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

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. 

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.

Setting up for one of Yelp's contributor parties. Image by Yelp.com via Flickr

This winter the Sparksheet team travelled to Toronto for Dx3 Canada, the country’s first trade show for digital advertisers, marketers, and retailers. A chief takeaway from the event was that real-world networking is more powerful than ever.

And to think that this lesson was driven home by none other than Crystal Henrickson, Marketing Director for Canada and Western U.S. at Yelp. It may sound counterintuitive, but according to Henrickson, there’s a remarkable benefit to fostering online communities in the offline space.

Yelp is no stranger to thinking outside the box. In 2009 they reportedly walked away from an offer by Google of more than $500 million. The bold move ended up being a savvy one: Their March 2 IPO launch saw the company’s valuation exceed 1 billion dollars.

During her Dx3 talk, Henrickson emphasized the importance of doing things differently. She explained how brands can get people interested in them online, and how merchants should deal with the inevitable bad review (or disgruntled reviewer).

Since more people are looking at online reviews before deciding on which product to purchase, brands, she argued, should be taking note.

We asked Henrickson to explain what makes Yelp stand out among other user-generated review sites, and about the offline networking Yelp facilitates for its devoted community of contributors (think really awesome parties).

She also cautions brand managers to take a deep breath before replying to negative reviews: posting when angry is never a good idea.

How does a virtual and social technology strategist fit into an IT networking company?

SPER is responsible for our annual sales force event called the Global Sales Experience (GSX) as well as a number of partner events including our annual global Partner Summit and Virtual Partner Summit (VPS).

These are both complex events and pulling them off requires a strong bench when it comes to leveraging the right technology to create an infrastructure that will transform the audience from passive to active participants.

I have had the pleasure to work on the Global Cisco Live Virtual event and currently work on our GSX and VPS events because my niche is using technology to enhance or at times create an opportunity to effectively inspire and communicate with a large globally distributed audience.

Where do events fit into the overall Cisco offering? Are they about brand awareness, or monetization, or both?
Cisco utilizes events of all sizes and types across the entire marketing and communication landscape, both internally and externally. From product launch webcasts, to our global annual user conferences called Cisco Live, to our presence at events like CES, to GSX, we leverage physical, virtual, or hybrid events to engage our audiences.

While many of our customer events are primed to go after brand awareness, GSX is a sales conference so it is about motivation for, communication to, and celebration of Cisco’s sales force. Most importantly, I believe all our events strive to increase loyalty in their own way.

Cisco is a global brand. How do you tailor your content and events for different countries, languages and cultures?
GSX is a great example of really recognizing the power of our event format and of turning lemons into lemonade, so to speak. GSX is a two-day event that takes place live in three waves, one for each geographic region, in 105+ locations and 400+ conference rooms around the globe.

The three-wave approach puts a global stamp on the format and experience and establishes a geographic influence in the content and creative presented during each wave.

Cisco is a brand that lots of people know, but that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to sexy content. How do you go about telling Cisco’s story in a compelling way that differentiates you from your competitors?
With GSX we leverage digital engagements to help tell our stories in interesting and meaningful ways. For example for the FY12 event we created the GSX Cloud Story. This experience provided an overview of the power of the cloud and Cisco’s unique positioning in the market in regards to this technology.

This was a highly, but not overly stylized production that leveraged visuals and audibles to tell a compelling yet concise story. There was also a host of supplementary short format content that dived further into specific markets and segments.

These were shot in a frank interview style and featured Cisco executives answering questions in a transparent and purposefully non-scripted manner. Both GSX and VPS also believe in enabling two-way dialogue with their audiences so executive chats are popular.

When we combine that two-way dialogue with real time peer-to-peer conversation, moderated text-based Q&A and polling, we find opportunities to let the audience tell part of the story, which I think is sexy.

We also believe the audience should drive the content forward whenever possible and we leverage a variety of tactics, including polls, to enable the audiences to choose, for example, the vertical they wish to hear a case study at the end of a session.

Because our geographically-dispersed audience will have different topics that they want more granular details on, the core presentation will morph each time it’s presented.

Dannette Veale 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” 

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”! 

When Jon McGinley stopped by the Sparksheet booth at DX3 Canada this winter, he echoed a comment made by a more than a few speakers at the event: Social isn’t just a PR tool anymore.

And he should know. He’s the director of marketing for Radian6, a small town Canadian startup that made it big – to the tune of $326 million – when it was snapped up by cloud computing company Salesforce in 2011. Its client roster includes half the Fortune 100 companies and the White House.

Essentially, the company creates tools that allow brands to analyze content on social media sites like Twitter. So when Obama hosted a town hall meeting in the summer of 2011, Radian6 was there to track the conversations, “listen” to the questions posed on Twitter, and then provide the White House with the resulting data.

Radian6 also measures social data from its application across different sectors of a business, from R&D to investor relations to customer support.

