to brick” phenomenon: Location-sharing app Foursquare driving retail purchases, online eyewear purveyor Warby Parker opening real-world “showrooms.”

Well, the line between physical and digital is even blurrier now with the rise of 3D printing, which was the subject of at least 10 SXSW sessions and the focal point of a sub-event called SXSW Create.

A 3D printing exhibit at SXSW sub-event Create. Image by John Biehler via Flickr.

There’s also a growing awareness that our ever-increasing production and consumption of digital content has (geo)physical implications. At least that’s the message David Bellona, a designer at Twitter, is hoping to get across.

Bellona gave a talk on “The Paradox of the Cloud,” noting that our ever-increasing online activity is powered by gigantic data centers, which he calls the “factories of the Information Age.” There’s estimated to be as many as 500,000 of them around the world.

Some tech companies, such as Apple, Facebook and Google, are making efforts to source renewable energy to power their operations, but most data centers are run on fossil fuels.

Chalk it up as yet another reason why, when it comes to content, we should be aiming for quality instead of quantity.

The next generation of media brands has taken over

For the first time in three years at SXSW I didn’t come across any panels about paywalls, newspapers or “how to save journalism.” In fact, many of the usual new media pundits and legacy media apologists were conspicuously absent. No one talked about print being dead or alive.

Instead, two of the major keynotes were delivered by web-native content publishers who have figured out how to create massively popular – not to mention free – content and get paid for it: Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman.

A slide from Matthew Inman’s presentation.

Peretti revealed Buzzfeed’s secret sauce for creating shamelessly sticky and shareable content. Ingredients may include: cute animals, nostalgia, timeliness and humour, churned by an algorithm that relentlessly promotes content that resonates quickly, and ruthlessly “starves” content that doesn’t.

Buzzfeed makes money by lending that recipe to brands in the form of so-called native advertising, or as Peretti called it, “social content marketing,” which he said accounts for 100 percent of Buzzfeed’s revenue.

For example, check out the “The 20 Coolest Hybrid Animals,” a sponsored post that was completely on-brand for both Buzzfeed and Toyota Prius, the hybrid car it was promoting. Silly as it is, this may just be the future of content marketing.

For The Oatmeal cartoonist Inman, the key to success is authenticity (he only publishes when he is inspired to – again, quality over quantity), crowdfunding and profitable brand extensions like books, t-shirts and other swag that allow him to keep his core content free.

Looking outward, ahead and beyond

There was lots of talk about the future at this year’s SXSW. And not in the ubiquitous “Future of X” kind of way. The actual future when none of us will be around, never mind the startup du jour. (Al Gore even wrote a book called “The Future,” which he was interviewed about on stage).

This may go down as the year SXSW Interactive attendees quit naval-gazing – stopped looking at themselves as the be-all and end-all and started looking outward. Sometimes way out.

One of my favourite sessions featured astronaut Mae Jemison, astronomer Jill Tarter (who Jodie Foster’s character in Contact was based on), and Star Trek actor LeVar Burton discussing the 100 Year Starship project, which boldly seeks to enable interstellar space travel within the next century.

NASA was also in Austin to showcase its next-generation telescope, while SpaceX (and Tesla) CEO Elon Musk discussed private space exploration in a Q&A with former Wired editor Chris Anderson.

Elon Musk delivering his keynote address at SXSW 2013. Image by Digitas Photos via Flickr.

The Space contingent represented a profoundly optimistic view of The Future at SXSW, while sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling brought us back down to earth with his apocalyptic closing remarks, reminding us that “these are not boom times” and “just because technology advances doesn’t mean things are getting better.”

I didn’t make it to any of the sessions but the healthcare stream was beefed up considerably this year, indicating that if we’re going to make it to Al Gore’s future, we better start taking care of ourselves – and each other.

Seeing sessions about autism, Alzheimer’s and accessibility on the schedule was a sobering reminder that despite what the dot-com millionaires turned self-help gurus lead us to believe, the sky isn’t the limit for everyone.

Maybe that’s what happens when you bundle an interactive conference with a music festival. Everyone starts to believe they’re Bono saving the world with a mobile app (my colleague calls this delusion “the elevation of purpose”).

So here’s the question: How do we remain optimistic and idealistic and moral (to borrow a term from RJ Owen, who led a great session on “moral design”) without becoming trite and sanctimonious?  How do we prevent healthy skepticism from sliding into cynicism?

Perhaps we need the Jill Tarters fearlessly leading us toward a Gene Roddenberry future alongside the Bruce Sterlings crankily calling BS. The fact that both were given a platform in Austin is a sign that as big and noisy as SXSW has become, it still gets it, and is therefore still worth going to.

We started in 1994 and as context, music started in 1987. In 1994, the title of the event was Multimedia and it was actually part of the film festival.

Then in year two, 1995, we split that off into two events, SXSW film and SXSW multimedia. And then eventually the name transformed from multimedia to interactive in the late 90s.

Interactive was traditionally the smallest portion of the event and would not have survived some very lean years if not for music supporting us and paying the bills.

We started to notice some strong growth in 2003 and 2004. If you’re looking for a tipping point, it was probably 2007, which was when Twitter essentially launched here. That was a big milestone in terms of our overall growth.

Do you see that success story as the reason why startups keep coming back? As in, it gives them the hope that they may be the next Twitter?

That’s a tough question. We’re all looking for easy, understandable marketing bites and hooks, and that’s a pretty nice hook to rely on. The event was fortunate enough to be growing even without the Twitter launch. The growth probably wouldn’t have been as sharp as it has been in recent years, though.

One of the things that Twitter really helped us with is that it caused a lot more startups and entrepreneurs to be here, and because of that, it got a lot more VCs to come.

That startup stuff is so sexy at this point that it gets a lot of attention.

So how do you account for SXSW’s growth? There are a lot of tech conferences out there that are trying to be what you guys are.

I would love to say the reason why we grew is because we have superior management that knows exactly what we’re doing, period, exclamation point! But that is probably not true. We have made every mistake at least five or 10 or 15 times.

Ultimately, the secret – if there is a secret to our growth – is that we have this very strong, very passionate, very creative community that comes to the event, and as much as we do all kinds of brochures or websites or emails, they’re the ones whose word of mouth publicity has created so much interest in this event and they’re the reasons why more people want to come.

Do you ever worry that SXSW Interactive is becoming too big or too noisy and about so many different things that the value is going to be drowned out?

Sure, that’s always a concern. But as much as it’s grown, I think we’re still very dedicated to these ideals of creativity and innovation and inspiration, which we were dedicated to 15 years ago.

It may be a little bit harder to find the kind of people you want to meet at the event as it’s grown, but that said, there’s a lot more of those kinds of people.

Beyond that, I think SXSW is in many ways very much a reflection of Austin. Austin grows a whole lot and one of the things you always see is that people who moved here 10 years ago say, “Yeah, that’s great, but you should have been here ten years ago, it was even better then!”

So there’s that kind of mythology about SXSW, that thing of, “Yeah, it’s fun but it was even better five years ago when you didn’t know about it but I did!”

SXSW generates a huge amount of content over the  days of the festival, but its online presence the rest of the year is pretty scant by comparison. Beyond your quarterly print magazine, have you thought of creating a platform for people to engage with the brand throughout the year?

I think that’s one of the areas where we have tremendous room for growth in. We haven’t even scratched our potential.

Certainly the gold standard for the high tech industry is what TED has done with their online content and how much that has expanded their brand. It’s absolutely amazing.

I would love to be able to get our content out in the same kind of way.

We do a lot of audio recording of SXSW sessions and release those as podcasts but, as much as some of us love audio, I just don’t think it has quite the same power as a video. So I think we have lots and lots of room to grow there.

So you see SXSW Interactive becoming not just an event brand, but a year- round media brand?

Yes, I think that’s an ongoing goal, and part of that refers back to the question you asked about the event: Is it getting too big?

As the physical space in Austin becomes more and more limited, if we’re able to showcase more of the content online, either during the event or year-round, then that allows us to get the content from SXSW to more people without them having to physically be here.

The trade show floor at SXSW Interactive 2012. Photo by nickmickolas via Flickr.

Is the new SXSW event taking place this summer in Las Vegas, V2V, a step toward branching outside of Austin?

A little bit. V2V will be a much smaller event to begin with. It has a lot of room to grow. Las Vegas has a lot of room to grow. We picture this as a very small event in year one and hopefully it can grow organically into the much larger event that SXSW has become.

But again, it took us 10 or 15 years to really understand what we were doing on the Interactive side.

I hope it doesn’t take us quite that long with V2V, but I imagine that in a couple years we’ll probably understand we were on the completely wrong model and will be doing something different, as these things pivot.

It always seems like there’s a few big ideas that permeate the event each year. Any expectations for 2013?

One of the strange, interesting memes that has emerged this year in terms of our programming is space. We’ve got 10 or 15 panels on either NASA’s continuing efforts in space or private exploration. Who would have thought that in 2013 space would be hot again?

Another big trend for this year’s event is 3D printing, on its own and as an extension of the ongoing DIY / Craft movement. The 3D printing trend is reflected in the fact that Bre Pettis is doing the opening remarks. And the DIY / Craft movement stuff is reflected in SXSW Create

Predicting what the big trends will be outside of SXSW is always a difficult game. If you think of Twitter, it was a cool thing at the event but I don’t think anyone would have thought that it would change the world. It takes two or three years for anything to make that kind of an impact.

There will be lots of things breaking out that will get buzz, some of which will never get buzz beyond March 15th, others of which won’t get a whole lot of buzz but may end up having a whole lot of long-term impact.

Note: We’ll be tweeting live from SXSW from March 8 to March 12. You can follow us here. 

• I will be speaking along with Sparksheet’s Design Director, Charles Lim, about the “55 Things You Have to Know About Content Marketing.” Actually, we were asked to talk about five things, but we thought 55 would be a lot more fun!
• Sparksheet has a booth on the trade show floor (#201) where we’ll be showing off our content creation chops through live visual storytelling. Let us turn you into content!
• Over the past few months we’ve published a series of exclusive Q&As with digital thought leaders (Canadian and otherwise) on the Dx3 Digest. Stay tuned for our very candid interview with Kim Kelleher, former worldwide publisher at Time magazine and current President of Say Media (Dx3′s gold sponsor).

If you’re in the neighbourhood, come say hello. We’d love to meet you. If not, we’ll be doing lots of live-tweeting over the next two days, so stay tuned!

Image via maximumfun.org.

You currently host three podcasts and produce several others through your Maximum Fun network. It seemed as though podcasts were a big deal in 2004, then people stopped talking about them, and now they’re hot again. How would you characterize the state of podcasts as a medium?

In 2004/2005 when podcasting was new, people were hoping for a hockey stick growth curve and obviously that didn’t take place. The technology wasn’t there to support it in terms of making it very easy and superfunctional for users.

To some extent the technology has gotten easier, to some extent there was an accrual of people who are comfortable with it and to some extent, around 2010 you had more big-name stars entering the field and dragging their fans with them.

Also, a lot more devices are internet-enabled and I think that helps, too.

Do you think brands and marketers should be paying more attention to podcasts?

My experience is that brand-driven podcasts suck and if you’re going to launch a podcast that sucks, it’s not worth doing. The truth is that the skills involved in podcasting are skills that you don’t learn when you’re getting a marketing degree.

Jesse Thorn is the host and creator of the NPR radio show and podcast Bullseye.

The opportunity that I see, frankly, is paid sponsorship of podcasts. I am shocked that I still interact with media buyers who don’t know what a podcast is. I was talking to my friend Jeff Ulrich, who runs the Earwolf network, and he said he’s given up on convincing media buyers to buy podcasts.

The truth is that podcasts, more than any other platform, are intimate and trusted, which makes them a really valuable venue for advertising. I think a lot of people are leaving fruit on the tree in terms of building partnerships with podcasts, more than just radio-style spots. It’s a great opportunity that’s being missed.

A buzzword that gets thrown around a lot these days is “brand humanization” and podcasts are one of the most human platforms out there. Maybe they’re too human for most brands?

I have heard from people who say that buyers are partly nervous – especially with comedy – that something is going to happen that is “off brand” over the course of a show.

I think that’s more a CYA situation with the fact that there’s separation between the brand and the buy. But it’s like that with social media, too.

I mean, it’s 2013. It’s not like there’s only 12 hours of television programming that you can advertise on and that’s been made for every person in America.

Can you tell us about Maximum Fun’s business model?

The whole operation is donor-supported, though we have other streams of revenue as well. There are a couple reasons that we did that.

The first is that the advertising market for podcasts still isn’t mature. The second is that I generally prefer non-commercial media to commercial media, and while I’m running a for-profit business, I want to reflect those values.

Ultimately I like having the ability to only use advertisers that I’m very comfortable with.

I like the idea of being in a business where my primary goal is to make something the audience loves rather than simply making something that gathers the most audience. I don’t want any part of making Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Maximum Fun is Jesse Thorn’s podcast production company. The podcasts are funded almost exclusively by listener donations.

It’s funny, people like to talk about metrics and data, but perhaps the best metric for content is whether people will voluntarily pay for it.

Exactly. My father has worked in non-profits his entire life and he’s still amazed that people will donate to a for-profit operation.

The internet has helped people realize that they can support things they like and that will allow those things to continue. Eighty or ninety percent of our audience don’t donate, but the ones that do give us a really solid revenue base. They are the ones who are most engaged in what we’re doing.

Another buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in social media circles is “community,” but public radio has been powered by communities for decades in the States. Does this make people like you particularly well equipped for the current media landscape?

I think so. I’ve always thought about what I do in terms of community and in terms of building an audience of people who actually care, and less about building the largest audience.

That’s not just public media values, it’s also non-profit values. With anything donor-supported, your goal is to engage your audience in that conversation, because otherwise they won’t give.

You’ve been a big proponent of the so-called New Sincerity movement. I’m wondering what the implications of that are from a commercial perspective, since your show relies on underwriting and sponsorships. At the risk of sounding cynical, what sort of brand is attracted to this particular tribe – and vice versa?

Tonx coffee subscription service is one of Thorn’s few brand sponsors.

I think the brands that are most attracted to what we do are people who make something really cool. There’s this company that’s been a sponsor of ours called Tonx. And they essentially operate a coffee subscription service.

You tell them how much coffee you drink and they send you the world’s best coffee that they pick themselves. This is a four- or five-person company. They roast it themselves, they pack it up and send it out once a week, twice a month.

And for people who care about coffee it’s something that’s really amazing and life-changing because no matter where you live you can get the absolute best coffee and you get to hear the story of it and the whole nine yards.

Another sponsor of ours right now is MailChimp. And the thing about MailChimp is they looked at this world of email lists and said, “God, all of these things suck, what if we did just a really good job of this?”

They’re about making something really wonderful that will actually make people’s lives better and I think those kinds of services fit great with the spirit of what we do.

They love that we’re irreverent, that we’re having fun and all of that and they love that our audience actually cares about things.

In his own words

Jesse Thorn on Hasbro’s My Little Pony franchise and the surprisingly sincere Brony movement:

I think Kickstarter is a perfect example of this. It’s not just about raising money, it’s also about creating a community around the products. The customers are fundamentally not just passive buyers, they have a part in the design of the product and are cheerleading from the sidelines as the team builds it.

They tend to be evangelists for it and use their own social media channels to promote it. When it comes down to it, they’re the most effective word-of-mouth engines because they felt they were part of something rather than just buying something.

The content, in that sense, [is] the updates. As the creator there’s this implicit contract that once you have pre-sold your product, you’re going to entertain. You’re going to inform your users with a stream of content for the duration of the adventure.

A lot of the maker companies you profile are based on open source technology. You say that the only intellectual property your own company protects is its trademarks. Does that mean branding is going to become more important than ever?

Basically, the old ways of protecting your products were patents, trade secrets,
copyrights, trademarks, ownership of distribution channel, sheer purchasing or selling power and things like that.

Those are all less important in this era. Those are the old industrial models of brand protection. The new brands are the ones we know so well from social media – the bottom-up brands.

The brands that are associated less with advertising and more with people’s personal experiences and how they pass their feelings about that experience through social media and beyond.

Maker products follow that same path. To the extent that “brand” represents a distinctive name, style and characteristics that are associated with your company, yourself or your community, it is more important than ever.

Image by Makerbot Industries via wikipedia.org.

