And if you are even slightly active on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you have become a number too, at least in the eyes of a new breed of influence marketers.

Our numbers are being compiled, sorted, sliced, diced, priced, dissected, combined, and filleted in ways that help companies sell more of their stuff. If you are fortunate enough to have a number that is high, it might earn you a free gaming system, movie tickets, clothes, sports equipment, a vacation to Las Vegas or Europe.

If your number is low, you will receive nothing. By the way, everybody knows everybody else’s scores. They’re posted for the world to see.

This trend of social scoring is creating new classes of haves and have-nots, social media elites and losers, frenzied attempts to crash the upper class, and deepening resentments.

Social scoring is also the centerpiece of an extraordinary marketing movement. For the first time, companies can – with growing confidence – identify, quantify, and nurture valuable word-of-mouth influencers who can uniquely drive demand for their products.

Influence

The word influence used to be in the same “soft” category as love, hate, and interested. Now we’re beginning to measure it? Don Draper and his Mad Men would have loved that!

Every time I write a blog post on the subject of social scoring, my readers foam at the mouth. “The only thing that stops me from taking this seriously is that I trust my fellow citizens to oppose this as vehemently as I do,” one reader wrote. His passion sounded more like a political speech than the typical daily blog comment.

“Why don’t you take a stand and help STOP this!” another reader demanded. Stop it? Why would we want to, even if we could? What is so personally threatening about a simple ranking?

After all, common internet analytics programs already offer scads of data to determine the success of our online ads, websites, and blogs. It’s no secret that Facebook and Google keep running accounts of our every move, want, and desire with a cold completeness and unnerving efficiency that would shock even George Orwell.

We know it’s happening. We are rated and categorized constantly, and for the most part we resign ourselves to that fact. But there seems to be something dramatically different about this notion of social scoring that makes people spitting mad.

When the number crunchers twist and turn that data to evaluate people, look out! This powerful business trend is tapping into something visceral and emotional that I have not seen before.

From social proof to social scoring

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ are upending the traditional concept of influence. Classical models of power are being flipped around in an internet environment where nobody really knows who is who.

In our dense world of daily communication tsunamis, people yearn to find shortcuts to truth, quick reads on power, and 140-character directives to make their lives easier. The trappings of social proof implied by the number of Twitter followers or Facebook “likes” may be more important signs of accomplishment to many people than a lifetime of real achievements.

The consequences for those who seek online power and influence are vast. If you have a social media account, you are already being judged. Companies with names like Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader are in the process of scoring millions, eventually billions, of people on their level of influence.

And they’re not simply looking at the number of followers or friends you’ve amassed. They are beginning to measure online influence through extraordinarily complex algorithms tweaked daily by teams of PhD-level researchers and scientists.

They’re declaring their judgments online, too, for the entire world to see. Although being publicly rated and compared has a significant icky factor, we can’t ignore the breathtaking business opportunities.

A healthy Klout score

The new influence class

When companies such as Disney, Nike, and Microsoft are creating successful marketing efforts centered on people’s social influence scores, as a business professional, you’d better take that seriously.

In essence, these companies are leveraging an entirely new marketing channel based on widespread access to personal influence. The more success these brands have, the more swag they’ll lavish on the new influence class and the hotter the fires of indignation will rage within those left behind.

We are at the dawn of the creation of a new social media caste system determined by how and when you tweet, connect, share, and comment. The haves may score better jobs, higher social status, even better luck on the dating scene.

The rules of personal power in our world have been changed forever. And there’s no turning back. How are you going to fare?

The good news is that in this new world of social influence, even the obscure, the shy, and the overlooked can become celebrities in their slice of the online world. You no longer have to win an election, be an elite athlete, or possess movie star looks to have power.

We are entering the age of the Citizen Influencer, in which every person has a chance to get behind the velvet rope and be treated like a rock star.

This is our time. This is your time.

You too can be an Internet celebrity. You too can earn your way into the influence class.

You too can discover the power of your own return on influence. And in fact, many companies already have.

This excerpt, adapted for Sparksheet, is from Return on Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing by Mark W. Schaefer. Copyright © 2012 by McGraw-Hill. Used by permission.

For perspective, second place goes to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which earned $483 million its opening weekend in 2011. And while 3-D admission price markups help account for The Avengers’ massive margin, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

That story begins five years ago with the release of Iron Man, the first of The Avengers’ superheroes to star in a feature film. Of the six superheroes, four had starring roles in films prior to The Avengers’ release and two had sequels. All were hits at the box office

Marketers… Assemble!

So what does this mean from a marketing standpoint? First, brand recognition matters. As Disney’s head of distribution Dave Hollis explains, Marvel “established character equity that, when combined, makes one and one equal a lot more than two.”

It also helps that Kevin Feige acted as Marvel Studios’ chief producer for the entire franchise, which allowed him to create a unified brand and “storyworld” from the get go: All of the films have the same feel and share the same vision.

The range of characters makes the film appealing to a broad demographic. Image via imdb.com

And although the film is unequivocally geek-centric (I’m sure The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy wishes he could attend), as The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit explains, the range of actors makes it appealing to multiple demographics.