Here’s McGinley’s take on why social media metrics are more relevant than ever, and how content marketing has helped grow Radian6’s business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you say the show has changed as well?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was there an interactive element? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Courtesy of www.ifp.org, via Flickr

Jeff Gomez turns entertainment brands into full-blown story universes. As CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, he has created multiplatform content for such intellectual properties as James Cameron’s Avatar, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean and Microsoft’s Halo.

Starlight Runner also works with companies like Coca-Cola (the Happiness Factory), Mattel (Hot Wheels) and Hasbro (Transformers) to expand consumer brands into multiplatform experiences in the form of video games, comic books, websites and TV shows.

The key to creating successful story universes, according to Gomez, is working with the strengths of each medium. Every platform adds a complementary but consistent element to a story, and in turn, enriches the audience’s experience.

Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Jeff Gomez at the StoryWorld conference in San Francisco where he delivered a highly autobiographical keynote entitled “Worldbuilding and Mythology.” We asked him about branded entertainment, the hype surrounding “gamification,” and whether there’s room for print in transmedia storytelling.

Transmedia means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. How do you explain what you do to someone who knows nothing about transmedia storytelling?

Everyone looks at transmedia through their own lens. Independent film makers may have the “bringing film into the digital age” angle whereas for others it’s franchising or adding interaction.

To me, transmedia is one or more stories that live on different screens. It’s about audience participation and the story changing with audience interaction, until that same story comes back and interacts with them in a different way.

The work you’re doing now is focused on the world of ARG [alternate reality games], but you’ve also advised brands like Ford, GE and Pepsi in your work with Undercurrent. How do these two sides of your work inform each other?

Sometimes my brand strategy work is directly informed by my gaming design. With Ford, for example, we designed the Focus Rally, which was an interactive race across the U.S. that we produced with Hulu and the producers of The Amazing Race.

They shot six competing teams in Ford Focus’ and we came up with this transmedia gaming strategy to let people at home live-stream the show, interact with the contestants driving, and influence the race. The team that had the most engaged followers won the competition.

Other times, it involves partnering our clients with indie game designers who are already doing awesome stuff. We help them make a big splash in a small community with what is probably, to a brand, a really small amount of money.

Do you think transmedia has the potential to cross-over to mainstream markets, or are you mostly catering to hardcore tech geeks?

We’re trying to figure that out. Socks, Incorporated was kind of R&D in that sense. We thought, what if we take some of the core principles of ARG and transmedia games and make them family-friendly, playable, light-hearted? Humour is a big part of our work, because we feel like it’s really lacking in the world of transmedia. So we tried that out and got a ton of research from the players.

There’s a ton of mixtures of technology that people haven’t tapped into yet, that alter physical and digital boundaries in a way that could make play happen anytime, anywhere.

Where do games fit into the free vs. paid content ecosystem? Are more people willing to pay for games than, say, newspapers and magazines?

We keep pushing our business models even further down the line. First you had to buy your Xbox game, then that was disrupted by games online that you could play for free with advertising or you would have to download the app and pay for that. Now, you can download the app for free but you have to pay to unlock additional content within the app.

I think the same thing is happening with transmedia, where the revenue models will be embedded within the story. We’re been toying with this model for the next phase of Socks, Inc., where  you can play most of the game for free but then you’re going to hit a paywall where if you want to keep playing a specific character’s mission you have to buy their badge or buy their sock puppet kit.

It’s like a FarmVille model, where you pay for an additional crop or animal that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. You don’t need it, but because you’re so engaged in the story you want to have everything.

I want to ask you about Jim Babb as a personal brand. You seem to exist in a gazillion online universes and you even created a microsite for your marriage proposal! How consciously do you manage that brand?

I think it’s important to have elements of yourself in your brand and to do things publicly. If you don’t, if you’re not doing it somewhat consciously, then what’s coming out unconsciously is probably not what you want.

Personally, as the years have gone on and my different online identities have melded into one image of myself, I find that my work benefits from being personal and transparent and vice-versa.

At StoryWorld you’ll be presenting on “The Evolution of Gaming Behaviours” along with Gabe Zicherman, Steve Peters, Dan Hon and Evan Jones. What are you guys planning to talk about?

For the longest time, we’ve been going on about the 1-9-90 rule, the notion that 1 percent of people on the internet are going to creating content for your game, 9 percent are going to be curating that content, and 90 percent are going to be passively browsing the website and then bouncing.

But things are becoming so much more interactive. Are people evolving or are games evolving? Were we not making the right kinds of games for people before?

I think the name “Evolution of Gaming Behaviours” sets us up on a really interesting topic: Are gamers changing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sparrow Hall flanked by his collaborators - Photo by Lindsey Bourke

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

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

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

What are you looking forward to most at StoryWorld?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos courtesy of Playboy

Holistic marketing is a creative approach that takes into account the entire 360-degree life cycle of a product or service, from the perspective of both client and consumer. One aspect of holistic marketing campaigns is transmedia storytelling, which employs different media and platforms to create a unified message or story. McMann calls this a “seamless brand image.”