1) 3-D Printer: A 3-D printer and the paper printer on your desktop play similar roles. The traditional laser (or inkjet) printer is a 2-D printer: it takes pixels on a screen and turns them into dots of ink or toner on a 2-D medium, usually paper. A 3-D printer takes “geometries” onscreen (3-D objects that are created with the same sorts of tools that Hollywood uses to make CG movies) and turns them into objects that you can pick up and use. Some 3-D printers extrude molten plastic in layers to make these objects, while others use a laser to harden layers of liquid or powder resin so the product emerges from a bath of the raw material. Yet others can make objects out of any material from glass, steel, and bronze to gold, titanium, or even cake frosting. You can print a flute or you can print a meal. You can even print human organs out of living cells, by squirting a fluid with suspended stem cells onto a support matrix, much as your inkjet printer squirts ink onto paper.

You say the maker model works best for “small batch” or niche products, leading a “long tail of things.” Do you think consumer appetites for quality and customization will grow as the technology gets better?

My first book, The Long Tail, was based on what we learned from the era of unlimited choice: the digital media era. What we discovered was that we are a lot more unique than the broadcast marketplace revealed.

Extend that to a parallel movement going on in some of the hipper spots of the world toward things like artisanal food. If you’re into wine, you understood that the more sophisticated your taste gets, the more you deviate from the mainstream.

If you’re into fashion, you know that couture and boutique are in a sense niche and yet they have the most influence.

The presumption is that the maker movement now extends that long tail to physical goods that were previously constrained by the limits of mass production.

But there are limits. There are things we don’t care that much about. I’m very happy to have mainstream milk. When it comes to silverware, I’m happy to go to Ikea.

And then there are other things I care hugely about. For some people it might be clothes, for some people it might be a bike and other people it might be their furnishings. That’s where you decide to live down in the tail.

You decide, “That’s going to be something that defines me. That’s going to be something where I’m really going to exercise my new power of choice.” It’s not the end of the mainstream, it’s the end of the monopoly of the mainstream.

Image via kickstarter.com.

2) CNC Machine: While a 3-D printer uses an “additive” technology to make things (it builds them up layer by layer), a CNC (computer numerical control) router or mill can take the same file and make similar products with a “subtractive” technology, which is a fancy way of saying that it uses a drill bit to cut a product out of a block of plastic, wood, or metal. There are countless other specialty CNC machines: CNC quilters and embroidery machines, CNC sign and vinyl cutters (for silk-screening), and CNC paper and fabric cutters for crafters, to name a few. Some CNC machines are the same size of a large table and are designed to make furniture out of wood. Industrial CNC machines can be as big as a warehouse and can serve out objects as big as an airplane fuselage.

Over the last 15 years we’ve seen both the music and publishing industries disrupted by digital technology. How can current retail and manufacturing brands avoid the same fate as record companies and newspapers? Are there ways they can prepare for the “new industrial revolution”?

I think these brands are fine for a couple reasons. First of all, we’re still talking about physical goods, which could not be distributed as easily as digital products could. So one way or another you’ve got to move atoms around and there are some barriers to entry there.

Twenty years after Amazon was created only a tiny share of retail is e-commerce and the stuff that isn’t goes through traditional distribution channels. The Kickstarters of the world are great, but those products aren’t going to make it to the shelves of Walmart any time soon.

The second reason is that mass production is really good at mass production. What mass production has never been good at is niche production. These are markets of ten thousand, which is a really interesting number.

Ten thousand is too small for a Foxconn, too small for a mass production company, they just don’t operate at that scale. It’s not efficient for them, and it’s too large for the individual or even a little local manufacturing business.

And yet what we learned with long tail digital content was that ten thousand was the sweet spot. That’s where music and film established their appeal.

Ten thousand is enough to build a business on but a few of those ten thousands will be able to catapult into the mainstream to become ten millions.

Image via epiloglaser.com.

3) Laser Cutter: One of the most popular of the new desktop tools is the laser cutter, which is mostly a 2-D device. It uses a powerful laser to cut a precise pattern of any complexity into sheets of whatever material you feed it, from plastics and woods to thin metal. Many CAD programs can break a 3-D object into 2-D parts so they can be fabricated with a laser cutter, and then neatly slotted together like one of those plywood dinosaur kits.

You wrote the book on “free” but conclude in your book that the maker movement is unlikely to go the same route, where people expect their stuff – like their content – to be free. What’s the difference?

They’re physical goods. The expectation with digital goods is that they were free because everyone knew the marginal costs were close to zero. Everyone knows the marginal cost of physical goods is not close to zero.

What’s easy in digital is adoption because barriers to entry are so low. What’s hard is making money. It’s the inverse with physical stuff. What’s hard is physical adoption, what’s easy is making money.

Image via 3d-images.net.

4) 3-D Scanner: This device, which can be as small as a breadbox, allows you to do “reality capture.” Rather than having to draw an object from scratch, you can put an existing object in the scanner. It uses lasers or other light sources and a camera to image the object from all sides, and then turns it into a 3-D image made up of tens or hundreds of thousands of polygons, just like a video-game character or CG movie set. The software can simplify it and let you modify any part you want. A common first experiment is to scan your head, then exaggerate your features and 3-D print a bobble-head of yourself.

One thing you don’t mention in the book is the implications of “the long tail of things” on the environment. On one hand, we may have shorter supply chains. On the other, more stuff. Is that really a good thing?

In general, shorter supply chains are more sustainable. But I think you have to be realistic about shorter supply chains. It’s one thing if you’re assembling locally but all your components are shipped around the world.

Are we just going to get more stuff? Traditionally that’s not been the model. It’s not that we buy more stuff or make more stuff, it’s that we make maybe the same or less but we value it more.

You pay more for it but you use it, you love it, you keep it and you treasure it. You treat it less as a disposable commodity and more as an heirloom or something that defines you.

The four excerpts above are from the book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. Copyright 2012 by Chris Anderson. Published by arrangement with Crown Business, a division of Random House, Inc.

In his own words

Chris Anderson on his transition from editor-in-chief of Wired to CEO of 3D Robotics:

You begin your book Content Strategy for Mobile by saying that there’s no such thing as a content strategy for mobile. Really?  

It’s funny, I gave one of my colleagues a copy of the book and he read the first page, put down the book, looked at me and said, “Well, you’ve neatly addressed all of my concerns with your book in the first sentence.”

What I’m trying to emphasize in the book is the idea that if you’re thinking you can treat mobile as this separate problem that’s sandboxed off from everything else, you’re making a huge mistake.

The problem is not about writing something different that will appear on a smartphone or tablet, it’s about ensuring that I’m delivering the right content or the best experience to all of my users regardless of what platforms on which they choose to consume content.

Really, this is about having a publishing process that allows you to treat all of the channels and devices that you need to get your messages out, as equal.

In your book you call out the notion of “designing for context,” suggesting that we can’t make assumptions about a user just because she’s using a smaller screen. Do you mean that people don’t consume content differently in certain contexts, or is it just that we don’t have enough information to make those assumptions?

This is probably one of the most hotly debated and contested points in the industry right now. Are we designing for the “mobile context” and what does that mean?

Anybody who’s ever used their phone while they’re sitting on their couch or when they had a laptop available to them recognizes that “mobile” doesn’t always mean that you’re on the move.

I think it’s perfectly appropriate to talk about optimizing for the local case, but don’t spin that to cover all the mobile use cases out there because, frankly, then you’re leaving out all the people who aren’t using their phone while standing on a street corner.

In fact, I would say for most organizations the goal is to achieve a sense of parity between the desktop and mobile.

In cases where you might say to yourself, “I don’t know if this content really needs to be on mobile, I don’t know if it’s worth it,” the answer is that it probably doesn’t need to be on the desktop either.

McGrane’s new book, Content Strategy for Mobile, published by A Book Apart.

You cite NPR as an example of a media brand that has embraced the adaptive content approach. Are any magazines doing it successfully? I assume that it’s harder for a print publication to make the transition than a radio network like NPR, where the raw audio content is already digital.

Right now the legacy process for most publishers is that they think print first. That model is going to break down as you start to realize it’s not just going to be web, it’s going to be mobile web, native apps and tablets, and who knows what’s next?

What if we stopped thinking of this as a sequential process and we start thinking about having one universal structure that would be designed from the start to cover the full range of cases, including print?

Having that flexible package of content that you can work with means that when you get to web or mobile or tablet or whatever, you have more pieces to play with.

Is the biggest obstacle to adaptive content technological – as you say in the book, most content management systems just aren’t equipped for it – or is it cultural, in that legacy media organizations are attached to the way they’ve always done things?

This is a user experience problem. Let’s treat the users, the content authors and the people who are going to use the CMS like they’re users of any other enterprise system.

It’s not an uncommon problem in UX, to say, “Oh right, you’re dealing with two very different sets of users with two very different needs, how do you prioritize their competing needs and design a system that gives you the best shot at meeting all of them?”

I’m really fond of telling publishers that the money they spend on improving their CMS, making it easier for their internal staff to navigate these screens, making it easier for them, for example, to post to social channels, is going to get them way more business value than yet another redesign of their homepage.

You suggest that mobile may be the key to reach under-served audiences and markets. How so?

I have pretty solid data from the U.S. that shows that 31 percent of people who use their mobile phones to use the internet say that’s the only way or mostly the way they access the internet.

This is astonishing! I mean, it’s a third of people who access the internet on their phones.

This has huge implications for all types of industries. If you have any sort of civic responsibility for communicating with the public and you don’t have a content strategy for mobile, you are dramatically underserving a population of people.

I also think it reflects a growing trend of people who do have access to a broadband connection or desktop computer who prefer to get their information through mobile.

There’s a huge underserved population today who are consuming content on their phones and we’re giving them a crappy experience. We’re telling them, “Here’s how the web works for you: You have to pinch and zoom your way through sites that were designed for a much larger monitor, you’re going to get errors and the fonts are going to be really tiny.”

We’ve all kind of collectively thrown up our hands and gone, “Well! That’s good enough!” No, it’s not good enough.

In her own words

Karen McGrane on getting writers to think about adaptive content:

It’s a brand new year and we’re gearing up for some big changes around these parts.

Over the past three and a half years you’ve seen Sparksheet evolve from an upstart agency blog to an award-winning multiplatform magazine. We’ve taken on more and more topics, industries and platforms, tweaking our site’s design along the way.

We don’t want to fix anything that’s not broken and we’re not about to change things up just because we can, or because we think we’re supposed to.

But we do want to keep evolving and, most importantly, we want to make sure that Sparksheet continues to serve you, our loyal readers, with relevant content in 2013 and beyond.

So before we do anything crazy we’re asking you to fill out a short reader survey. We know that no one likes surveys, but this one is pretty painless, we promise.

Basically, we’d like to know a little bit more about who you are and why you come to Sparksheet. We want to know what sort of content you’re into, what we’re not covering that you think we should be, and what you’re sick of hearing us go on about. We’d also love to know how you use the “good ideas” you find on Sparksheet – who you share it with, why and how.

It will only take a few minutes of your time. And we’d really appreciate it.

The 2013 Sparksheet Reader Survey

That’s a wrap for 2012, the year of data, books, sponsorshops, memes and false idols. It was also the year we launched a podcast, released an emerging markets e-book and won a bunch of cool awards.

We’re off to recharge our batteries, soak in some sun (or snow) and celebrate the holiday season with friends and family. On behalf of the Sparksheet team I just wanted to say thank you to all our readers, contributors and advocates for your engagement over the past year.

We’ve got big plans for 2013, including a big redesign, new content and more platforms. We want to make sure that Sparksheet remains useful and inspiring to you. Let us know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks again for your support. We’ll see you in the new year!

(Note: It’s a huge file, so if the infographic doesn’t load on your browser click here)

Last month marked the eighth anniversary of your

That was my general aspiration. In 2004 I was a freelance journalist in Montreal writing pretty much exclusively for Canadian magazines and some newspapers.

I wanted something to build on my own but I also wanted something that could raise my profile and that would hopefully be of value. The idea that it could turn into a book, different columns, doing workshops and a position at Poynter never crossed my mind.

Do you think that accuracy is the biggest threat to journalism today? Some would point to business model problems, but you have chosen to focus on ethical ones.

The broken business model of news is the result of an even larger shift, which is the splitting of audiences and the inability for any media property to gather a massive captive audience.

Today the question is, how do you deal with that? Developing a really trusted and connected relationship with your community is a huge weight to counter that shift. Yes, accuracy comes into it, being accountable for your mistakes comes into it, but the biggest thing is showing a human face.

If you don’t engage in a genuine and human way with your audience, which does mean being accountable and does mean acknowledging the things you get wrong, you can’t build a strong connection. It’s just a fake aura of perfection. And that’s what we had for a very long time, when news organizations could operate that way and get away with it.

Has the web made accuracy more or less of a problem in journalism?

It’s a double-edged sword. The internet is the greatest disseminator of information and bullshit we’ve ever seen, but it’s also the best way to network fact checking.

The new reality is that you have to do a much better job at figuring out what the facts are and spreading them.

By and large, news organizations are not as good at spreading the facts as they should be and the folks who come up with the misinformation and the hoaxes are much better at appealing to things like emotion, values and desires.

Spundge is a web curation tool created by Silverman that allows users to save and share content.

Spundge isn’t the first online newsroom platform for content creators. What specific needs were you looking to fill with this tool?

Everybody needs a system for finding things that are interesting and that relate to what they do for their job, for collecting those things, for sharing them with the relevant people, and for putting that information into action.

The problem is that there’s a different tool for each part of the process and all those tools lock the knowledge away. They’re about keeping it there just for you. So we saw an opportunity to make that knowledge gathering a lot easier and to make it collaborative.

And aside from putting it all together into an integrative workflow, we should be helping people move towards the act of publishing in some way. That means they should be able to keep private what needs to be private but they should be able to easily take that knowledge and get it out there, whether it’s an email newsletter or a blog post.

You’re currently working with news organizations but I know you’re looking to get Spundge into the hands of brands and content marketers as well. Have you seen different needs from those two markets?

What I’ve seen is that they have their own areas of expertise but that they struggle in other areas. Take the example of a brand that’s getting into publishing. Where they often struggle is the aspect of where their content comes from, how to source it, how to decide what’s right and create good quality content, rather than just trying to sell products.

When it comes to newsrooms, they’re very good at gathering and packaging information, but where they’ve often been struggling is that they have all these internal systems that don’t talk to each other.

Journalists by nature tend to be very protective of the information they gather. The idea of being collaborative and of seeing the added value of collaboration is a big thing that journalists need to open up to more.

You’ve been involved with other journalism startups over the years. Do you think journalists can learn something from Silicon Valley?

With the broken business model and with a sea change in what’s going on with audiences, we need people to think of new ways of building news from the ground up.

That’s why you are starting to see entrepreneurialism journalism programs in universities. There’s recognition in the industry that we need people to really think about these challenges and launch new things.

The other piece, frankly, is that this is a once-in-a-century moment in media, and if you have the skills and you have ideas, this is the absolutely right time to try and put those things into action. I can’t think of another time when I’d rather be involved in news and information in some way.

What is “fansourcing” and what inspired you to build a website devoted to it?

Fansourcing is a way to make author tours a viable means of promotion. There’s this funny disconnect where all these book readers are hanging out online but they’re getting their recommendations in person. Our idea was to build something that lets you bridge that online-offline divide.

When I was an author, I wanted people to know about my book but everyone said, “don’t try and do a tour because it will be a disaster.”

But I’m stubborn and I didn’t listen to them. I did a lot of four-person events. That really takes the wind out of your sails.

So our idea was, what if you could build a mechanism that made sure you only did good events if you always promoted the events just the right amount?

Luckily we didn’t have to invent this idea, we just applied it to a new space. We basically applied the ideas of Groupon and Kickstarter to live events. And that’s what we call fansourcing.

The idea is that the important activity for marketing your book is connecting with communities. If you can do that, you’ll be able to get enough people to go to your events.

And with a mechanism like fansourcing you basically pre-sell that minimum amount and once the 15th book or the 20th ticket is sold, you agree in advance to do the event.

What does your business model look like?

Our approach is, if you’re a non-traditional space then we’ll do the book fulfillment for you and act as the bookstore. If you’re a bookseller then we do revenue share deals.

If you’re an author that wants to sell tickets or get an honorarium for an event, then we take a small cut, like five percent, or if you just want to use us for free doing RVSP, free events, then it’s all free.

Do you fear you’re putting book publicists or agents out of business with this platform?

It’s the job of agents or publicists to empower their authors. There are so many titles and there are so many authors that need help and there aren’t enough resources to help them all.

So why not create a mechanism that lets everyone do their jobs a little more efficiently? I don’t think we’re putting anyone out of business, we’re creating more opportunities because we’re creating more sales and more hits, and that’s good for everyone.

Do you think live events have become more or less important for authors in the digital age?

They are more important because the value of that word-of-mouth connection is so great and it’s harder and harder to get.

I guess we all sort of thought the value of a like or a share or a retweet would be enough to get people to buy a book. But that didn’t necessarily work out. It takes more for someone to buy a book and it takes more for you to build a book-buying audience.

The real value and importance of live events is that they create stronger connections and better relationships. Identifying those key relationships is the difference between having a successful career as an author or just a title that fades away into obscurity.

It makes perfect sense for an author like Jeff Jarvis to buy into a platform that’s all about crowdsourcing and audience empowerment, but was it a struggle to get other types of writers to buy in?

For us the biggest challenge is this slight shift in behaviour. You need to accept failure at a different point and failure is a tough word. But if you don’t connect with the right audience and you don’t get people interested in a particular event then you should let it go.

This saves you time and lets you spend your efforts developing new audiences and finding other communities.

So you’re basically bringing the lean-startup, “fail fast” model into the event and publishing worlds?

I guess we are! “Fail better every time” is a great approach because it is going to help you identify your audience much more efficiently.

Think about how much nicer an exchange it is for the author and the host to be able to say, “Hey! We gave it the old college try, it didn’t work out” versus flying to Duluth and giving a talk to a giant audience of nobody.

Sparksheet was awarded in the following categories:

• Gold – Best Standalone Digital Magazine, B2B (Eddie)
• Gold – Best Online Column or Blog, B2B (Eddie)
• Silver – Best Digital Edition/Digital Magazine Design (Ozzie)

Comprising the Eddies, which recognize editorial excellence, and the Ozzies, which honour excellence in magazine design, the Folio Awards are one of the largest international awards programs in magazine publishing.

Last year Sparksheet was awarded an Eddie for best online B2B column (the winning piece was written by our design director, Charles Lim). This year, Sparksheet contributor Karyn Campbeell’s article Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web won in the same the category.

Congratulations to all the nominees and winners, and thanks to the judges and our readers for your support! You can find the full list of Eddie and Ozzie awards winners here.

The Futures of Entertainment conference is one of those all-too-rare events at which almost everybody is out of their element. Launched through MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program by Convergence Culture author Henry Jenkins, the event brings together academics, marketers and media types to discuss the changing relationships between media, brands and audiences.

In a clash of civilizations, academics are forced to explain how their research applies to the real world, while industry folks have to elevate their jargon beyond 140-character sound bites. Last weekend this made for some fascinating, multichannel and at times contentious debate – a rarity at most industry events, where groupthink tends to prevail.

Here are some key takeaways from the event.

Semantics matter (can we move beyond semantics?)

Let’s start with the name of the event itself. The web is so overloaded with prognostications about “the future of” this or that (especially at the end of the year) that it’s refreshing to see the word “future” in its plural form, an acknowledgement that any  – and, more likely, every – outcome is possible.

The use of the word “entertainment” over, say, “content” or “media” probably has something to do with the fact that FoE is closely aligned with the University of Southern California (where Jenkins is now based) and that its sister event is called Transmedia Hollywood.

But emphasizing entertainment is also an important reminder for content folks that all media – from journalism, to sports, to film – is ultimately created for an audience and “is only as valuable as the people it touches,” as Frontline’s Andrew Golis put it during a panel on “the futures of public media.”

Members of the panel “From Participatory Culture to Political Participation” discuss how tools like social media are changing politics and activism.

Semantics ­came up over and over again at FoE, especially on the event’s exclusive “backchannel,” which was projected on a screen next to the panelists and on the public backchannel known as Twitter. A conversation about “the ethics and politics of curation” with Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova became a discussion about the difference between curation and aggregation.

A panel made up of three young creators of online video content about issues like economics, marriage equality and Islamophobia was bombarded with questions about why they refused to label their work “activism.” At one point, one apparently fed up audience member posted on the backchannel:

Everybody’s an expert

Speaking of the backchannel, I don’t think I’ve ever been to an event where the level of audience conversation consistently matched and often surpassed that of the “experts” at the front of the room. Maybe this just happened to be a particularly erudite Cambridge crowd, but I think it was more than that. I think that people are starting to question the nature of expertise itself.

This was addressed in a session called “Curing the Shiny New Object Syndrome,” which featured a particularly eclectic mix of academic theory and industry wisdom. At one point, Social Media Examiner’s Jason Falls suggested that one way for brands to avoid wasting time and resources on trendy but ineffective social networks is to rely on a network of influencers, or what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith call “trust agents.”

But Eden Medina, an Associate Professor at Indiana University, suggested that the “professionalization” of the expert as a way of “demarcating” a specific career path (which I presume involves some combination of consulting, speaking, book authorship, etc.) has a long and complex history.

Panelists discuss the the “shiny new object syndrome.”

In other words, there’s no guarantee that we can trust professional thought leaders any more than we can trust venture capitalists, whom AT&T AdWorks Lab’s David Polinchock and several backchannel commenters accused of self-servingly perpetuating much of the hype over the web’s doomed “shiny new objects” (Color, ChatRoulette and Augmented Reality apps were a few of the objects mentioned in the discussion).

Instead, Falls and others suggested companies invest in “labs teams” made up of people whose job it is to experiment with and assess new technologies. If I were to put on my expert cap I’d predict that we’re going to see more brands and agencies boasting their own internal incubators and think tanks with various degrees of independence.

During a networking break, I spoke to someone who works at Cambridge-based Microsoft Research (also the home of respected media pundit Danah Boyd) who is studying the arcane art of slapstick video game comedy (!). I suggested he is practicing “branded academia” and he enthusiastically agreed. Is this the a future of entertainment/content? Watch this space.

New media is old

The most heated session of the event ­­– by far – was a conversation with T Bone Burnett, the legendary music producer behind the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and albums by the likes of Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson.

Burnett flew in from Nashville with a clear mission: to convince this crowd of new media elites that the American music industry is under siege and to enlist them in the fight against online piracy.

“Recorded music,” argued Burnett, “is to the U.S. what wine is to France”: America’s greatest cultural ambassador. He called multimillionaire Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who was arrested in New Zealand for copyright infringement earlier this year but who remains a folk hero in some circles, an “organized criminal.”

He told the audience that “it’s stupid for the tech community” – which he perceives as sympathetic to copyright infringers ­– “to attack the arts.”

T Bone Burnett (left) discusses the merits of copyright in the digital age.

Predictably, the FoE audience pushed back against Burnett, accusing him of clinging to an outdated business model and urging him to focus on solutions instead of “whining” about the past, as one questioner put it.

But Burnett’s position was more nuanced than that. He acknowledged that record companies had been “idiots” to pursue individual downloaders with punishing lawsuits. He suggested the industry move away from “copyrights” and toward “transaction rights.”

Burnett said he doesn’t have a problem with individuals sharing music with their peers. His beef is with the likes of Kim Dotcom who are making their fortunes off musicians’ labour while “sucking billions out of our culture.”

I’ve long believed that the music industry bears much of the blame for its decline over the past decade, having failed to anticipate the digital disruption and to adapt its distribution model accordingly.

But I couldn’t help sympathizing with Burnett’s plea on behalf of the musicians and sound engineers who, as he put it, are seeing the door to a music career “closing behind them.”

In one particularly heated exchange with Mauricio Mota, one of the organizers of the conference, Burnett turned the tables on the tech crowd and accused them of living in the past.

The ethics of the internet, Burnett argued, didn’t develop with modern technologies like streaming music, bit torrent and high-speed bandwidth in mind. And though I’m a fan of Mota, I have to say that his equation of high-tech pirates like Kim Dotcom with “fat cat” record label executives did seem a bit dated.

Web pundits like to remind people that “it’s still early days” and, in the grand scheme of things, that’s certainly true. But it’s not that early.

The web was invented seven U.S. presidential terms and 16 Neil Young albums ago. If we’re going to find solutions to problems that, in the end, everyone agrees on (in this case, making sure artists are paid for their art), maybe it’s time to move beyond outdated narratives and caricatures.

If we’re going to build the future(s) of entertainment, we’re going to have to let go of the past.

Photos by Joey Tanny. For more photos, check out our album on Facebook.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

You guys emphasize several times in the book that this is not a social media book. It’s almost as though you guys doth protest too much! Why is that?

One reason is about positioning. As authors you can’t just be like, “I’m about social media.” It’s like saying, “I’m about e-mail.” It’s totally stupid.

The other reason is simply to get people thinking beyond social media. We’re stuck in this glut, this place where everyone is thinking, “well, if I can just get more Facebook likes then everything is going to be okay.” But everything is not going to be okay.

The dilemma is that you have to get the readers out of that as soon as you possibly can. And so you make the first sentence of the entire book, “this is not about social media,” and hopefully you get them into another mindset.

I notice that you use the term “platform agnostic” in the book, which is something we hear a lot lately but we’re not always sure what it means. What does platform agnostic mean to you?

To me, it means, use the most effective thing. And it means, don’t be subject to the whims of media or the whims of what anyone else is telling you. The answer to what to use or what platform to work with is: the one that will be most effective.

Although “content” isn’t a variable in The Impact Equation, the whole book seems to rest on the premise that successful people and brands need to be creating lots of great, relevant content, constantly. Do you really think everyone can be a content creator? Content is hard!

Of course content is hard! That’s a totally valid point. I think content should just be taken in a broader sense. The Nike Fuel Band, when you put it on and it gives you updates of how you’re doing, it is a form of content entertainment. It’s a form of content because it’s something you pay attention to.

Almost all media is content in some form or another. So even though you may not be creating content per se, as in blog posts or television, you are creating something that is inherently media-like.

One of the premises behind the book is, everyone is media now because we interact more through media then we do in “real life.”

Almost every interaction we have is through email, through phone, through twitter, etc. And every little while we meet in person and we discover it’s actually different than anything else we do. We’ve become more familiar with being media than being people.

What does impact mean to you? I may be wrong, but I don’t think you ever define it in the book.

It’s because everyone has a different worldview and so it means different things to everyone. At the end of the day, it’s getting the thing that you consider important to be noticed and be done. It could be starting a company and getting investors to your company, but for others it might just be getting an audience.

We hear so much about China’s remarkable “rise” that it’s become almost cliché. But this podcast isn’t about manufacturing or technology or cars. It’s about luxury goods – and more specifically, luxury wines and spirits.

The market for luxury goods in China  – everything from handbags to sports cars – is experiencing remarkable growth. In 2009, China surpassed the U.S. to become the second largest luxury goods market in the world after Japan.

As for luxury beverage brands, a study released in October 2012 put the luxury wine and spirits industry growth rate at 12 percent, meaning brands have to figure out a way to cater to the demand, while keeping their products exclusive. After all, luxury is all about exclusivity.

Episode notes

In this episode you’ll hear from:

-Eric Lee, Managing Director of JWT Shanghai

-Augustin Depardon, Global Marketing Director at Remy Martin

-Catherine Curran, Associate Professor at UMass Dartmouth’s Charlton College of Business

-Mark Spivak, author of Iconic Spirits: An Intoxicating History 

-Eve Thomas, Associate Editor of Spafax’s Luxury Brands division (defining this episode’s “sparkword”: Luxury).

You’ll learn about:

-The importance of “taste” in emerging markets

-Cognac’s connection to hip-hop culture

-How the Japanese created the luxury Bourbon market

-Why China’s luxury spirit brands refuse to call themselves luxury brands

-and much, much more

Episode 2 of “Good Ideas” was produced by myself, Spafax online editor Jasmin Legatos and Sparksheet editorial assistant Sophie Woodrooffe. It was recorded by Albert at Base Bin Studios.

Nicolas Lebel wrote and performed our theme. The song at the end of the podcast is Lazy On the Grind by Ghost Style, featuring Kwokkin.

Special thanks to our interviewees and everyone else who made this episode possible. Let us know what you think!

Subscribe to Good Ideas on iTunes. 

Download Podcast Episode 02 – Spirited Away

Image by webstock via Flickr.

You were the design director of the 2008 Obama campaign. How much of a role do you think design played in building Brand Obama?

I think design plays a pretty important role in building any brand, but I think that brand was much more than just design.

It’s much easier to build a very exciting and powerful brand if you have a really good product to work with and Obama was appealing to many people, which definitely helped our cause.

And then he had written two books that we could look at as reference, and that really got us started on the design process that I think resonated with his message.

So you started with his story and then built the brand around that?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it wasn’t just his story, and that’s something a lot of people get wrong. When we took on the project, we weren’t just looking at his story, we were looking at our collective story as Americans.

And I think that was a far different take than most campaigns. If you look at today’s campaigns, the Romney/Ryan campaign is not necessarily looking at the American people. This race isn’t about the American people; it’s about these two candidates. That’s far different than what we were doing in 2008.

Was it a challenge to change people’s expectations of what a political campaign is supposed to look like?

We had a little bit of work to do. The only thing we had established at the time was the logo mark. For us it was thinking about, “what is the right American typeface for this candidate?”

We had to change a lot of minds in politics as to what that would be, what that would look like. I think they’re very used to things looking a certain way. We were coming from more of an advertising background, so we needed to try and convince them that this could look like a high-end brand rather than a political campaign. So we had to educate.

You were also involved in the Obama administration redesign of whitehouse.gov. It must have been very different designing for a president rather than a candidate, no?

Yeah, very different. I was working for the transition team and we were working toward a deadline of the inauguration.

The guy who came into office eight years prior to Obama’s inauguration didn’t necessarily think of the web as a medium with which to be transparent or discuss the administration’s agenda.

We wanted to be able to blog, we wanted to be able to build a Twitter feed and we wanted to be able to have a Facebook page. But even at that time there was a lot of work to be done on day one in order to make it all possible.

Scott Thomas was involved with the 2008 redesign of whitehouse.gov. Featured here is the revamped site in 2012, which includes links to a blog and social media sites.

The Presidential Papers Act actually had to be amended in order to allow for the President to have a Twitter account or to have a YouTube page.

For the most part, we used very much the same process that we used within the campaign, which meant looking at historical cues to sort of guide what we should be doing.

Typographically, we wanted it to be a little less modern and a little more sophisticated. We wanted to make sure that it put on a nice suit; similar to anybody that enters the West Wing. We wanted to make sure that it was well dressed.

You didn’t work on this year’s campaign, but what are your thoughts on how the identity has evolved now that Obama is the incumbent?

The Obama campaign used Gotham typeface during the 2008 campaign (top). The font for the 2012 campaign remains Gotham but with added serifs.

I suggested they stick with the Obama logo. It has a lot of equity. And I suggested they stop using Gotham as a typeface because it would appear too much like the last campaign and the President is obviously far more experienced now. So going to a slab serif instead of a geometric modern typeface would be a nice image departure.

Overall, they’ve done a really nice job executing the brand and keeping it fresh, making for a very nice relationship between the last campaign and this campaign.

You co-founded the The Noun Project, which has been described as an effort to “create a social language that unites the world.” That’s a lofty ambition! Do you really think design is a universal language?

Yeah, it has been since the beginning of time. Seventeen thousand years ago humans created pictorial representation. We then began having ideographic languages that evolved out of these pictorial forms, which evolved into Slavic languages, which then evolved into our current phonetic form. So I think this is really a nod to the past.

We’re noticing a very similar problem to what we had thousands of years ago: If two cultures are needing to communicate, the way in which they communicate can’t be through some phonetic language, they need to be able to communicate in another way, and the pictorial representation is the best way to do that.

And that’s why when you land in an airport in Europe or in some country in the Middle East or Asia, the symbols and the way-finding devices that get you from point A to point B are the same, even though the words themselves can be incredibly different.

These are the symbols that transcend cultural barriers and I think that it’s important that the language is organized, collected and shared in a new way, using technology to do that.

The Noun Project relies on crowdsourcing, but you have a business model built in. Icons are available for purchase and you even have T-shirts. Do you think we’ve finally come to the point where open source doesn’t necessarily have to mean free anymore?

Yeah, I definitely think so. When we decided to make icons available for purchase it was because users were requesting it in massive numbers.

We wanted to open up the possibility for individuals that were using them for commercial applications to be able to purchase the icons royalty free and we wanted to create a web share with designers that were uploading the symbols to further the incentive of uploading and contributing to the language.

So now we split whatever revenue we make with the designers 50/50. This is a nice little way for designers to earn a certain amount of side income, which I think is a viable model and one we’re continuing to monetize by developing services and applications around The Noun Project as a language.