For example, McMann created a campaign for the British Council aimed at creative professionals looking to hone their skills through mentored work placements abroad. The goal was to publicize the program and its benefits in an effort to encourage applications.

For the campaign, McMann employed a multitude of online and offline tactics including:

• a breakfast panel event. Industry leaders, past award winners, press and would-be applicants attended.
• online and print advertising
• links on various social media platforms and industry forums
• viral emails for advocates and past award winners to circulate
• press releases accompanied by interviews from past award winners

Through her efforts the program received solid press coverage, including mentions in the Guardian and several high-profile blogs. The program tripled the response rate to applications received from the previous year.

Earlier this summer, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Kathryn McMann at 140conf to get a better idea of what she does and how she does it. They also discussed different approaches to transmedia storytelling in North America, the UK, and even Brazil.

With its anachronistic topic portals (”Computing”, ”Reference Desk”, “Marketplace”), Instant Messenger service, and infamous “You’ve Got Mail!” greeting, AOL set the standard for how we communicate and consume information online.

But in the years since its heyday, AOL has struggled to keep up with the second generation of online brands.

Two years ago, former Google executive Tim Armstrong jumped to AOL’s sinking ship to become the company’s Chairman and CEO, and set out to re-brand the once-mighty Internet service provider as a content company.

Armstrong has focused on building a comprehensive roster of content brands and services to be operated under the AOL umbrella. These acquisitions include tech blog TechCrunch, video content platform 5min Media, and about.me, a site that aggregates all of a user’s online identities into one profile.

AOL’s biggest – and most prominent – acquisition took place earlier this year when it bought the Huffington Post for a reported $315 million dollars, and named the site’s namesake, Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group.

Armstrong has also set his sights on fostering hyper-local newsgathering communities. In June 2009 AOL acquired Patch.com, “a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.”

But with double-digit drops in revenue, massive layoffs, and shakeups at the executive level, many are questioning whether even the widely-respected Armstrong can keep AOL afloat.

Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Tim Armstrong in the (very noisy) backstage area at 140conf to discuss AOL’s increasing focus on original content and how the company is leveraging local communities to create some of it.

And his latest endeavor does just that.

After 10 years as an author, Godin knows who his audience or “tribe” is. He knows how they consume information and what they do with it. But for him, “none of these things are supported by the core of the current corporate publishing model.”

Frustrated by the disconnect between authors, publishers, and readers, Godin decided to break with convention and initiate his own publishing revolution.

Founded in 2010, the Domino Project is a hybrid publishing/marketing/distribution house, “powered by” Amazon, that is focused on producing high-quality works, unfettered by traditional middlemen.

The aim of the Domino Project is to make ideas “spreadable.” For Godin, his mission is to “deliver manifestos that are optimized for the tribe, for the small group that wants to grab them, inhale them and spread them.”

Instead of traditional books, the Domino Project produces “manifestos”– succinct, cogent pieces with no filler – in multiple formats, including hardcover, audiobook, limited editions, and Kindle. The idea is to capitalize on people’s ever-shrinking attention spans by producing shorter works that are easily digestible and, consequently, more shareable.

By leveraging Amazon’s limitless shelving space and global reach, the Domino Project is also able to distribute works faster and more efficiently than regular publishing.

Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Amber Rae at last month’s 140conf to discuss just how the Domino Project is turning traditional publishing on its head, and whether this model can work for anyone not named Seth Godin.

Adam Crowley @140conf - Image by bjmccray via Flickr

Hot off reaching its 10 million users milestone, Foursquare announced this week that it has jumped on the daily-deal bandwagon, expanding its Specials platform and partnering with sites such as LivingSocial and Gilt, among others.

This newest venture is just the latest move by Foursquare in its ever-expanding quest to get people away from their computer screens and into the real world.

During his sit-down with Mashable’s Adam Ostrow at last month’s 140conf, Dennis Crowley, the site’s co-founder, discussed taking Foursquare “to the next level.” One of Crowley’s main goals is to make the site’s wealth of crowd-sourced content more accessible to users who don’t necessarily want to “check in” all of the time.

The biggest change in the location-based social network over the past year, Crowley said, has been the explosion of merchants and brands that are adapting to (and banking on) the concept of checking in.

Sparksheet editor Dan Levy caught up with Dennis Crowley backstage to discuss just how Foursquare is bridging the online and offline worlds and how brands are leveraging the site’s rich user-generated content.

Ann Curry @140conf - Image by bjmccray via Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what exactly is a marketoonist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Eva Blue via Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Gilad’s blog, where he writes about everything from the Middle East to data visualization.

The Future of the Book, a mixed media installation he created for the Boston Book Festival in 2009.

Global Voices, an international community of bloggers who translate citizen media from around the world.

Disclosure: Sparksheet is published by Spafax, a WPP company.

Will the iPad and its dozens of competitors launched at CES finally get advertisers to spend money on digital? Are tablets going to save the day for revenue-starved publishers?