Come join us on Thursday, November 1,  for a free webinar with me, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy. In conversation with McKay Allen from LogMyCalls.com, I will share some key insights into becoming a “brand journalist” and a few tips for more effective content marketing.  Some topics we’ll cover:

• Google says that content marketing is now the key to SEO–why?
• Great examples of content marketing – from Spafax to John Deere, Michelin, Lexus, etc.
• How to get more traffic from your content
• How to turn your expertise into content
• Getting started down the trail to effective content

Last night we won big at the fourth annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards, picking up a total of seven awards in the Blue (business-to-business, professional association, farm, scholarly) division, including:

• Best overall online-only publication (Gold)
• Best website design (Gold)
• Best e-newsletter (Gold)
• Best mobile-optimized website (Gold)
• Best blog (Silver)
• Best use of social media (Silver)
• Best article of series of articles (Silver)

Other big winners this year included the CBC, the National Post, Maclean’s and Huffington Post Canada. A huge thank you to the COPA judges and congratulations to all the other winners.

How do you turn reading into a social experience? Isn’t it one of the last truly solitary things we do?

It has always been social to the extent that book clubs have been around for just as long as people have been reading. A book you read that you don’t talk about is kind of half read, in a way. You need that conversation with friends to bring out what you thought about the book or to amplify it or to consider it from a new perspective.

At some level, there’s still a person with a book, and that can’t change much. I do think there are little things that a company like ours can do that make that experience a little bit richer or that just take it in a slightly different direction.

People are coming to Goodreads and posting updates while they are reading the book because of the popularity of our mobile apps. People are on the go, they’re reading, and especially if they’re reading an e-book they can just switch over to the app and quickly say, “I’m 20 percent done,” or, “I love this part.”

It’s not a deep or long conversation at that point. You’re just posting what you think. But your friends might comment on that. They’ll say, “oh yeah, I like that part, too!” or have a little argument or whatever, and then you save the link to your conversation for when you’re done.

What are some surprising things you’ve learned about the way people read and relate to their books?

It’s the incredible breadth of books out there. It’s what people read. I’ve been kind of amazed that there’s a reader for every book in the sense that all of us are kind of parochial in our tastes. We read what we like, and occasionally we might branch out of that if our book club picks a book that’s not usually the sort of thing we would read or if a friend really recommends us something.

But it’s just seeing the sheer volume of books that are out there. So many books that I’ve never even heard of and that aren’t on my radar at all have thousands of reviews on Goodreads. That’s been an eye-opening experience.

How humanly curated is the Goodreads community and how much of it is sorted by computer algorithms?

I think at our heart we’re a social site. Even something like the book-recommendation algorithm, it’s really our community that brings in the data that makes something like that possible. You really couldn’t do this without the scale that we have.

Most people aren’t signing up specifically because they think we can spit 20 great books at them, even though we could do that if they rate enough books. I think they’re joining because their friends are doing it. That’s how this site has grown, it’s all been word of mouth.

We’re pushing something like 16 million books a month to Facebook, which creates more than half a billion impressions, which is kind of crazy. In the end it has all been person-to-person and that’s really been what’s driving it.

So you have a thriving community of readers, but how active are the authors?

Pretty active. We just passed 50,000 authors in our Authors Program, which is small when you consider there are 11.2 million members on the site, but it’s the biggest author community that I know of.

A lot of authors like to use the site like readers do, so they’ll come onto the site to say what they’re reading. If they do have a new book out, they’ll do something like a giveaway. Some of our authors will buy ads from us, some of our authors participate in author chats.

You just hosted an author chat with Salman Rushdie. How did that come about?

It was pretty amazing. He’s not actually a member of the author program. I just thought his book sounded really interesting. It was a really amazing discussion.

That’s one of the best parts of my job. Seeing comments like, “what an honour to have my question answered by Salman Rushdie,” or something like that. It’s pretty wild for people,

especially if you live somewhere where Salman Rushdie is never going to go on his book tour.

You’re not going to get to shake his hand and thank him for writing his books. So I love being able to put people in contact with their favourite author.

So how does Goodreads make money?

We’re advertising supported, and we do make some money off affiliated sales [Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.]. At this point we work with every major publisher, many smaller publishers and increasingly movie studios – people who are doing a book tie-in to a movie or that sort of thing.

One thing we’ve had a lot of success with is doing a “challenge.” We did this for The Help, for instance. They wanted to do something around the theme of unexpected friendships, so we said, “Let’s create a page where there’s a little challenge and the steps of the challenge are you have to watch the trailer for the movie, you have to add the book to your shelf and you have to write a short thing about an unexpected friendship.”

It was pretty amazing. We got a lot of people to enter that. And it’s just a little sticky thing that people can do with the content from the movie and the content from the book that goes beyond ‘just click and add it to your shelf.’

Do you think the key to Goodreads’ success is that the platform exists independently from where the books are actually sold? Otherwise, couldn’t Amazon just replicate what you’re doing?

I can’t really say whether that’s been the key to our success or not. We’ve never sold books so we don’t know what that would be like.

I know that we are really good at social and that’s what people are coming to the site for. Also, we’re platform agnostic, so whether you’re reading on Kindle, or reading on a Nook or you’re reading a paper book from the library, it doesn’t matter; you can come see what’s going on at Goodreads.

That’s what we’re offering. It gives us a very unique space. We’re not selling books, we’re being the place where people discover books, and we’re finding ways to capitalize on that. That’s where I think the opportunity is in the book business right now. All of this is about discovery in the end.

Digital Book World is an online and in-person community that covers the growing e-book industry, but this was their first event all about how these digital books get found by readers. The two-day, singletrack gathering of bookworms generated a handful of important and surprising lessons.

Books are big

Jon Fine

Don’t listen to anyone who says books are dead. Again and again, #DBWDM speakers assured the audience that more people are searching for, buying and reading books than ever. They’re just using different platforms to do it.

Gavin Bishop, head of publishing at Google, presented lots of Google-coloured graphs that showed how book-related Google search queries have grown significantly across all genres since 2009.

The data, which will eventually be released as part of a white paper, demonstrated a direct correlation between book searches and book sales. For example, searches for “Steve Jobs” after the Apple founder’s death predicted the success of “Steve Jobs,” the bestselling biography by Walter Isaacson.

On the retailer side, Jon Fine, director of Author and Publisher Relationships at Amazon, confirmed that sales of both e-books and print books are on the rise. “It’s not about print vs. digital,” he said. “It’s about books vs. everything else.”

In other words, book publishers and vendors are now competing with other forms of content (blogs, video games, social media) as much as they are with each other.

Data is everything

Dan Lubart and Angela Tribelli

Data, data, data. Data was one of the key words at this month’s Content Marketing World conference – and it was king, queen and jester at #DBWDM. As Angela Tribelli, Chief Marketing Officer at HarperCollins put it, “you can’t grow something you can’t measure. “

To underscore the supreme status of data in today’s book publishing industry, Tribelli co-presented with HarperCollins’ recently hired SVP of Sales Analytics, Dan Lubart. But the duo emphasized that data is only meaningful in publishing when numbers people and words people (read: editors) work together.

For example, at her former job with Conde Nast Traveler, Tribelli worked with a data analyst to determine whether Rio de Janeiro really was the “hot new travel destination” that travel writers were gushing about.

Google Trends didn’t support Rio’s case – until Tribelli suggested the data analyst search for alternate spellings of the Brazilian metropolis. Turns out most web searchers aren’t very good spellers, meaning that editors aren’t going to be made redundant any time soon.

Speaking of Google Trends – use it. I can’t tell you how many presenters brought it up as de rigueur for book marketers and publicists. I haven’t crunched the data. But a lot of them talked about the recently revamped Google Trends.

We’ll get back to the data lesson a bit later, but David Goehring, Director of Digital Book Publishing at Wiley, summed it up quite nicely: “What used to be an art – book publishing – has now become a science.”

The author-publisher dynamic is broken

The #DBWDM audience was full of book publishers and every time an author took the podium, they gave them an earful. Erika Napoletano put it most pointedly: “I saw them [her publisher] as partners, they saw me as a dollar sign.”

In a gutsy talk, Joe Pulizzi (the Content Marketing World guy) suggested that publishers are “working with a flawed model.” Instead of marketing books on an ad hoc basis, he suggested publishers should “break down their audiences” and authors by subject and create a publisher-branded “platform” to serve each niche.

Book publishing doesn’t even need to be about (just) books, he said, “it’s about being the leading information provider for your niche” – a feat Pulizzi’s achieved in the world of content marketing.

The good news is that this is starting to happen. Simon & Schuster is trying to “build a community around the love of reading,” said online marketing manager Jessica Chaput, while Penguin has its Book Country platform. It may be only a matter of time until book publishers become strong content brands in their own right.

From left: Laura Hazard Owen, Brett Sandusky, Fauzia Burke and David Goehring

The author-reader relationship is stronger than ever

Whatever tensions linger between book authors and book publishers may be to the benefit of book readers who have more opportunities to engage with their favourite writers than ever before.

That’s due in part to social reading platforms like Goodreads, which encourages authors to join the conversation (stay tuned for our Q&A with Goodreads’ community manager Patrick Brown) and Togather, which allows authors to “Fansource” their book tours.

Author Elle Lothlorien spoke about responding to negative reader reviews online and winning over her harshest critics through personal and respectful dialogue. Lothlorien said she sees this simply as “good customer service,” emphasizing that “I’m a writer, but I’m a business person too.” If more authors adopted that mentality, publicists might find themselves out of work.

You can (still) judge a book by its cover

Sasha Norkin

Yes, book covers are still very important for discoverability, even for e-books. As Sasha Norkin, VP of Digital Marketing at Barnes & Noble explained, great covers get pinned on Pinterest and shared on Facebook. Plus, highly visual e-books like graphic novels and cookbooks are becoming increasingly popular, according to Norkin.

That said, discoverability is about more than pretty pictures. And here’s where we circle back to the other “D” word. For Amazon’s Jon Fine, “metadata is the new book cover.” That is, e-books need to be properly titled, tagged and categorized for search engines – and ultimately, readers – to find them.

What all this means for digital book publishers is that discoverability and marketing are all about understanding and leveraging the tools, standards and social currency of the web. More people are reading books than ever. That’s the most important lesson of #DBWDM. The rest is just data.

You

There’s a book by Eric Ries called The Lean Startup. The whole principle of lean is build, measure then learn.

The lean model says identify the thing that’s most uncertain, and then build in experiments just enough to verify or repudiate that uncertainty and then iterate. And the way you do that measuring part is data.

So if you learn to iterate quickly and you collect data and learn from it and build those lessons into the next iteration faster than the competition, you will win.

This is true of any industry, from press to start-ups to big companies, and this data-driven intel is absolutely exploding because of the sheer volume of new sources of data we’ve created.

There are people out there who see this vast amount of data and their eyes glaze over. So how important is the presentation of that data in a form and medium that people can digest and interact with?

It’s absolutely essential. Julie Steele edited a book on visualization and does a great job of explaining the importance of something being accessible.

There’s a company called Narrative Science that will take data and turn it into sentences. They take all the math that’s captured in little league baseball games and basically write newspaper articles that look like they were written by a human. And the uptake is huge because parents want to see an article written about their kid.

When it comes to filtering and analyzing this data, how much of a role will technology and machines have as opposed to, you know, humans?

In Philip K. Dick’s short story, Minority Report, precogs detect crimes before they happen using their psychic powers. Image via Wikipedia.

The human race is very good at coming up with systems to deal with problems. We haven’t got the speed to evolve a bigger brain at the rate that technology is changing so we had to build ourselves a prosthetic brain, and it’s a smartphone.

In a dozen years it will be unthinkable not to have one. When you are born you will have a smartphone that is part of you. It will follow you through your life. You will upgrade it, but it will have all of your contacts, it will have your life, logging stuff like your blood pressure and medications. It will know where you travelled, it will have a history of all your transactions. And none of this is science fiction.

The real moral issue around this is that we use the data to form predictions. And just because you think I’m behaving like a terrorist or a pornographer or a thief doesn’t mean I am. But if you act as if I am, you have effectively persecuted me for thought crime. We don’t need precogs for it, we have predictive analytics.

What you’re describing is not an ideal scenario, is it?

No. I just wrote a piece for O’Reilly last month called “Big data is our generation’s civil rights issue” and one of the best responses came from Anders Sandberg, who writes for the ethics blog at Oxford University.

He said that nobody sees the offer they didn’t get. So if only the white people got an offer for 20 percent off, that’s the same as giving a tax to minorities. But nobody’s aware of the offer they didn’t get because it’s not persecution, it’s just, “I didn’t get that offer.”

The banks used to do this thing called redlining in the 1950s and ‘60s where they would draw a border around a part of the town with all the minorities in it that they didn’t want to lend money to and they would say “no” to loans with those zip codes on them.

Just because we’ve figured out a way to personalize the redlining doesn’t make it any less unfair.

A map of Philadelphia showing redlining; the practice of refusing people from certain districts loans, based on racial stereotyping. Image via Wikipedia.

Now that we’re in futurist territory, what kinds of jobs or roles do you see arising to help navigate these issues?

American scholar Cathy Davidson says that over 60 percent of the jobs our kids will have don’t exist yet.

The first thing is data science. One of the best things I think society could do right now is to stop teaching calculus and start teach statistics. I mean you took calculus and trigonometry in school, but when’s the last time anyone’s used calculus?

When was the last time you used probabilities and statistics? Probably five times on the way here, right? Bayesian math, opinion polls, chances of rain… Yet we spend a very short time thinking about probability and statistics and lots of time learning about calculus.

So in a world where we are dealing with information most of the time, I would say statisticians, data analysts and data architects are very big positions. Also, privacy officers, and machine-assisted curators and programmers. I think the biggest thing is teaching machines how to do stuff.

So does that mean the future is hopeless for us liberal arts and humanities types?

“The reality is that when a machine tells you what you want, a hipster’s going to tell you what you should have instead.” Image via Flickr by Bruno Santos.

No, I think the future is very good for liberal arts and humanities types because when you get far enough up in any field it’s always philosophy. I mean, we just talked about a bunch of different issues, from the rights of the individual to thought crime; these are philosophy issues. These are issues of taste.

And if you look at the most successful e-commerce sites right now, they’re the ones that are curated, they are the ones full of hipsters telling you which fixie bike you need or which ironic moustache T-shirt you should wear.

The reality is that when a machine tells you what you want, a hipster’s going to tell you what you should have instead. There’s naturally going to be this tension between individuality and prediction.

You have been involved in the launch of a number of conferences, including Bitnorth, the International Startup Festival and CloudConnect. How important are events in this age when we can actually connect so easily using technology?

There’s a great book by Edward Tenner called Why Things Bite Back about the unintended consequences of technology. He says, for example, that with computers we expected the paperless office, but in fact what the computer did was turn everyone into their own desktop publisher and we use more paper than ever.

I think the same is true of conferences. We saw the emergence of video conferences, audio conferences, email and all these other remote messaging technologies. What that’s done is reduce the cost of distribution so the traditional media industries like print and publishing are threatened, but it has also reduced the amount of physical interaction we get.

If you are going to go and do networking, increasingly it’s about the lobby conference and the events are becoming more and more structured around that interaction.

We’re thrilled to announce that Sparksheet has been nominated for three Folio Awards this fall.

Comprising The Eddies, which recognize editorial excellence, and the Ozzies, which honour excellence in magazine design, the Folio Awards are one of the largest international awards programs in magazine publishing. Sparksheet is nominated in the B2B category for:

• Best Standalone Digital Magazine (Eddie)
• Best Online Column or Blog (Eddie)
• Best Digital Magazine Design (Ozzie)

Last year, Sparksheet won Best Online Column or Blog for our design director Charles Lim’s column Print in Digital Clothing: The Problem with Magazine Apps.

The awards will be presented in New York City on October 31. Congratulations to all the other nominees! It’s an honour to be selected.

Ask a web developer and she will invariably start waxing poetic about hardware architecture, software frameworks and programming languages. Ask a journalist and he’s likely to start talking about the places content is housed – in print, on the web or in an app.

Speak to a film or television producer, writer or marketer and they might casually drop the term “transmedia,” a close cousin of platform agnosticism which is coming into its own as an industry. Last year we attended a conference in San Francisco all about transmedia.

We like to think of Sparksheet as a platform agnostic magazine. That means we aren’t wedded to any particular medium. We love the web, but we also think there’s a time and place for print, TV and even radio (check out our new podcast).

It also means our content is available on whatever screens or device you want to consume it on, thanks to our website’s responsive design.

Confused yet? So are we.

Which is why we’re asking you to give us your take on the same question:

What does platform agnostic mean to you? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

For Rosie Allimonos, transmedia storytelling expands the brand universes of BBC shows like EastEnders and Doctor Who.

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.

-Rosie Allimonos, BBC Television

Transmedia pioneer and media scholar Henry Jenkins thinks cross-platform content is all about extending the lifespan of a story.

Pieces of the story can be scattered across media platforms and that creates incentives for us to return to that content again and again, creating multiple touchpoints for brands but also creating an expanded canvas for storytellers to work on. The story is not tied to one platform. It is in all media.

-Henry Jenkins, Author, Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins. Image by WayneKLin via Flickr.

Brazilian storyteller and startup founder Mauricio Mota thinks the platform itself can shape how a transmedia story is told.

You are not locked to a little island, you’ve got this big map and people will want to explore it on the Internet, on their cellphone, at an event, or reading a newspaper or magazine… Transmedia allows you to develop different parts of a story, for different audiences, on whatever platform suits it best.

-Mauricio Mota, The Alchemists

Platform agnosticism isn’t just about telling good stories. Medical doctor and science journalist Ivan Oransky thinks it has pedagogical power, too.

Journalists have always reported, curated, edited and managed information in various ways, no matter what we called it. What has changed over time, as technology gives us more options, is how we display that information to readers, viewers and listeners.

-Ivan Oransky, Executive Editor, Reuters Health

New York Times editor Jonathan Landman boasts about the flexibility that reporting on the web gives to print journalists. For him, multiplatform means the convergence of real-time news on the web with classic print publishing.

Are we a genuine, platform-agnostic 24-hour newsgathering operation or what? Guy climbs building at 1:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning after the paper had closed and the print editors had left the building. Web staff is on the case. We publish the news at 3:11 a.m. We add new information as it becomes available. We mobilize Sewell Chan at 4:30. By 6 a.m. there’s a 1,000-word story with pictures. Good morning, New York.

-Jonathan Landman, Deputy Managing Editor, The New York Times

Maurício Mota. Image by jmm kazi via Flickr.

For content marketer and writer David Preece, being platform agnostic means being adaptive to the constantly shifting winds of mobile and web-based technologies, be they applications or hardware.

By staying platform agnostic, and making sure you do what’s best for your clients and content, you’ll already be one step ahead of those agencies who are fixated on just developing for the latest web platform regardless of suitability.

-David Preece, Beyond

Same goes for digital and social expert David Patton, who argues that staying platform agnostic lets marketers focus on good content.

Companies looking to sell to consumers or enterprises need to be creating content that can be easily adapted to any platform. Like newsrooms, marketing needs to evolve from being focused on filling a specific platform to creating compelling content that fits in any bucket.

-David Patton, Waggener Edstrom

Tell us: What does platform agnostic mean to you?

(Note: It’s a huge file, so if the infographic doesn’t load on your browser click here)

Today we’re thrilled to present the culmination of that cross-continental partnership: A brand new Sparksheet e-book!

In Same Same But Different: Understanding Emerging Markets, Carolyn offers insights and data about digital trends in Brazil, status anxiety in India, travel habits in China, mobile adoption in Africa, sexual politics in Russia and much more.

Much thanks to Carolyn, Vanessa Hamilton and the rest of the team at TNS Australia’s Travel and Leisure Research division for their ongoing support and collaboration.

You can download the e-book for free on our special microsite at  – and test your own knowledge in our interactive Emerging Markets Quiz.

British Airways has been a longstanding partner with the Olympic Games in the U.K.

British Airways’ involvement with the Olympic Games goes back a long time. What does this assocation mean to the brand?

We trace our steps back to 1948 when we were involved as a brand in London, and we’ve also been flying Team GB since 1966, so we’ve had a long involvement with Team GB and ParalympicsGB.

We’re a really proud British brand: We’ve got “British” in our name, we’re red, white and blue and we think this is a fantastic time to celebrate London and everything that’s great about the city.

What criteria do you use when deciding whether a sponsorship is a good fit for the British Airways brand?

We look at marketing strategy and where it’s taking the brand. One of the things we’ll use London 2012 for is to engage with a younger audience. Sponsorship is a fantastic way of talking to new audiences that wouldn’t normally register you as a brand or feel engaged with you.

By tapping into something the whole country is really passionate about, you get a chance to talk to new audiences in a way they wouldn’t really expect you to, and as a result, they become far more engaged in British Airways.

British Airways flew the Olympic Flame on flight 2012 to the U.K. on a plane specially named The Firefly.

How much of a role will social media play in your sponsorship compared to previous years? When BA launched the Olympic-themed “To Fly, To Serve” campaign in February, the ads debuted on Facebook and Google+ – even before airing on TV during Coronation Street! 

Social media has been a fundamental part of our strategy over the last five years. We started off with a competition called Great Britons, which is a bursary that still exists, where we asked people to apply to bursaries if they can demonstrate their British talent.

Then we would pay for flights to help them improve that talent. We used Facebook with that campaign. People had to use friends to vote and the ones who got the most votes went on to win flights.

Since then we have involved social media enormously. To launch our Great Britons competition we opened a pop-up restaurant in Shoreditch, London for two and a half weeks and people could come down and have a menu tasting.

We only released the tickets on Facebook and sold out in three and a half hours through word of mouth. It was incredible. We then added two more tasting sessions and they sold out in 20 minutes.

We also have a 60-second TV ad that shows all the key areas of central London and by entering your postal code the plane drives by your house. As a result people have been sharing it and it’s gone viral, with 2 million views in two weeks. My dad even told me about it!

As the official airline of London 2012 you will have a significant presence at the Olympic park. Is it going to be a challenge to replicate the brand’s values and service on the ground as opposed to up in the air?

We have over 300 volunteers who will be helping at the park. For the first time ever, there’s going to be an enormous double-sided screen where people can watch the action, and we’ll have a number of volunteers at the park to make sure people have a fantastic time.

Experiential or on-the-ground events offer a fantastic way of engaging with people who don’t necessarily fly with British Airways – to give them a chance to see who we are as a brand.

You launched an ad campaign recently that focuses on food (“Height Cuisine”) and you’ve also been a sponsor of Taste of London. Is there going to be some sort of foodie tie-in with the Games?

As part of our Great Britons program we found a Michelin-starred chef named Simon Hulstone who has been working with Heston Blumenthal to design a dedicated Olympic-inspired menu on board and which will be served to over 3 million people over the summer. The menu was actually inspired by menus from 1948.

British Airways isn’t just any local brand. As a national airline and flag carrier, you’re also ambassadors for the United Kingdom. How are you planning to welcome the world to London?

We are the flag carriers for Britain. When people set foot in our aircraft they say it’s like being in Britain. We just want to bring a piece of the Olympic Games to all of our flights, so that people’s exciting journey to the Olympic Games starts on the British Airways aircraft.

We have an Olympic-inspired menu, we’ve got a large number of Olympic inspired films and documentaries on board, so there’s a lot that we do to get people excited about the Games before they actually land in London.

The British Airways' Firefly transported the Olympic Flame on its journey across the U.K. Image by markyharky via Flickr.

At Sparksheet we’re proud to call ourselves a multiplatform magazine and today we’re adding yet another platform to our content arsenal – a podcast!

We’re big believers in the power and intimacy of audio and agree with folks like Mitch Joel and Jay Baer that podcasting is an undervalued and underutilized medium.

Called “Good Ideas” after our trusty tagline, the podcast will allow us to delve deeper into some of the content, media and marketing stories we explore on Sparksheet.

In our first episode, we explore the increasingly relevant phenomenon of country branding (also known as “nation branding” or “place branding”) through the lens of one of the most successful country brands out there: Brand Brazil.

We speak to one of the world’s leading country branding experts and sit down with two marketing profs (a Brazilian and a Canadian who runs a Brazilian exchange program) who help us unpack how Brazil transformed itself in the minds of travellers from “the land of favelas and corruption” to “the land of joy and creativity” in just a few short years.

It turns out that many Brazilians have a more nuanced view of the country’s rising brand than those of us looking in.

Episode notes

Robert Mackalski (left) and Ilan Avrichir

FutureBrand’s Country Brand Index (we speak to Gustavo Koniszczer, Managing Director for Spanish Latin America)

Robert Mackalski (the McGill marketing professor)’s blog

Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (the São Paolo business school where Ilan Avrichir teaches)

Brazil Goes Social: The Rise of the Brazilian Digital Middle Class (our Feature Article on Brazil’s changing social pyramid)

Sparksheet’s “Brand Brazil” column

Thanks to Nicolas Lebel who wrote and performed our theme. The song at the end of the podcast is “Samba a Dois” by Los Hermanos.

“Good Ideas” was produced by myself, Spafax Online Editor Jasmin Legatos and Sparksheet Editorial Assistant Sophie Woodrooffe.

Special thanks to our interviewees and everyone else who made this pilot episode possible. Let us know what you think!

Subscribe to Good Ideas on iTunes. 

Download Podcast Episode 01 – Brand Brazil

You recently launched

When you watch the show in the way it’s being presented there’s little doubt it’s being brought to you by Schick Hydro, but the branding isn’t interrupting your viewing experience.

Every time Clean Break cuts to commercial, “Presented by Schick Hydro” appears. With the outros you get a promotional message. Then we put three commercials into the half-hour time slot. So, in that half-hour we get 11 quality brand mentions.

We did a bunch of research and guys told us that if the content was heavily branded, they would be turned off.

That’s how we came to the conclusion that we didn’t need to brand it, didn’t need to put pictures of razors, didn’t need the guys to wake up in the morning and go, “Oh, I can’t wait to shave with my Schick Hydro before I go surfing today!” That would have been stilted and wrong.

The series is about three men in their 20s and 30s who escape to Hawaii and pursue their “dream jobs.” What’s the connection between the content and the Schick brand?

We came up with this concept of “free your skin” as a way of getting around the drudgery of shaving. That’s where the product started.

As we began brainstorming, the idea of making a “clean break” really started to stick. Stuart McLean at Content and Company came up with the concept and we really liked it.

Clean Break has great analogies back to the product as well, because we’re up against a huge competitor [Gillette], which is one of the top 20 brands in the world and so we said, “we want guys to shake up that every day rut and get out and try something new.”

Clean Break features water imagery to connect it to the Schick Hydro brand.

Did you have trouble selling such a subtly branded series to your C-suite?

The hardest one to buy in initially was me. It wasn’t instinctive for me to spend money and then not put my brand all over the content.

But once we did the research and I realized we’d get credit for it, I was able to create a pitch for myself, which I took to my management. They bought it along with me.

In a recent New York Times article you suggest that Schick’s target demographic (men 18 to 34) is “inherently cynical about advertising.” Does that mean we’ll see more brands embracing content marketing?

I absolutely think you will. Yes, they’re cynical, that’s what all our data says, but TV is still a great way to reach a lot of people. People are spending a lot of their free time on mobile devices, but they aren’t spending significantly less time on TV.

TV advertising isn’t going away, but cracking through the clutter, getting men to pay attention, and then getting them to believe in the brand and act on it is getting more challenging.

So in addition to traditional TV ads we need to find other ways to speak to men.

Let’s be honest – razors haven’t changed much in the past 100 years and there’s only so much you can do to differentiate your product (I’m thinking of that Onion article from a few years back that turned out to be very prescient). Do those limitations on the product-design side force marketers to be particularly creative?

JWT of New York teamed up with photographer Jim Fiscus for the Schick Hydro ad campaign.

You’re right that a piece of sharp metal on a stick scraped across your face is what shaving is and has been for a thousand years. It used to be a sharp rock across your face.

With the multiple blades, I think consumers got blade fatigue, but the number one complaint remains: “I still get irritation while shaving.” So what we’ve been able to create with skin guards and adding better, longer lasting lubrication is a significantly superior shave than anything else on the market.

So are we better to go with this emotional, brand-building bonding stuff? Yes, but we also go with some hard-hitting digital competitive claims that say, “Schick Hydro is preferred over Gillette ProGlide at a better price.”

What we’re doing is creating a very rational approach for the stats men – the guys who want to know why it’s better. For the guys who want something that gives them a hug and makes them feel better in the morning, there’s Clean Break.

So we have two types of content we run that get to both sides of the guy.

Schick is the most popular razor brand in Japan and Taiwan.

Schick is the top selling razor brand in Japan and Taiwan, even though it’s second to Gillette everywhere else [Editor’s note: the razors are sold under the parent brand – Wilkinson Sword – in the U.K. and some other markets]. Why so big in Japan?

Gillette is about 110 years old. In World War I Gillette gave soldiers in the U.S. military razors when they went off to war. Soldiers used these razors the whole time and when they came back at the end of the war, they were Gillette shavers.

Schick didn’t start until after World War I and by the time World War II rolled around, Gillette got that contract again and sampled U.S. soldiers. So Schick has never been first in the U.S. and hasn’t been able to catch up.

We’re slowing making gains, but it’s taking us forever. Contrast World War II with the Korean War and the 1960s. We went into Japan way earlier than Gillette, and established that Schick was the razor to use.

Men are such creatures of habit, it is very difficult, once they’ve formed that habit, to consider changing it. That behaviour, combined with who got there first, explains why it’s so difficult to change market share.

Brad Harrison will be speaking at Custom Media Day, a Custom Content Council event, on Wednesday, July 18, in New York City. 

Joe wrote a great think piece for Sparksheet before last year’s event in which he argued that the term “content marketing” was approaching a bubble that might pop at any moment. Meanwhile, Spafax Content Director and Sparksheet columnist Arjun Basu wrote in his post-event roundup that the content marketing industry was becoming a web-centric silo and that “there seems to be a kind of bunker mentality seeping into the discourse.”

The second annual Content Marketing World takes place in Columbus this year from September 4 to 6. We thought it was a good time to check in with both Joe and Arjun (who will be speaking at the event) about the State of Content a year later.  You can watch that conversation below. It turns out that this may be the year that content marketing goes global:

Editor’s Note: In a recent article about Google+ we explored the usefulness of Hangouts for marketers and media brands. Get the full story here. 

So many news feeds, not enough personalized and design-conscious curation. That was the problem that Flipboard, the award-winning Android and iOS app, solved for millions of users.

The app, created by CEO Mike McCue and developer Evan Doll, has seen standout startup success, with 8 million users registered since its 2010 launch.

Flipboard is a curation tool that makes it easy and (and pleasurable) to browse content from a variety of different feeds, from newspapers and blogs, to Twitter and Facebook profiles.

The display takes advantage of the touchscreens on tablets and smartphones, allowing users to “flip” through the content in much the same way they would their favourite magazine (without resorting to skeuomorphism or shoehorning print design into digital clothing)

It’s this kind of innovation that has given the app an edge on its competition. Last month Flipboard expanded its monetization options to paywall, as TechCrunch reported, announcing a partnership with The New York Times.

The company will also begin integrating audio content into the app. Thanks to a partnership with National Public Radio, SoundCloud and Public Radio International, Flipboard’s users will be able to listen to their favourite radio stations while browsing.

Of course, Flipboard is faced with the same existential question as the media outlets that power the app’s content: How do you make money off free, digital media?

Sparksheet editor Dan Levy got a chance to pose this question to Flipboard Curator Mia Quagliarello at SXSW Interactive this spring. Her response: If an app’s design can be informed by print magazines, why can’t the ads?

In the book you talk about how forming habits can help us save energy and brainpower. Does that mean habits make us more efficient?

Absolutely. It’s a way for our brain to seek out an opportunity to achieve the same behaviour with less energy expenditure and less thought assigned to it. That’s why habits exist.

Efficiency is very important when it comes to neurological activity because the more efficient the brain is at certain activities, the more mental space you have to, for instance, dream up new things or think about something else.

But can’t habits – even good ones – sometimes lead to a lack of flexibility and adaptability within organizations?

Efficiency and adaptability are always in conflict with each other. When something becomes more efficient, by its very nature it tends to be much less flexible.

As habits develop, particularly in corporations, people stop paying conscious thought to the activity they’re performing. They lose some of that flexibility, which is why predictable accidents happen.

You suggest that it’s important for organizations to form “keystone habits,” which can percolate into everything they do. For instance, as CEO of Alcoa, Paul O’Neill focused on worker safety. But how do you get employees to buy in?

The trick is to find the keystone habit that employees can intuitively see some sort of correspondence with.

For Paul O’Neill at Alcoa it was safety. There was a huge amount of concern around people showing up for work and getting injured. Nobody feels comfortable going to work and believing they are going to get hurt.

So if somebody comes in and says, “look, I’m going to make sure that nobody gets hurt today,” that’s something that people can buy into.

If, on the other hand, Paul O’Neill had said, “look, you’re going to show up every day and the keystone habit is making as much money as humanly possible, but your wages will stay exactly the same,” obviously no one is going to buy into that.