I get the feeling that many of the print owners who once saw tablets as a Valhalla are now a little more concerned as to whether or not this can deliver any meaningful benefit.

What remains critical is how The Times of London does with its subscription model, how Murdoch’s new initiatives like The Daily – News Corp’s new “iPad newspaper” – perform.

But in terms of the iPad, I’ve generally detected a bit more cynicism in the last few weeks – not cynicism, concern – that when it comes to developing significant revenues, things aren’t going to work out quite as people thought they would.

Tell me about the increasing importance of data in the advertising world. Is that entirely due to digital?

No, not entirely due to digital. It dates back to the old quote by John Wanamaker or Lord Leverhulme or the other 25,000 people who are claimed to have said, “I know half my advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Data was important well before the digital age. But with the advent of online media and cable and IPTV people are becoming more concerned about measurement and ROI. And the fact is that we now have the ability to measure in ways we didn’t before.

Speaking of metrics, is Groupon really worth $6 billion?

Oh, who knows? I mean somebody at the Telegraph reminded me recently that in 2008 I had sort of hinted that $15 billion was a high valuation for Facebook, so what did I think of $50 billion!?

Apparently Goldman Sachs valued it that way but you’ve got to be careful as it might not be pure equity and their valuation is 25 times their revenues! That said, it does appear from some of the information coming out that Facebook is profitable and has decent margins at low levels of revenue.

So who knows – maybe Facebook really is a money-making machine!

As for Groupon, it’s an interesting concept but it’s a coupon concept – a promotion concept. It’s very difficult to conceive of a company that started two years ago being worth $6 billion now, but who knows?

Are you still as enthusiastic about the BRIC economies as you were last year?

More so. Actually, what was really interesting in 2010 is that America bit back and traditional media bit back.

But although America will do well again, I think 2011 will see yet another rebalancing in favour of the BRICs and “the next 11.” They were the last into the recession and in the last few months India and China have surged yet again.

Dan Ariely by poptech via flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the country is changing and Brazil’s emerging middle class is reinventing the game for brands and marketers alike. According to estimates, 10.7 million Brazilians are set to hit the skies for the first time in 2011, 8.7 million of whom belong to the “emerging classes” C and D.

Brazil’s largest airline now faces the challenges of remaking its brand for these new travellers. As TAM’s Manoela Amaro explains, the company is leveraging social networking sites like Twitter and YouTube, establishing partnerships with lower-end brands such as retail chain Casas Bahia (which has made billions in profits by charging interest on instalment plan purchases), and creating ads with popular folk figures.

Brazil's Emerging Classes: Roughly 6 million people are expected to move from Class C to Class B in 2011

How have the so-called “emerging classes” changed the face of flying in Brazil?

We are in the midst of an economic boom in Brazil and the whole world is witnessing it. In the past, travelling by plane was basically for the richest people from “classes A and B”, who top the Brazilian consumer pyramid.

Nowadays, the base of the consumer pyramid is increasing with the economic growth of classes C and D. Thousands of people from these lower economic classes are now potential customers.

What are you doing to engage these new customers?

TAM’s strategy is to show that the company is accessible to all. That’s why we adopted the slogan: “You will go, and will go with TAM.” [Editor's note: The Portuguese slogan, meant to echo a popular cheer sung during Carnival, is almost impossible to translate into English].

We invited Brazilian pop singer Ivete Sangalo to be the spokesperson for our brand. We didn’t want an “elitist” person or a very popular one, but someone who could reach out to all classes.

She was on the cover of TAM Nas Nuvens inflight magazine and in several videos made for our channel on YouTube and our inflight TV. In September, we produced a big concert with Ivete at Madison Square Garden, in New York.

How are you using content to accommodate customers that have never flown before?

We launched the microsite Como Viajar [“How to Travel”] where people can learn everything about flights, especially the English terminology, which some customers might not know. The site’s “host” [the person who dispenses the flying advice] looks like a regular person, neither a sophisticated nor a popular one.

Both the check-in staff and flight crew are trained to help passengers who are travelling for the first time. We realize that flying is completely new to many customers and everything from ticket pricing to the inflight experience can be confusing.

We also recently launched a second portal called TAM Tips for all kinds of travellers, not necessarily those who have never travelled before. It’s still in beta but it will be a collaborative website linked in to the social networks that will offer tips and routes for tourists.

Tell us about your partnership with the low-end Brazilian home products store Casas Bahia. What does it say about TAM’s new brand?

This is part of our strategy for distribution. We can’t expect the passenger to come to the airport or one of our stores to buy a ticket. We have to be where they are.

We’re trying to challenge the perception that TAM is an airline focused only on executive customers and show that we are open for anyone who wants to fly. It goes hand in hand with the Ivete Sangalo slogan: “TAM is for everybody.”

Brazil has the highest rate of social networking activity in the world. How does this play into your engagement strategy?

We are living in the “truth” era. Customers always had the decision-making power in the service industry but this whole movement of social networking just makes it more evident.