At Alcoa, the line workers couldn’t participate in the benefits of greater efficiency – there’s no inherent reward in that for them – so they focused on the things that actually impacted their lives, which in this particular case was safety.

You write that the golden rule of habit change is belief and you explain how Starbucks creates a belief system by teaching its employees virtues like self-discipline. Do we really want to put our faith in brands?

Allowing companies to create habits and take advantage of their training doesn’t mean you’re handing over your ability to think.

A lot of people need these highly structured environments that give them an opportunity to learn, and it’s very beneficial for them to go work for companies like Starbucks.

That said, ultimately what Starbucks is teaching is the ability to marshal your own willpower, critical thinking and the ability to set goals and plans.

Hopefully people walk away from that experience with a better understanding of how success occurs, which means they have the tools to take greater responsibility for their own lives.

One of the most fascinating and frightening chapters of your book details how retail brands like Target track our habits with such precision that they can tell whether someone is pregnant before she’s even told her family. How do brands take advantage of all the data out there without crossing into creepy territory?

There’s a trade-off happening within society. Most of the advances that create convenience in a buying experience also create data.

The reason why that convenience is created – despite being expensive for companies – is so that they can get the data. People need to make a choice about what type of trade-off they’re comfortable with.

People are totally comfortable with this trade-off in the online realm. Nobody ever really feels like Amazon is creepy for suggesting books to customers. It’s when it gets offline that people seem to have some issues about it.

But I think that conception of privacy is changing, and as people become more comfortable and familiar with the precise formula of this trade-off, people will be able to make more informed choices.

That’s what stops it from being creepy. It’s just: Where do you fall on that line?

The book’s thesis involves what you call “the habit loop,” which consists of a cue, a routine and a reward. You also suggest that marketers need to create a “craving” for their product in order to tap into that loop. You use toothpaste as an example. Is this true for content as well?

For a lot of people, coming to an online magazine is not a habit. They’re coming because they’re making a conscious decision to do so. But there is some online behaviour that is habitual: people clicking through their favourite websites, for example.

They go to the same sites over and over again because they are looking for some sort of distraction and they become habituated to seeking distraction in this one particular form. It happens all the time.

And clearly lots of websites out there do a good job of exploiting that craving!

Definitely. For example, sites like Huffington Post and I Can Haz Cheezburger?, or Gawker for that matter. A lot of them present content in these very quick paragraphs, which you can click through very easily.

The reason for that is because the sites want it to become habit forming to click to the next page – you get this burst of entertainment and then move immediately to something new.

Loic Le Meur (right) speaking with Microsoft International President Jean-Philip Courtois at LeWeb 2009. Image by Dave Cynkin via Flickr.

For the past nine years thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers and business leaders (not to mention world leaders like Shimon Peres and Nicolas Sarkozy) have been coming to Paris to attend LeWeb, Europe’s largest internet conference.

LeWeb is run by Loïc Le Meur, whose most recent startup is the social media managing tool Seesmic. While he calls San Francisco home, Le Meur is considered one of Europe’s preeminent web advocates.

In a conversation at this year’s SXSW Interactive Le Meur said that he thinks of LeWeb as “a studio” as much as a conference. The key, according to Le Meur, is to produce quality content that can be leveraged to promote next year’s event.

So instead of spending money on a sales team (LeWeb’s full-time staff consists of Le Meur and his wife) or on sponsored speakers (LeWeb never sells speaking slots) Le Meur said he invests about half a million dollars in producing, editing and distributing video content.

And although the face-to-face aspect remains as powerful as ever, “the online component of events is becoming much more important,” Le Meur said.

The theme for the London edition of LeWeb is “Faster than Real Time.” It includes speakers discussing how this concept translates to social media, business operations and the platforms that make them work.

Speakers include Highlight founder and CEO Paul Davison, TechCrunch Editor Eric Eldon, Celebrity Chef and food activist Jamie Oliver, Instagram co-Founder Kevin Systrom and comedy writer Baratunde Thurston.

After his SXSW talk, Le Meur took a few moments to speak with Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy about content’s role in LeWeb – and events in general. He started off asking Le Meur about the online value of offline events.

At The Art of Leadership, which took place in Toronto earlier this week, the focus was on informative and entertaining content delivered by six bestselling business authors and thought leaders. Here are a couple of key takeaways.

Stephen Shapiro presents on "Leading a Culture of Innovation"

People are different

As you probably gleaned from its name, The Art of Leadership was all about exploring what makes an effective and innovative leader or manager.

Turns out a big part of it is recognizing that employees have different motivations, habits, personalities and work styles. In the first talk of the day (each ran for a generous hour), Marcus Buckingham, author of First, Break All the Rules, gave us a breakdown of several different types of workers (from “activators” to “includers” to “analyzers”) and how they each fit in to a well-rounded team.

Chester Elton presents on "Creating a Culture of Buy-in and Belief"

In his talk on getting employee buy-in, The Carrot Principle author Chester Elton spoke about an “engagement continuum,” explaining how managers might transform employees from simply “enabled” to “energized” at work.

Elton, who engaged the Toronto Convention Centre crowd by tossing giant carrots into the audience, offered Zappos as an example, with the online shoe retailer’s motto, “Delivering Happiness.” A well-defined mission statement or “noble cause” goes a long way in motivating employees, according to Elton.

Susan Cain present on how to "Harness the Strengths of Introverts"

For her part, Wall Street lawyer turned bestselling author Susan Cain explained that everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum between introversion and extroversion. The premise of her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts, is that introverted people are an untapped resource in a world that privileges assertiveness and charisma over thoughtfulness.

In her low-key way, Cain audaciously called the acceptance of introverts in education and the workplace “the great diversity issue of our time” and ended her talk with various solutions (including cutting down on meetings and designing office spaces to include both communal and solitary spaces) for how companies can leverage the talents of introverts and extroverts alike.

Vijay Govindarajan presents on "Strategy and Innovation"

Great leaders take great risks

This may seem obvious but several of the day’s speakers offered compelling examples of the relationship between successful leadership and their willingness to think big and out of the box.

Reverse Innovation author Vijay Govindarajan pointed out the audacity of John F. Kennedy’s famous, fulfilled 1961 promise to “put a man on the moon and bring him back before the end of this decade.”

Kennedy’s declaration, according to Govindarajan, epitomizes the sort of seemingly unrealistic but incredibly specific goal that successful leaders set for themselves and their brands. “How many goal-setting and evaluation processes pander to mediocrity?” Govindarajan asked, rhetorically. Better to dream big.

This lesson was echoed by Innovation Nation author Leonard Brody, who argued in his talk that in an educated society where “smart is the lowest common denominator”, “today’s lucrative skill is the ability to see around corner and the willingness to take risks.”

Similarly, for Best Practices Are Stupid author Stephen Shapiro, “expertise is the enemy of innovation,“ meaning that too many successful leaders simply rest on their laurels, which hinders them from recognizing the next big thing.

There’s the rub with leadership. You always have to stay one step ahead.

The skyline from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport

(It’s a huge file, so if the infographic doesn’t load on your browser click here).

The New City Gas building at the heart of C2-MTL

Does the world really need another business conference? Between blockbuster events like TED, Davos and SXSW, esoteric industry trade shows and humbler networking meet-ups, it’s a miracle anyone ever steps into their office these days. But even as technology has made it easier to connect with colleagues and peers around the world, our thirst for face-to-face interactions has become more powerful than ever (and the travel industry isn’t complaining).

I’ve been to a lot of media and marketing events over the past few years. Some have been informative, others genuinely inspiring, while most have been a mixed bag. But they’ve all adhered to same general format, which includes some combination of airless conference centres, labyrinthian expo halls, fluorescent lighting, canned music, box lunches, filtered coffee and cheap swag.

Not C2-MTL. Curated by homegrown advertising agency Sid Lee and supported by their longtime client (and part owner) Cirque Du Soleil, events giant HSM, business magazine Fast Company and a fleet of sponsors including all three levels of government, C2-MTL’s mission was to “reinvent the business conference” and to promote Montreal as an international hub for creativity and commerce.

The C2-MTL atrium

Glancing at C2-MTL’s speaker list one might confuse the event for any other summer conference, with familiar new media headliners like The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Google Creative Lab’s Robert Wong joining entertainment elders like Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner (with a bunch of C2-MTL stakeholders – Cirque CEO Daniel Lamarre, Sid Lee Chairman Bertand Cesvet – thrown into the mix).

Arianna Huffington is interviewed by Mitch Joel

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner

Google CFO Patrick Pichette interviewed by the C2-MTL onsite editorial team

But as MC Geneviève Borne reminded the crowd throughout the event, C2-MTL’s unique selling proposition had less to do with the event’s content than “the experience.”

Even before picking up their badges C2-MTL attendees were treated to a sound and light “mind reset moment” created by The Moment Factory, the Montreal-based company that animated Madonna’s halftime show at this year’s Superbowl. It was a first taste of the interactive art installations that were sprinkled throughout the venue.

Indeed, the venue alone set C2-MTL apart from other business conferences. Rather than take up residence in Montreal’s venerable Palais des Congrès or the local Hilton, C2-MTL breathed life into a 19th-century gas warehouse located in the long-forsaken, slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Griffintown, just south of downtown.

The building, know as New City Gas, was the crown jewel of C2-MTL’s pop-up “village of innovation,” which included several branded lounges and giant wooden tables for group lunches, breakout workshops and Lego sessions.

The epicenter of the event was a sort of town square in front of New City Gas populated by Adirondack chairs, a well-stocked café-bar, a taco truck and a kiosk serving fresh lobster meat in toasted hotdog buns (an apt snack given the nearly 30-degree temperatures and blaring sun).

The C2-MTL plaza looking north toward downtown Montreal

A breakout session

Fun with Lego

A rare taco truck in a city where street food is banned

The event’s commerce and creativity theme came to life in the E-merge exhibit, sponsored by Quebec’s Minister of Economic Development, Education and Export Trade and curated by Art Souterrain’s Frédéric Loury. The exhibit showcased experimental interactive projects by a combination of local contemporary artists and digital startups.

E-merge exhibition: "Echoes of Absence" by Baillat Cardell & sons + Iregular

E-merge exhibition: QReative Room by 2XM Interactive

E-merge exhibition: Hysterical Machines by Bill Vorn

The conference hall, which took up the second floor of New City Gas, felt more like a state-of-the-art concert venue than a sterile convention centre thanks to gorgeous lighting and a rocking live band that entertained the crowd between speakers.

The crowd inside New City Gas

The C2-MTL crowd from above

The C2-MTL house band

Time will tell whether C2-MTL really does change the business conference game. But one clear lesson for event organizers is that good music, great food, a unique venue, and a well-curated aesthetic can count almost as much as the keynote.

(Words: Dan Levy | Photos: Joey Tanny) 

For more photos from C2-MTL check out our Facebook albums - Wednesday and Thursday. 

Where is the boundary between “mission-driven journalism,” as GOOD prides itself in doing, and social activism, which is something journalists have traditionally stayed away from? Is that boundary obsolete?

Having a mission isn’t the same thing as having an agenda on an activist front. Most magazines have had mission statements that they strive to fill and for us that’s definitely true.

When GOOD was founded in 2006 they sought to occupy a media space between social justice do-gooder media, the mainstream media and cool-hunting or hip kids media. GOOD is a creative and social good-oriented magazine, but it’s also high quality and playing the same game as more established media.

Being mission-driven makes people understand what it’s all adding up to when they come to your site or read your magazine. It’s not that we are covering a geographic area or industry. We’re sort of illuminating a point of view on the world and creating a body of work for people who share a similar approach to the world.

During your SXSW panel you mentioned that even though your title is Executive Editor, you spend half your time talking to the sales team. And your title does seem to indicate that you straddle both sides of the Chinese wall. So is your role content-oriented, business-oriented or both?

My number one responsibility is to make good media, so it’s content-oriented. That means supervising the team that makes good media and also, realistically, ensuring that we are able to continue to do that, which means also working with the sales team.

I’m frequently surprised that media survived as long as it did with such a strict wall between the editorial and business sides. This is not to say that GOOD is exemplary at every level in terms of how we negotiate this.

Every partnership we forge is different and essentially our entire business model is built in a grey area. What that really requires is a lot of trust from the folks who are outwardly representing what we do to clients and partners. It’s also important that those folks understand enough about what we do to really respect the lines we draw and for us to all be on the same page about what we want to make.

GOOD Corps is a strategic creative consultancy that helps brands "transform the values at the core of their identity into actionable solutions that improve their business and the world"

Speaking of business models, how does GOOD make money?

Really what we sell against is brand. We do sell banners and use e-mail sponsorships and other things that are closer to the realm of traditional advertising. But we also have a really awesome creative services team that makes custom content for partners.

Much of that appears without the GOOD brand on it but they are purchasing our brains and our sensibility, which in a way is much more of a hybrid agency model along with a traditional sales team.

We’ve also seen a lot of success with our existing editorial series. For example, we do a weekly feel-good feature called “People Are Awesome” which is our version of everyday heroes, and partners will help us underwrite this material.

It’s much easier to inhabit that grey area if all partners are paying for is profiles of people, or if their sponsorship is helping us do something that we’ve always done. We don’t have to worry about stepping on any toes because we’re partnering with a client in one area to underwrite content in another area.

GOOD Maker is a tool that helps individuals and organizations fund social action

Like lots of media brands, GOOD has branched into the event space. I think the way you put it at SXSW is that “events are just another way of consuming GOOD.” Can you unpack that?

This is sort of something that’s in GOOD’s DNA. In the really early days, instead of trying to do direct mail or a lot of traditional magazine approaches to gaining subscribers, they threw parties. We still host a lot of parties related to magazine issue launches, we also do things that are a little more action-oriented.

For example, we created a human infographic in downtown L.A. to raise awareness about traffic issues. For that we did some work with the city and partnered with an ad agency. It was an attempt to say, “okay, if you read GOOD you probably care about people getting around the city and transportation issues and are also interested in getting out of your house and physically being a part of something.”

The staff is not huge here so we’re always thinking about ways that we can also enable people who are into the idea of doing good things that make sense with our brands and we can support them and then have them sort of run with it.

GOOD is a print magazine as well as an online platform. What’s the relationship between the two products and how do the conversations that take place on the website inform the print edition (and vice versa)?

The print magazine definitely has a quarterly vibe; it comes out four times a year, the stuff in it is longer and it’s always more in-depth explorations of stuff we write about day in and day out on the website. So inasmuch as those daily and weekly discussions are informed by our community, they trickle up and inform the feature assignments we make and how we form our print magazine.

Then there’s the feedback loop, where once the magazine is on newsstands and we put all the content from the print magazine online we get people weighing in on it.

For example, we have this 12-page infographic explaining the U.S. economy that we put online after the issue was on newsstands and I actually think it will pay dividends in a long-term sense.

When we write about things that are economy-related we can take portions of that infographic, we can link to it; it becomes this base of knowledge that we can build on with our online community.

We’re huge design geeks at Sparksheet and one of the things you guys are known for – and have won awards for – is design. What’s the connection between your obvious emphasis on good design and GOOD’s mission?

What’s really important about GOOD is that we fill the ‘social good’ role that could easily tend to ‘boring’ or ‘eat your vegetables.’ Design is a really important way that we live out the creative, innovative part of that mission and brand identity.

Practically speaking, as a journalist, working in close collaboration with designers is totally essential to making reported work come to life in a meaningful way.

We have a team of designers who really think the best use of their skills is making narrative, reporting and all things related to helping people understand the world better.

The economy infographic that I was discussing is also a collaboration between me as an editor and reporter and the designer who worked on it.  I didn’t just write it and then hand it off to a designer. There was a whole discussion about how best to convey this complicated information visually.

And that’s in the DNA of how we work. It all comes back to brand identity. We want to be a space for creativity and fun just as much as we’re a space for learning and social good.

A portion of GOOD's infographic on the U.S. economy

Commerce and creativity have always been interlinked. From Shakespeare and Edison, to Dylan and Jobs, the history of art, culture and ideas has been defined by debates about authenticity vs. selling out, populism vs. purity. As content creators, marketers and entrepreneurs we’re faced with this tug-of-war throughout our work lives – consider mixed-message titles like “Executive Creative Director” and “Chief Creative Officer” or terms like “show business” and “brand storytelling.”

In his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer lays out various examples of creative genius in business, art and entertainment, including an enterprising 3M engineer’s invention of masking tape and Dylan’s game-changing composition of “Like a Rolling Stone”. As far as the brain is concerned, Lehrer says, there’s no difference between creating for the sake of commerce and creating for creativity’s sake. Both masking tape and musical masterpiece are products of the same neurological apparatus.