Here at TAM, we have been using this to foster relationships and share our values with passengers. TAM is the Brazilian company with the largest number of followers on Twitter – more than 128,000. If you have a question and post it there, someone from our team will answer you in less than five minutes. We have a team dedicated to monitoring and replying to messages like a call centre that works 24 hours a day.

Twitter is a great way to listen to what people are saying about the brand in real time.  To engage further, we sell promotional tickets exclusively to these followers, what we call “Twitter fares.”

You produced a very popular interactive video campaign for last year’s World Cup in South Africa. How did that experience turn out?

We launched a website, Paixão por Torcer [“Passion for Cheering”], where we asked visitors to send inspirational messages with videos that would be watched by the Brazilian soccer team during their flight from Brazil to South Africa. The exterior of the TAM plane that transported the soccer players was painted with messages sent to the website, with the slogan: “We don’t take only the Brazilian team. We take all of Brazil.”

On the day we launched the video TAM had the most accessed branded YouTube channel in the world, and the video currently has more than 115,000 views.

Brazil has two very important world events scheduled: the Olympics in 2014, and the World Cup in 2016. What are your expectations for these events?

We are very excited. Brazil has much work to do in terms of infrastructure and we at TAM will have to be prepared for the demand that will come with these events. This is our goal for 2011.

SparksheetTV: As Brazil’s largest international airline, how does TAM present Brazil’s culture and brand to the world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Gannett on treating events like digital campaigns:

Ben Grossman on using content to humanize your brand:

Branded storytelling expert Michael Margolis on the power of narrative:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can humanize something in many ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How would you describe that voice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by @jeffpulver via Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by CC Chapman via flickr

What led you to Iambik?

Iambik comes out of my experience as the founder of LibriVox, a project that gets volunteers to record public domain books, and gives them away for free.

It seemed to me that some of the ideas we had at LibriVox could be applied to works that are in copyright, in a slightly different model.

With Iambik we’re clearly more concerned with producing professional-quality audiobooks, and of course we won’t be giving audiobooks away, we’ll be selling them – through our own site, and through partners such as Audible, eMusic and Overdrive.

LibriVox gave me the insight that publishing ought to happen from the web first, and grow from there, rather than have the web as a kind of add-on to a physical business.

I suspect that’s where all book publishing will go: web and digital first, with the physical incarnations of books happening only for a subset of books that, as Frank Chimero says, “deserve to be objects.”

Do you think audiobooks are getting more popular?

Yes, the top book apps in the iPhone app store are consistently audiobooks. I think that’s indicative of a change, where younger, more tech-savvy people are discovering audiobooks.

People have less time to read these days, and if they can do part of their “reading” via audio – in a convenient, cost-effective way – then I think we’ll see significant growth, or at least growth of new audiobook listeners.

Plus, the stigma that went with audiobooks is starting to fade. No one has time for stigmas any more. At least not about the formats people choose to get their “bookiness” from.

What sorts of publishers will Iambik be dealing with?

We’re talking to all sorts. We’ve started with independent literary presses because they’re really in line with our vision of publishing. Our next collection will be crime books, again with some great indie presses.

We’re also talking to the Big Six – really any publisher with good books they’d like to make into audio. We’re keen on talking to them and they seem to be interested in talking to us.

So mostly North American publishers? Do you see this project branching out internationally?

To date we’ve only worked with North American publishers, but we will be working with some UK publishers too. And eventually, we’d like to make audiobooks in every language.

You’ve described Iambik’s publishing model as very “webby”. Can you explain how you will work with publishers, authors and producers and the reasons why you’ve decided to structure yourself this way?

Well, I think we are a lot closer to the structure for many digital publishing schemes – the real difference is with traditional print publishing.

The big difference with Iambik is firstly that we’re not paying out any big advances, and second, we’re going to connect as much as possible directly with customers online.

Our hope is that narrators and publishers will want to work with us because we do a good job of finding good books to record and getting people in front of them.

Do you think dealing directly with customers online will be your advantage?

I think a publisher’s job is to connect content producers with the people who will enjoy that content, and vice versa. And so by definition, I think that publishers need to connect directly with customers. If they don’t, I believe they will have a very hard time, going forward. This is the big shift of digital.

At the same time, the existing online distribution channels do something really important: They aggregate audiences. So we will sell directly to our customers, but we’ll also spread our content through whatever distribution channels we can.

We’re starting with three distribution channels: OverDrive, eMusic, and a third one we can’t mention until it is finalized.

But I think in the digital age, producers of content need to be everywhere the people are: That goes back to the importance of connecting people and content. You go to the people and bring them your content, and hope that the people start coming to you to find your content.

In a recent article, you wrote that “thinking of eBooks as just another way to consume a book lets the publishing business ignore the terror of a totally unknown business landscape and concentrate on one that looks at least similar in structure, if not in profits and losses.” What do you think will be the real force of change in the publishing industry?

I think the real force of change will be the tension around what readers wish to do with (digital) books once they get them. In the old days, book publishers paid writers and editors and printers to make books, and then sent them off to retailers, and that was the end of it.

Publishers are trying to maintain that structure with eBooks. We make the books, send them to Amazon or Kobo, consumers pay $X for the books, and everyone is happy.

But there are two things happening. Digital means that anyone who really wants your book for free can get it for free. And digital means that consumers expect to be able to do all the things we expect out of digital goods: ship them around, chop them up, search them, annotate them, comment on them, share them.

So, on the one side, the clarity of what consumers are willing to pay for, when, and how much is up in the air. On the other side, what publishers are expected to provide or support is going to look very different than it does now.

So my answer is: It’s going to be a rough ride for book publishers in the next decade. But, what will win out in the end is what always wins out: good books that people care about. I don’t think we have to worry about those.

Photo by adactio via flickr

Do you see new media concepts like “engaging with” and “listening to” customers as fundamentally changing the customer-vendor relationship or are these just buzzwords?

I think companies are making a much more sincere and earnest effort, on the whole, to engage customers as human beings and not just as what Jerry Michalski calls “gullets with wallets and eyeballs.” Companies also don’t have much choice, since the marketplace is now filled with increasingly capable and independent customers.

Jerry first delivered that line back in the early years of the Internet boom, when companies saw the Net as a way to increase economies of scale in dealing with many customers at once. It was only natural, at the height of the Industrial Age, to do what industry had done for 150 years, which was to look for efficiencies through treating customers as populations rather than as individuals.

On the Internet, however, customers have many more ways to assert themselves. They have far greater powers of speech, of publishing, of reaching out and engaging. This fact was overlooked back in the 1990s, at great cost: Most dot-com companies went down in flames.

Today it’s clear that companies need to engage customers as individuals. The problem is that individuals don’t yet have all the tools we need, even if companies are improving their methods and language.

Now we need to work on the demand side, by equipping customers with their own tools, and not just the exclusive ones that companies give them. (For example, with loyalty programs.)

Do you think branded content can ever be useful to customers? Even in a world where customers are in control, businesses still have to get found, don’t they?

Branded anything is fine, as long as it’s backed by substance, and “branding” as a purpose does not subordinate the hard and simple work of earning a good reputation.

The problem with branding today is that it has stretched from its original purpose – making the names, symbols and unique qualities of a company familiar – to a kind of self-aggrandizement, especially at the individual level. Bloggers, for example, are being told that they should work on their “personal brand.” This is worse than silly. Be yourself and earn a reputation for doing what you do. Let companies do the branding.

Earlier this year you published a blog post called “Brands are boring,” in which you argued that we need to think of a more human way to talk about businesses. But isn’t the term “brand” just a way of conceptualizing the values of an organization? I think of Google and “Don’t be evil,” Blackberry and “privacy” or Virgin and “fun” and these seem like very human aspirations.

Maybe it will be helpful to remember that the word “brand” comes to us from the cattle industry.

It was first popularized in the early ‘30s – when radio was becoming ubiquitous – and manufacturers would fight “shelf wars” in grocery stores by putting one kind of many different packages (each a “brand”) and pounding listeners with messages about each. (It was in this age that it was first said, “If you’ve got nothing to say, sing it.”)

Lately marketers have dusted off this old term and used it to mean something much different than it did in the first place. The associative qualities you mention are what Trout and Ries many years ago called “positions.” (Their first and best book was “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.”)

Google is the non-evil company. Virgin is the fun airline. Volvo is the safe car company. We can intellectualize “branding” all we want, but its position will always be anchored in its original purpose: to burn a name into the brains of consumers.

Companies are humanized only by their people. How Google or Virgin or Volvo behave with their customers is what makes them more or less human. And it is the human beings at those companies that carry the humanization burden.

Apple always comes up in discussions like this, which is itself a problem because the company is profoundly unique: an example only of itself. Yet it’s worth mentioning that Apple is humanized by its stores and its customer service.
My iPhone and my last three Mac laptops have all had problems. In every case our local Apple store took care of things, with maximum courtesy and minimum fuss. Their “geniuses” weren’t perfect but they were human and they handled my problems well.

I think Apple’s success today owes to many things, but nothing more than personal service at those stores, and on the phone. If you want to call that “branding,” fine. But I think humanization and positioning work better. They are more human and better positioned than any other company making computers or phones.

I want to ask you about privacy, which is an important part of the VRM discussion. We want businesses to recognize our past interactions and treat us in a personalized way, but we’re also a little creeped out when it happens. So how do you see people using VRM tools to navigate that line in a way that makes us feel safe and well served?

We need our own tools for controlling the way our data and other personal information is used. Some of these tools will be technical. Others will be legal. That means we will have tools for engagement that say right up front how we want our data used and respected. We can do this without changing any laws at all – just the way we engage.

As I said in The Data Bubble, the tide began to turn with the Wall Street Journal article series titled “What They Know,” which is about how companies gather and use data about us. More and more of us are going to be creeped out by assumptions made by marketers about what we might want.