Still, it seems clear to me that as a culture we tend to value seemingly “pure” examples of creative pursuits over those driven by commercial interests. Yes, Steve Jobs’ ingenuity has been equated with Albert Einstein’s and John Lennon’s, but Jobs isn’t just vaunted for founding the world’s most valuable company, but for doing so despite the fact that he famously “never did it for the money.”

To help us unpack the complex relationship between creativity and commerce, I reached out to a cross-section of designers, musicians, filmmakers, writers and marketing types, asking them how they strike a balance between commercial and creative thinking and if these two pursuits have ever come into conflict in their work. I was surprised to find that their answers fell more or less neatly into three categories: those who see creativity and commerce as perfectly compatible, those who strive to broker a compromise between the two, and those who cultivate decidedly non-commercial outlets to satisfy their creative needs.

“Creative thinking is commercial thinking”

Cindy Gallop

Cindy Gallop served as Chairman and President of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty before reinventing herself as a web entrepreneur with projects like Make Love Not Porn and If We Ran the World. Gallop is decidedly in the “no conflict” camp when it comes to the relationship between commerce and creativity. In fact, she thinks many content creators sell themselves short on the commercial front.

“I am a big believer that everyone should realize the financial value of what they create,” Gallops says. “I feel this particularly strongly because my background is theatre and advertising – two industries where ideas, creativity and hard slog making those ideas and creativity come to life are massively undervalued, including by the creators themselves.

So my creative thinking is commercial thinking. The consultancy work I do for clients is designed to build their brands while making money, and my own ventures are designed with clear business models at their core from day one.”

Andrew Davis

Like Gallop, Andrew Davis sees creativity as the essential ingredient in successful client work and insists that “the more creative it is, the more successful it is.” Davis is Chief Strategy Officer at Tippingpoint Labs, a Boston-based branded content agency. Before that, he worked on the Muppets brand at the Jim Henson Company.

Davis says that the key to creative freedom within a corporate context is understanding what your client stands for. “It’s only when we haven’t understood their core values or when they can’t express them very well that we’ve been shot down in flames,” he says.

For example, Davis’ agency once pitched a campaign to GPS manufacturer TomTom that involved staging a “zany road trip across the United States.” The idea was to demonstrate that if your GPS can take you to the “World’s Largest Ball of Paint” (it exists, in Indiana), it can get you anywhere.

But it turned out that TomTom wasn’t interested in highlighting TomTom’s handiness for the holidays; the brand wanted to promote the technology’s usefulness in everyday life.

“The meeting ended with this awesome creative idea that we would never leverage,” Davis says.

“Art that doesn’t require compromise becomes self-indulgent”

Reanna Evoy

Reanna Evoy is the Art Director for ALDO, the global shoe brand. At first she seems to join Gallop and Davis in seeing commerce and creativity as complementary. “I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive,” she says. “If it looks good and it is on brand, ultimately the customer/client will have a positive reaction.”

But Evoy also introduces another element to the commerce vs. creativity conversation. Compromise. She acknowledges that there are occasions when the two pursuits come to a head and suggests the solution is to find a middle way.

“There have been countless times when business decisions have outweighed my artistic direction,” she says. “Call it ‘make the logo bigger’ syndrome. It happens all the time. Even straight-up budget considerations can put pressure on a project.”

Helen Klein Ross

As someone who straddles both the agency and literary worlds, Helen Klein Ross has mixed feelings about the idea of compromise. Ross is a former creative director, widely read blogger, and the unofficial Twitter voice of Mad Men’s Betty Draper (a role that she’s parlayed into a boutique agency called Brand Fiction Factory).

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Ross says. “We’re always writing in the service of something, no matter what platform we’re writing for… the creative and commercial always have to be pretty much linked.”

But in her literary life Ross seems less compromising. For instance, she once wrote a poem that contained a four-letter word. Several editors offered to publish the poem on the condition that she drop the profanity, but she felt that doing so would weaken the poem.

“I had to decide which I wanted: a published poem or a good poem. I left the word in. And the poem was published.”

Frederic Bohbot

Lucky for Ross, she didn’t have to compromise her vision in the end. But for Frederic Bohbot, an independent filmmaker who produces feature-length documentaries for the CBC and other Canadian broadcasters, compromise is “the name of the game.”

“As a producer, the balance that I need to find is between the director’s creative vision and the broadcaster’s generally less creative desires,” Bohbot says.

While Bohbot is critical of “broadcasters who fear that at the first instance of demanding thought, the viewer will change the channel,” he concedes that compromise isn’t always a bad thing. “I do think that most art that doesn’t require compromise becomes self-indulgent, which we have been the ‘victim’ of as well.”

“Living in two worlds means I don’t have to compromise either one”

Jay Vidyarthi

Jay Vidyarthi is at a crossroads. Last year he left his full-time gig as a User Experience Designer at Yu Centrik to pursue a graduate degree at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology.

Since then, he’s made a name for himself as a design expert at TEDActive and as the creator of Sonic Cradle, a unique synthesis of music, meditation and technology. The project earned him an invitation to exhibit at TEDActive this year, which he says led to potential investors.

With his studies winding down Vidyarthi plans to send applications to what he considers the four leading institutions in his field: MIT, Stanford, Google and Ideo. You’ll notice that the first two are academic institutions that will allow him to pursue his creative impulses unimpeded by commercial interests, while the second two are commercial brands, albeit notoriously creative ones. In other words, Vidyarthi finds himself at the intersection of creativity and commerce.

To Vidyarthi, creative and commercial pursuits aren’t perfectly compatible, nor are they opposing forces that necessitate compromise. Both are vital, but each in its right place and time.

“Think of it like a wave moving back and forth,” he says. “You don’t want to be in the middle, you want to go with the flow and make sure the creative and commercial sides of your practice are up to date but not overshooting the equilibrium.”

Ron Tite

In addition to his design work, Vidyarthi is a prolific musician. And while he says he’s been able to “maintain that equilibrium” as a designer, he’s had a harder time balancing his creative instincts with commercial ambitions when playing in rock bands.

“I immediately get shot off balance whenever I’ve tried to commercialize my music. Maybe it’s too close to me to let go of. But the minute I start thinking about growing an audience, I lose my creative spark.”

That’s why Ron Tite, a former Executive Creative Director at Euro RSCG who now works as a consultant, moonlights as a standup comic. In fact, it’s why so many of us – from cab-driving novelists to saxophone-playing politicians – have side projects (or, to use a less pretentious term, hobbies).

“When I simply want to express myself creatively with no regard for commerce, I do a comedy show,” Tite says. “I do it to do it and don’t care whether there’s money at the end of it all. Living in two worlds means I don’t have to compromise either one.”

The relationship between commerce and creativity is at the heart of C2-MTL, a global conference that takes place May 22–25 in Montreal. As an official media partner, Sparksheet will bring you exclusive content before, during and after the event. 

You went to journalism school and identify yourself as a “caffeinated” journalist on Twitter. How does journalistic thinking infuse your work as a designer?

I have been a journalist for nearly my entire life, with my first newspaper job in fifth grade. However, I have been a designer throughout my 10+-year professional career.

I came to web design via communication and information design for print newspapers and magazines. I fell in love with working on the internet the moment that I realized that writing code is designing information.

Both news designers and web designers are burdened with the same things: organizing information so that it is discoverable as well as rationally arranged, illustrating ideas that deepen the understanding of content, and working within a set of constraints.

Miranda Mulligan with NPR's David Wright at SXSW 2012

You and Dave Wright from NPR began your talk at SXSW saying you wouldn’t talk about “above the fold.” But I have to ask: Is there a “fold” online? Does it matter?

Most of the terminology used to describe web design stems from print-focused design, i.e. “canvas” and “above the fold,” and it is time for us to let it go.

The web is an infinitely flexible medium opposed to print, which is finite with absolute measures, and a definite beginning and end. Language matters and words used should be appropriate to the medium.

How closely do you work with the sales department in determining ad placement on the site?

Currently, we are not running any advertorial content on BostonGlobe.com. It is a subscriber-supported site, so we have not tackled any of the design challenges that arise around advertorial just yet.

That said, the Globe is a collaborative work environment, so when there is a business need for new advertising positions, the design team works with the sales and operations team to develop a solution.

I should also mention that last fall, our design and development teams prototyped and ended up running some responsive advertising creative across the top of BostonGlobe.com for a month. It was kind of fun, getting to invent something for one of our clients.

BostonGlobe.com's responsive web design

How closely do you collaborate with the print design team at the Globe? Would you describe the newspaper’s approach as “digital first,” or are you still essentially translating a print project to the web on a daily basis?

The Globe’s presentation team is comprised of both digital and print designers and a few programmers. By and large, we all sit next to one another and the digitally focused team members primarily take the lead on training the print designers to work on the portfolio of digital offerings.

The Globe has been publishing web-first for five or so years now. The newsroom cultural transition happened well before my time in Boston, as I have been with the Globe for a little over a year and a half.

Jeffrey Zeldman once told us: “Content informs design; design without content is decoration.” How would you characterize the relationship between content and design in the editorial world?

Well, I am not sure anything is different in the editorial world, per se, though I have been known to liken the relationship of design and content – as well as the relationship of visual design and development – to the popular sand ceremony often performed during weddings.

In this ceremony, a couple pours various colours of sand into a vessel symbolizing their union. Like the grains of sand, once combined the relationship between content, design and development is very difficult to separate.

By now, I would hope that we have all learned that designing in a vacuum is a big “no-no” and design systems defined without real content tend to fall flat.

There was lots of talk at SXSW about designers playing leadership roles in newsrooms, acting as bridges between silos and departments. I believe you used the term “power brokers” during your talk. How do you see your role as a designer within your organization?

The work of the web designer goes well beyond pixel-pushing beautification and rare is the project that has no need for a designer. At one point or another, nearly all departments cross paths with the design team in order to execute a project, and the most successful ones engage the designer from concept to completion.

Therefore, a designer is uniquely positioned to be one of the most informed people in an organization, knowing most of the idiosyncrasies of all the moving parts. As an aside, this is also the reason that I think web designers make really powerful product managers and project managers.

Newspaper websites have been around long enough that certain design elements and practices have almost become cliché (as your co-presenter David Wright put it, “We’re passing around these coding and UX habits like a dirty needle”). What are some common editorial design tropes that need to be purged?

Oh wow, where to start?! Dave and I both like to talk about how many design decisions get made following the determination of advertising positions.  Occasionally we bemoan that, as an industry, we refer to these positions as “requirements.” This, like in the “above the fold” question, is something we inherited from print.

On top of that, since the industry also needed a system that could be standardized for advertising networks, we created a design pattern that includes “the right rail” and “banner-blindness” problems. We cheapened our own products.

In terms of designing stories, specifically, editorial web designers depend far too heavily on software (i.e. Flash). Learning to write real code is not magic, it’s just hard work.

Also, I feel strongly that web design needs more editorial designers, especially in key positions at medium- to large-scale publishers. The best editorial designers are good at enhancing, often deepening, readers’ understanding of stories and published content.

Thanks to decades of establishing best practices and relationships with writers and editors, their strength is in the additional value added to content when the written word and visual design are skillfully and strategically combined.

More on The Sparkbeat: Miranda Mulligan explains how BostonGlobe.com’s cutting-edge responsive design affects the newsroom. 

Responsive web design is close to our hearts at Sparksheet. Since last summer our own website has been 100% responsive, meaning that it adapts to whatever screen or device you consume it on.

The beauty of responsive design is that publishers don’t have to design from scratch every time a new gadget or operating system comes out, saving time and money. It also means that content consumers are treated to the optimal experience, whether they’re on the train or in their living rooms.

The Boston Globe introduced their responsively-designed website last fall. The site contrasts sharply with the old Boston.com site, which used to serve as the Globe’s primary web destination. Earlier this month the Society for News Design named BostonGlobe.com the “World’s Best Designed” news website:

The Globe’s responsive design is remarkable and deserves to be noted as one of the key moments in media design history, akin to USA Today’s embrace of color and graphics. Its impact will affect a generation of digital journalists and is an example of what’s possible when smart design and rich content is balanced with a focus on being standards compliant and future-friendly across all platforms.

In an in-depth Q&A with Miranda Mulligan, The Boston Globe’s Digital Design Director, Sparksheet asked Mulligan how the site’s responsive framework affected the editorial and design process at the paper. Here’s what she told us:

The single biggest challenge is the necessary culture shift for the entire digital business. From the developers, to the designers, to the editors and content creators, to the business-money-making side, everyone has to change their thinking and process. And well, change is hard. Here are some of the challenges that profoundly impact editorial:

• Designing and building interactive information graphics and practising data visualization storytelling relies on a significant change in the design and development process.Traditionally, most newsrooms have relied heavily on Flash to execute interactive stories and data visualizations. Since Apple’s iOS and Flash do not play together nicely, finding another way to tell these stories is paramount. Also, designing interactives and data visualizations for mobile has, by and large, been an afterthought. Now, designing for mobile must be the first thought.Also, this design process relies heavily on rapidly prototyping and creating the visual design within the browser. The process is smoothest when the experience has been designed and coded using mobile-first techniques, and then designing and enhancing for wider, more fully featured browsers. It seems awkward at first, but gets more and more conformable with practice.
• One significant upside for content producers and site editors: Character counts in headlines become less of an issue because there is no way to know the exact (to the pixel) location it will be on the page for the user. Letting go of pixel-perfection is quite freeing.
• Most modern news websites rely heavily on third-party relationships: i.e. advertising networks, a video management and serving relationship, events and calendaring solutions, games, obits, etc. However, the code served from these vendors will most likely not play nicely on a flexible grid unless it has been specifically written to do so.
• Flash movies/games will not play on iOS devices. There are a variety of techniques around handling and crafting experiences with this type of content. However they all involve some significant hands-on haranguing.

Editor’s note: Imagine was withdrawn from the market after it came to light that Lehrer fabricated some of the quotations in the book. Lehrer resigned from his staff position at The New Yorker and has not been published since. 

Is there a difference between creating for the sake of commerce (like 3M) and creating for creativity’s sake (like Bob Dylan), or is it fundamentally the same process?

It’s fundamentally the same process, especially from the perspective of the brain. I think that’s why the brain is an interesting avenue with which to pursue some of these questions.

The brain is a category buster and the brain doesn’t respect differences between when I’m working on an assignment or when I’m working in my spare time.

Simply put, creativity is the invention of something new that’s useful. Obviously we could spend the rest of our lives debating the details of what exactly new and useful mean, but I think we know what creativity is when we see it.

Your book talks about the importance of form in creativity but you present conflicting views. First you say that “You break out of the box by stepping into shackles,” but then you quote Milton Glaser: “To have a style is to be trapped.” Should we see constraints (even budgetary ones) as good for creativity?

We need the right kind of constraints. Look, for example, at the history of poetry. There’s a reason why poets always stump themselves with poetic forms. Those very intricate forms force us to come up with truly original lines. They force us to dig below the obvious clichés and associations.

So sometimes constraints can be essential in a very real way, because creativity is not our first mode of thinking. We really have to be forced into it. In that way, constraints can really unleash our creativity.

Of course, the wrong kind of constraint is just a trap. That’s what Milton Glaser is talking about. You develop routines, or just develop this standard approach that is rooted in efficiency. It makes your life a little bit easier but it also reduces the realm of possibilities that you consider.

This is the leading theory for why creativity drops off as we get older. People develop styles of thinking. They develop habits, routines, and all those routines get in the way.

That’s why those who stay creative throughout their entire career or life constantly risk reinvention. They always experiment with new products and new problems. They’re always trying to find new ways of attacking the problem. In a sense they’re always looking for a new set of constraints, and that’s the healthiest way.

Milton Glaser (right) at work with Walter Bernard at WBMG in the 1980s. Image via miltonglaser.com

You talk about the importance of focus in the creative process, but you’re also cheerleader for daydreaming. How should we find the right balance between focus and distraction?

I think the first step is to recognize that creativity isn’t a single way of thinking, that the creative process goes through these phases where sometimes you will have epiphanies, but afterwards you’ll have to work it out. You’ll need to go through draft after draft, edit after edit, iteration after iteration.

You really have to diagnose the problem that you’re working on and try to figure out whether what you need is a moment of insight. Do I need an epiphany? Do I need to take lots of hot showers, or do I have a feeling of knowing? Do you have a sense of making progress, in which case you should just keep putting in the work and drink another triple espresso.

Do you think it’s possible to replicate the “serendipity” of face-to-face interactions (which you credit for the creativity of brands like Pixar and industries like Broadway) on digital platforms? Is that where social media come in?