This is also part of what I believe is an advertising bubble. Our tolerance of too much advertising is like the proverbial frog, boiling slowly. The difference is that the frog dies, while we’re going to jump out. Everything has its limits, and we will discover how much advertising we’re willing to suffer, especially as more of it gets too personal.

The holy grail of advertising for many decades has been personalization. If we know enough about a person, the theory goes, we can make perfect bull’s-eye messages for them. But this goal has several problems.

The first problem is that personal advertising is kind of an oxymoron. Advertising has always been something you do for populations, not individuals, even if ads show up in searches by individuals, and advertisers are looking for individual responses.

From the individual’s side, advertising shouldn’t be any more personal than a floor tile. You don’t want the floor tile in a public bathroom to speak into your pants.

In fact, we’ve never liked personalized advertising of the old conventional sort, such as direct mail. We see our name on the envelope and then toss it anyway, most of the time.

The second problem is the belief that it’s actually possible to have perfect information about somebody. It’s not. And where it gets close it gets creepy.

The third problem is that advertising is still guesswork.

We need it, to let lots of customers know what we’ve got. But there should also be more efficient ways for supply and demand to meet and get acquainted – ways in which, for example, individual customers eliminate guesswork by telling vendors exactly what they want. VRM is one answer to that need.

Project VRM was conceived as a way to fulfill the promise of the Cluetrain Manifesto that  “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings.” Ten years after you co-authored that book, do you think the Internet and new media have made commercial relationships more or less human?

More, for sure. But we still have a long way to go. The whole last sentence there says “We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp.” This was the real promise of Cluetrain (at least in the commercial domain), and it is not yet true. Our reach as customers still does not exceed the grasp of vendors. And that’s what we’re working to make happen with VRM.

Check out Part I of out interview in which Doc explains how social networking, mobile media and open-source technology can help make business more human.

Photo by mary hodder via flickr

Let’s start with the basic question: What is VRM and why should businesses and marketers care about it?

VRM is Vendor Relationship Management. It’s the customer-side counterpart of Customer Relationship Management, meaning it’s the way customers manage their relationship with vendors. Businesses should care about it because customers will come to market with their own tools, and it’s a good thing to be ready to engage with those tools and those customers.

What role do Facebook, Twitter and other so-called social media play in VRM?

They provide ways to test or prototype some VRM activities. For example, one can put out what we call a “personal RFP” on Twitter. A couple years ago I did that at O’Hare when my family was delayed several hours by a snowstorm. I tweeted a request for pointers to a good sit-down restaurant at the airport and got a pile of helpful responses.

But we were still inside Twitter’s silo. Twitter owns and controls the means by which I issued that RFP. This is very much like it was when e-mail was owned and controlled by companies. You had to operate inside AOL’s mail, or Microsoft’s mail, or MCI’s mail. Today only one company controls all of tweeting, and that’s a problem, no matter how well Twitter behaves.

We have the same problem with Facebook. One company owns the whole show. It’s AOL 2.0. No matter how big Facebook gets, it can’t be bigger than the Web, and certainly not bigger than the Net. It’s a giant walled garden. And walled gardens are not free marketplaces. They are private ones.

Both Twitter and Facebook are close to becoming clichés as well. See Dilbert from last month, especially that first frame:

That you say “so-called social media” says a lot as well. As I’ve pointed out, social media are largely understood as marketing vehicles. Telephony, texting and blogging are no less “social” than Twitter and Facebook, but are dismissed or ignored because they have less marketing value.

VRM is social to the degree that humans are social, shopping is social, and dealing with companies in the marketplace is social. And, to the degree that “social media” – whatever they are – help, we might call them VRM tools. But VRM will never be a branch of social media or marketing, any more than any of us are branches of commercial entities.

What opportunities does the widespread adoption of mobile smartphones present for VRM?

This is the limitless sweet spot for VRM.

Humans are mobile animals. We were not built only to sit at desks and type on machines, or even to drive cars. We were built to walk and talk before we did anything else.

This is why mobile devices at their best serve as extensions of ourselves. They enlarge our abilities to deal with the world around us, with each other, and with the organizations we relate to. This especially applies to companies we do business with.

Right now we are at what I call the “too many apps” stage of doing this. Every store, every radio station, every newspaper and magazine wants to build its own app. At this early stage in the history of mobile development we need lots and lots of experimenting and prototyping, so having so many apps (where in lots of cases one would do) is fine.

But as time goes on we’re going to want fewer apps and better ways of dealing with multiple entities. For example, we’ll want one easy way to issue a personal RFP, or to store and selectively share personal data on an as-needed basis.

We won’t want our health data in five different clouds, each with its own app. We may have it in one cloud, for example, much as most of us currently have our money in one bank. But we’ll also need for that data to be portable, and the services substitutable.

Are there any businesses or services putting VRM tools into action? Anyone making money with them?

A number of companies are making VRM tools. Azigo, Kynetx and MyDex are three that come to mind. A number of open-source projects are also in the works. I’m working with students at MIT and Kings College London on my own development projects (r-button, EmanciPay and related tools). The list goes on.

It’s important to remember that not everything useful in the marketplace comes from companies or makes money. The protocols in the Internet’s suite make no money in themselves, yet support trillions of dollars in economic activity and benefits.

Look up RSS on Google and you’ll get more than two billion results. Dave Winer created RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a tool to make it easy for anybody to syndicate what they publish. He didn’t do that to make money for RSS itself, but to enlarge the publishing world as a place where many – including himself – could make money and do other good stuff.

The authors of the e-mail protocols we all take for granted (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) just wanted a simple zero-cost way to do e-mail, not to make money with it. And e-mail supports a heap of economic activity as well.

In fact both RSS and e-mail qualify as VRM tools already in use.

If you want to see which way the wind is starting to blow here, look at this tweet from Alexander Ainslie:

Blaine is one of the founders and architects of Twitter. Webfinger is a way to translate e-mail addresses to URLs. This too can be a powerful VRM tool.

You recently hosted a VRM+CRM summit, where you brought folks from both sides together to cross-pollinate. Did you find any common ground?

Well, it was a workshop, rather than a summit, and it was terrific. We had a lot of very productive dialog, and agreement about the need to engage. We also saw clearly that both sides have a long way to go.

What mattered was that both sides were moving toward meeting in an open marketplace where customers roam free and companies see more value in free customers than in captive ones.

Check out Part II of our interview in which we ask Doc about privacy, marketing buzzwords and his contention that “brands are boring.”

Photo by Joi via Flickr

You recently made a splash by announcing that Linchpin would be your final book with a conventional publisher. Is cutting out the middleman a luxury reserved for bestselling authors with established brands and strong marketing talents, or do you think this is where the publishing industry is headed?

Publishing is about taking a financial risk to bring an idea to the world, it’s not about printing. Printing is easy.

The hard part for any author going forward isn’t going to be getting shelf space (that’s infinite at Amazon). The hard part is permission to talk to people who want to hear from you and in creating ideas worth spreading.

So, either publishers are going to start building that asset or authors will.

What happens to organizations when linchpins leave? Can Zappos be Zappos without Tony Hsieh? Can Virgin exist without Richard Branson?

Great question. I think smart organizations have more than one linchpin, no?

In Linchpin, you write that “it’s damaging to put on a new face for work” and suggest people bring their personalities and emotions into their jobs. But doesn’t it get tiring to be “on brand” all the time?

It’s not tiring if your brand is you. If the emotional labour you do is from the heart, then it’s natural. If the work you do is important, it’s okay to keep doing it. Where the stress comes is when you don’t believe, or if you’re scared out of your mind.

You talk about the need to stop obsessing over perfection and simply “ship” ideas and products as soon as they’re ready. But does this ability depend on the brand’s positioning? (i.e. it may work for Google but not Apple or Mercedes who have built their reputations on the promise of perfection).

Apple? Apple ships stuff that isn’t perfect all the time. They sell to people who value “first.” I agree that Mercedes is in a different category. I think most organizations that want to grow, though, have little choice but to create a culture of innovation.

What are some sites, tools or services that you find indispensable for overcoming resistance and “shipping” what needs to get done?

I use a big watercolour pad and some markers. I don’t go to meetings. I make promises and keep them. The Shipit journal I just published to Amazon helps a bit with that.

How important a role does content play in what you’ve famously called permission marketing? Are there any brands doing a good job of providing useful, relevant content in an unobtrusive way?

Content is at the core of it. I like that Amazon knows what I like. I like that Groupon is funny. I like that my domain service only reminds me of expiring domains at the appropriate last minute…

Linchpin draws upon Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which was written a good two decades before the whole question of whether online content should be free or locked behind a paywall. Do you think media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and soon the New York Times are making a big mistake by opting out of the gift economy?

There’s no doubt it’s a huge error. The Guardian is already bigger than both, and the Times is much bigger than the Journal. Trading attention for short-term cash gain is a no-win strategy I think.

Your books contains so many airline- and hotel-related examples that you obviously spend a lot of time on the road. Can you think of an instance when a travel brand or service proved indispensable?

What is actually good about travel?

The security guys treat me like a criminal. The flight attendants yell at me. The flights are overstacked, things go wrong, promises are broken. The airport food is miserable. Sorry, but the only thing the travel and hospitality people I interact with seem obsessed with is cost reduction. They usually pander to the middle of the market and forget to treat different customers differently. Where’s the joy?

I’m ranting now. I’m sorry.

It’s so easy to get this more right than they’re getting it. So easy to hire people (and train people and reward people) to focus on delight, to keep promises, to get to the heart of why people are travelling in the first place. I know how deadening it is to deal with the crowds day in and day out, and I’m sure it wears them down, but the individual traveller finds it hard to be sympathetic.