When you go back 15 years, there was this sense that the online world would somehow replace the analogue interactions of real life. That hasn’t happened at all. We need these real world connections, meetings in the flesh, more than ever.

In terms of imagining online exchanges that will foster the serendipity of real life, it’s tough to say. At its best, Twitter makes it possible, but what you often get with Twitter is people obeying the self-similarity principle. They seek out people who are just like them, so you end up with a set of people you’re following who share your interests, your sensibilities, your attitudes, your political leanings.

We certainly do the same thing in the real world. We seek out people who are just like us. But when it comes to maximizing creativity, you really want that friction. You really want that tension in the room. You want some fresh and strange and weird voices too because they’re the ones that are going to unleash your creativity.

Pixar’s Headquarters were designed to encourage employee interaction. Image by Joe Wolf via Flickr.

Do you think IP laws have hindered creativity? You write about the importance of “recombination,” of building on old ideas (Shakespeare is the prime example in the book). Is the web’s culture of curation, linking and mashups bringing that culture back?

It’s a very difficult line to draw. People have been trying to figure out how to draw this line ever since intellectual property was invented back in Elizabethan England. In Lincoln’s phrase, the purpose of intellectual property is to add fuel to the fire of genius.

It is an important motivational force, but at the same time, one also has to recognize that there’s a tension there because, as Steve Jobs put it, creativity is just connecting things. It’s finding new connections between old ideas.

You have to give people access to those old ideas, you have to allow the future Shakespeares of the world to rip off plots and to steal lines. Dylan described his process as one of love and theft: First you fall in love with an idea and then you steal it. Then you make it your own.

We have to make it possible for people to steal the right way.  It’s not about theft so that you can watch it on your laptop. I’m talking about theft so that you can reinvent it. I think too often copyright laws make it too hard to recombine, too hard to mash together old ideas in new ways.

Bob Dylan in 1966. Photo by Barry Feinstein via Flickr

Where does the editing or refining process come into play? Is that still part of the creative process?

It is. When you talk to creative people they begin by telling these romantic stories about how they had a big epiphany in the shower, but if you keep pressing them they’ll confess that even after that big epiphany they still had to go through endless drafts.

Look at Beethoven, the definition of an artistic genius. The guy was going through 70 drafts of a single musical phrase until he found the perfect one. Editing is an essential part of the creative process.

This kind of work doesn’t seem as romantic or grand as the light bulb going off when we least expect it, but it is just as important. There’s nothing glamorous about it, it’s quite dismal in fact and may even make us a little depressed, but it’s how we make our ideas perfect.

The larger point is that creativity is damned hard. If it were easy, if it were just about finding ways to relax and going on vacations, Pablo Picasso wouldn’t be so famous.

What about your own creative process? Do you browse the academic literature to find a narrative, or do you start with an idea and build from there?

I start with the mystery. I start with something I want to know more about. In this case it was the mystery of the moment of insight. Figuring out where these ideas come from when they arrive out of the blue just struck me as totally befuddling. I wanted to learn about it. That’s where I began.

Then, of course, I go to the peer review literature and the science. The hardest part is finding the stories that bring the science to life, that will let you make the connections between the abstract experiments in the lab and the creativity in the room.

Jonah Lehrer will be speaking at C2-MTL, a global conference that explores the relationship between commerce and creativity. As a media partner, Sparksheet will bring you exclusive content before, during and after the event, which takes place May 22 to 25 in Montreal.

The Frost Bank Tower (aka "The Owl") lights up the Austin skyline

As we noted last year, SXSW is huge. At any given moment there are dozens of panels, meet-ups, keynotes, showcases, “core conversations” and branded events going on throughout Austin.

That means that no two experiences at SXSW are alike, and that it’s nearly impossible to distill five days of sessions and spectacles into a handful of tidy trends.

But as Robert Scoble noted during a conversation about – what else? – the future of events, SXSW is a good indicator of where things are headed over the next year in the digital space. Here are my top five takeaways.

We have the tools we need

It may have something to do with the chilly rain that dampened the first two days of the conference, but SXSW 2012 had a more sober feel than last year’s edition. (Figuratively speaking – there was no shortage of free booze flowing as per usual.)

At SXSW 2011 the Arab Spring was still fresh, the iPad 2 was flying off shelves for the first time, and nearly every session brought up those viral Old Spice ads that were supposed to change the face of online marketing. But this year I can’t think of a single news event, technology or viral campaign that set Austin abuzz.

The closest thing was Kony 2012, a 30-minute film about the former Ugandan warlord, that reportedly drew as much as 100 million views this month, but is already facing a backlash for oversimplifying a complex world issue.

Ogilvy Notes presents visual summaries of SXSW keynotes

That no so-called “game changer” emerged this year is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, as digital research superstar Danah Boyd mentioned in her talk on “The Power of Fear,” the Arab Spring turned out not to be a quick social media fix of that region’s problems.

Meanwhile, 2011 buzzwords like gamification, localization and paywalls (remember how everyone was up in arms about The New York Times?) were nowhere in sight on this year’s schedule.

So perhaps the lesson here is that we have the tools we need. Or, as The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston put it in his inspiring keynote, it’s time to “marry the creativity of the tools with the story.”

When it comes to media, it’s all about the brand

Google erected its own "village" on Rainey St. near the Austin Convention Center

I focused on web journalism trends in my SXSW 2012 weekend review, so I won’t dwell on it here. But one of the overriding (and encouraging) lessons from Austin this year is that we’ve officially entered the age of the media outlet as brand.

Yes, media outlets have always been brands. Print magazines like The New Yorker and TV shows like Dr. Who have understood this for years. But for the past decade most online publications have operated as commodities, focusing on “clickable” content that will attract “eyeballs” for their advertisers.

I don’t think I heard anyone use the word “eyeballs” or even the word “traffic” at SXSW 2012. Ann Friedman, Executive Editor of Good, whose motto is “for people who give a damn,” explained how Good is all about catering to a specific “affinity group” through web content, videos, and events.

France's knitted booth on the trade show floor.

Good’s “mission-driven” brand is an “easy sell” to advertisers, Friedman said, because running ads on the site “is about having a point of view, not just buying inventory in space.”

Similarly, The Office star turned web entrepreneur Rainn Wilson invoked the “B word” in a funny keynote about Soul Pancake, a website that seeks to “de-lamify” spirituality by fostering conversations around religion, philosophy and creativity.

With regular spots on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and a TV pilot in the works, Wilson proudly proclaimed that “Soul Pancake is becoming a brand.” And so is Rainn Wilson, it seems.

Design is everywhere

Last year in Austin there were lots of discussions about content and lots of discussions about design. But at SXSW 2012, content and design were treated as two sides of the same coin, as they should be.

The Boston Globe’s Miranda Mulligan and NPR’s David Wright

One of my favourite SXSW sessions, “Journalism’s Got 99 Problems: Design is #1” (the title is a nod to rapper Jay-Z, who performed in Austin the night before), saw NPR’s David Wright and the Boston Globe’s Miranda Mulligan hold court in a room full of designers, publishers and advertisers.

Wright complained that “too many journalists think designers are people who colour in for a living,” arguing that design thinking needs to be brought into strategy sessions from the get-go.

In a panel called “It’s Not News It’s Business,” former Washington Post digital director Justin Ferrell suggested he’d like to see more designers, developers and programmers in executive positions at newspapers and magazines (they’re already calling the shots in Silicon Valley).

What’s clear is that the next generation of media websites is going to be heavily inspired by social news startups like Flipboard and Instapaper, which everyone seems to agree are at the vanguard of editorial design.

Latin America is hot

It was nice to see more non-English speaking markets get attention at SXSW this year and one of the hottest topics was the emerging Latin American consumer.

Austin-based Dell put up a plexiglass wall in the convention center that attendees could sign

In a fascinating talk on Brazilian youth, researcher Carla Albertuni characterized Brazil’s young influencers as “bridge youths” who use a combination of online and offline social networking to reform (but not necessarily “disrupt”) the country’s traditional class system.

In another session, “Have Latin American Media Become Social?” Mexican editor Valdir Ugalde explained how media brands in different Latin American countries are embracing the web.

In Colombia, according to Ugalde, user-generated content is hot. Argentinian newspaper Perfil publishes an online magazine called “140” all about trending topics on Twitter.

Chilean outlets rely on Faebook for generating traffic, while Mexican broadcasters use Twitter hashtags to generate online conversations on air.

Events are platforms

If you follow Sparksheet on Twitter, you’ve probably already heard bits and pieces of the lessons above. That’s because, along with a huge chunk of the estimated 24,500 SXSW 2012 attendees, we tweeted live throughout our five days in Austin.

Robert Scoble, Brian Duggan and Loic Le Meur fielding questions during the session "Events are Now Platforms"

Twenty four thousand is an incredible number. But when you factor in everyone who followed the conversation online, it’s clear that SXSW is much more than a face-to-face event. It’s a platform for quality content, delivered in real time. At least that was the lesson of a “core conversation” with Loic Le Meur, founder of Europe’s biggest tech conference, Le Web.

Le Meur said that his small organization spends roughly half a million dollars a year on video and live streaming and that the Paris-based conference (Le Web will be branching out to London this year) is “just a studio” where the content is created.

In other words, without a sales and marketing team, Le Meur relies on this year’s content to promote next year’s event.

Of course, what the online audience doesn’t get are the face-to-face conversations, unexpected connections and real world relationships that only a live event can deliver. And that’s why you can count on finding us back in Austin next March.

The Austin Convention Center

Over the past decade or so the formula for success in online publishing has been something like this:

Post a lot of content.

Keep it short.

And do it fast.

The assumption here is that people look to the internet for simple, snackable content in “real time.” And with its reverse chronological template, the web’s first indigenous news medium – the blog – was designed to deliver just that.

But over the course of the weekend here at SXSW, this model has finally been challenged and it seems as though fast, short and abundant may be giving way to slow (read: thoughtful), long (read: in-depth) and scarce (read: quality over quantity).

Curating quality

Maria Popova and David Carr

This web publishing paradigm shift became apparent to me during a Saturday morning session entitled “The Curators and the Curated,” featuring an all-star panel with David Carr, the curmudgeonly New York Times media critic, Mia Quagliarello, content curator for digital magazine app Flipboard, Max Linsky, co-founder of longform.org, Maria Popova, a blogger, and Noah Brier, co-founder of brand curation tool Percolate.

Although the panelists failed to see eye to eye on the monetization question (Carr: “I’m so glad you’re all here to repackage and repurpose me. By the way, that’s how I eat!”), they agreed that content should be judged on relevance rather than timeliness.

Popova decried what she called the “newsification of the web,” while Carr lamented “the tyranny of the new.” Lansky insited that “new stories and old stories get clicked on the same amount” and claimed that his site experienced no decrease in traffic when they scaled back the number of daily posts (although this wasn’t mentioned in the panel, that squares with Salon’s recent revelation that the online magazine’s traffic actually increased after they committed to posting less, but better, content).

SX-Men: Gawker vs. Slate

The old and new paradigms of web publishing came head-to-head in the form of two simultaneous sessions Sunday morning (I managed to catch about half of each, running from the Austin Convention Centre to the Hilton next door).

The first session was a live Q&A with Nick Denton, the founder of mega-popular blog network Gawker Media. Denton, who doesn’t so much court controversy as seduce it, defended Gawker’s gossipy, nouveau yellow style of journalism, summing up Gawker’s philosophy as “don’t consider too much before you put it down on the page.”

Prompted by interviewer Anil Dash to reveal the contents of a voice message by Brian Williams (Denton recently alienated the veteran news anchor by publishing a snarky email Williams had sent him), Denton joked, “I’m not getting page views out of this so what’s the point?” Which sums up Gawker’s editorial mandate pretty neatly.

Dr. X and Magneto playing Chess in X-Men film

The second session featured David Plotz, the editor of online magazine Slate, in conversation with Evan Ratliff, a contributor to Wired magazine and the editor of mobile publishing platform The Atavist.

As Plotz explained in a Sparksheet Q&A last year, Slate sees itself as a bastion of long-form journalism on the web and encourages staffers to spend months reporting on pet projects that manifest themselves as multi-part, print magazine-length pieces.

The session was dubbed “140 Characters vs. 14,000” words, but Plotz said that “it would be a mistake to think of social media as the enemy of long-form.” On the contrary, Plotz argued that by satiating our thirst for quick news and pithy headlines, Twitter was “driving out” what he called “commodity news” and “aggregation journalism” (Plotz didn’t say where Slate’s own news aggregation site, The Slatest, fits in to all of this).

Although Plotz didn’t call out Gawker by name, my guess is that he would put Denton’s content in the latter category. As I tweeted during the session (in a geeky nod to X-Men), Denton and Plotz are sort of like the Magneto and Professor X of web journalism, two very different sides of the same coin. Only time will tell whose vision for the future of web content will win. But I guess it’s pretty clear which one we’re rooting for.

Image from mediabistro.com

You’ve been an art director at Time for the past 15 years, which may have been the most transformative period in journalism ever. How has your role changed over the years? 

Certainly, the digital landscape has dramatically changed our industry over the past few years. It’s an exciting transformation that shifts virtually every day and gives visual journalists an entirely new set of tools with which to tell their stories.

Fortunately, what hasn’t changed is the importance of clear, concise and impactful storytelling. Time’s founders set out to do just that more than 80 years ago and it continues to be our mission today, no matter how our content is delivered to our millions of weekly readers.

Time was one of the first magazines to launch on the iPad in 2010. Do you have the same designers working on the print and digital editions?

I’m proud of the fact that the same art directors who produce the weekly print newsmagazine also design Time’s multiple tablet editions. So as they’re conceiving layouts for the magazine, they’re also thinking about how those layouts will translate to the tablets. And they’re working with our photography and video editors to integrate multimedia content.

Time magazine as viewed on iPad

The shiny new thing in the web design world these days is responsive design. Do you see Time moving in a direction where, instead of building a bespoke app for each platform, you have one responsively-designed website that works on all screens?

What’s great about Time is its openness to smarter ways of producing and delivering our content. Responsive design is relatively new and we’re certainly testing it in theory to see whether it makes sense in our current workflow.

You may be the only person ever who has made the jump from sportswriter to Design Director.* What has your background taught you about the relationship between content and design?

Ironically, I tend to view them as the same. In both cases, the challenge is to take the reader through a story – whether as a college basketball and PGA Tour beat writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or as an art director involved in some of the biggest news events of the past decade. It’s all about the story – whether written or designed.

I spent more than 10 years as a writer, so I still tend to approach each story from that perspective, even though my primary focus is to make it visually appealing for the reader.

Time is famous for its iconic and sometimes controversial covers, with their striking portraits and distinctive red borders. But how important is the cover of a magazine in an age where content is often consumed out of context?

It’s even more important now. It’s no surprise that our lives are completely bombarded with information clutter every second of the day. When a brand I trust can sift through that immense amount of information and deliver it to me in virtually any form I want, it’s refreshing.

When you strip all that noise away and discover a place that makes you smarter, it’s invaluable. That’s what Time and the red border is for me.

You’ve art directed more than 150 Time covers, including the 9/11 anniversary issue, the last two Person of the Year covers and the deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Steve Jobs. But a magazine cover is the product of both design and editorial decision-making. Can you give us a window into this delicate process of collaboration?

That’s the fun part! The cover of Time, as you would imagine, is an extremely collaborative process with everyone given a chance to have their opinion heard.
We do some advance planning, particularly on non-news cover stories, but most weeks the process kicks into high gear on Tuesday (we close the cover Wednesday afternoon). It’s not uncommon to have a dozen or more concepts to choose from each week.

In addition to your print, iPad and international editions, Time has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr. How do you maintain a consistent brand across these different platforms, some of which are more customizable than others?

Actually, these sites are more customizable than you think. You may not be able to change the designs of each one, but that’s not what’s really important here.

The customization comes in the curation. Each social network that Time joins will reach a different set of readers. (We are on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Tumblr, but we’re also on Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest.)

Our Facebook following is quite international compared with our other social followings. We post more foreign pieces than we would on Pinterest, which caters more to women in the U.S. We’re able to embody Time on all of these networks because the brand is so versatile.

D.W. Pine will be speaking at the 2012 Custom Content Conference, which takes place March 21-23 in Washington D.C. Sparksheet readers are entitled  to the member rate discount by registering with promo code “sparkDC” 

*Editor’s note: I stand corrected. Writing on the American Copy Editors Society blog, Charles Apple points out that are actually a lot of journalists who have made the transition from sportswriter to designer. Thanks, Charles. Feel free to continue calling me out on “dumb comments”!