Bright colours attract kids, Robert Downey Jr. brings in the 40+ crowd, Samuel L. Jackson is a huge draw for African Americans, and Thor ensures all half-mortals will be lining up to experience the 3-D extravaganza.

Feige suggests in a New York Times article that the feel-good levity that writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Cabin in the Woods) brought to the film is in part responsible for its word-of-mouth success. And with overwhelmingly positive (and numerous) Twitter mentions, it’s fair to say that’s probably true.

And then there are the games and apps. Avengers Alliance has been available on Facebook since March, with 1.2 million users playing per day, helping spread the word online.

If you’d rather play a game even Tony Stark would be proud of, there’s the Super Hero Augmented Reality App for iPhone and Android advertised by Wal-Mart in partnership with Marvel, that lets players assume the role of their favourite characters (here’s looking at you, Hawkeye).

The marketing genius lies in the app’s retail details, says Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff. Wal-Mart, in partnership with Marvel, is selling over 600 Avengers-related products, and to get fans into their stores, they have erected QR codes and placards of the superheroes.

Bring the Super Hero AR app to Wal-Mart, snap a shot of the QR code and unlock more characters. Take a photo of one of the placards and the character appears in life-sized digital glory beside you, which, of course, you can send to your friends, enticing them to head to Wal-Mart for their own photo shoot.

But perhaps the most significant marketing coup goes to the humble shawarma. According to TMZ, shawarma sales skyrocketed inLos Angeles after the premier. The reason? A post-credit scene features the Avengers team noshing in a shawarma shop. How’s that for celebrity endorsement?

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

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the tourism industry has been in decline, with some calling it a “lost decade.” Roger J. Dow, President and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, wrote in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that market share for long-haul travel has fallen from 17 percent to 12 percent.

One of the central causes of that drop, he argued, was that “the supply of visas for travel to the U.S. has not kept pace with skyrocketing demand in key emerging markets.” International tourists are flooding the gates, but the gates remain closed.

Somebody must have been listening because the U.S. government has since created a non-profit tourism promotion corporation called Brand USA. The “public-private entity” is a product of the 2010 Travel Promotion Act, designed to stimulate growth in the tourism industry.

As a concept, country branding is fairly new: The Country Brand Index, for example, has only been around for 7 years. But the tangible benefits of promoting a country’s image extend well beyond travel and tourism – how a nation is perceived affects business, immigration and even politics.

And how a country is perceived isn’t as straightforward as one might think. Large population and economic clout does not necessarily translate to a better reputation (China ranks 65th on the CBI).

From cheeky catchphrases to quintessential imagery, country branding, like any branding, has a lot to do with communicating a particular message clearly and effectively.

The "Virginia is for Lovers" slogan has been in use since 1969 and generated over $800 million for the state the first year it was launched.

In the case of the U.S., Brand USA chose the tagline “Discover A Whole New America” to go along with its TV commercials.  Spearheaded by JWT, it’s a whole lotta Americana squeezed into a 1 min. spot.

As far as the U.S.’s CBI ranking – while it perched on the number one spot back in 2009 (thanks in large part to the “Obama effect”) the country has since slipped back to sixth place.

We’ll see whether the tagline and country music resonates with the masses.

A Starbucks in Lao Ximen, Shanghai. Image by bitslice cipher, via Flickr.

History suggests that foreign brands lack the local understanding to effectively target Chinese consumers online.

Companies like Google, eBay and Groupon all entered the Chinese market hoping to translate their success from the U.S., only to ultimately meet with failure in the Middle Kingdom.

Rather than try to introduce Chinese citizens to online services from the West, successful multinationals like Starbucks, Diageo and IKEA have all worked within the existing frameworks of China’s online space to engage potential customers.

By making use of local microblogging platforms, popular online video sites, and lifestyle social networks, these brands demonstrate that the real winners of online in China are not internet companies themselves.

Instead, they are brand marketers who understand where their customers spend time online, and come up with creative ways to engage them in an environment they are already comfortable with.

Starbucks: Microblogging the Chinese Way

A poster from Starbucks' 2011 Christmas campaign. Image by dcmaster, via Flickr.

In October 2011, Starbucks opened its 500th store in mainland China, with plans to reach 1500 stores in the country by 2015. To fuel its ambitious growth plans, Starbucks partnered with China’s leading mobile advertiser Guohe Ad, tapping into its local expertise for a Christmas 2011 campaign.

Guohe created a social app on the Chinese version of Twitter, called Sina Weibo, that allowed users to “check in” when they visited select Starbucks locations in China. Starbucks customers who used the app received a free drink size upgrade.

The campaign was so successful that Starbucks received 40,000 daily click-throughs to the microsite and achieved the number one ranking on the popular Chinese application platform Weico.

By partnering with a local firm that understands the marketplace for mobile and microblogging, Starbucks built up a tremendous amount of buzz among its Chinese customers.

Diageo: Chinese branded entertainment

Spirit brand Diageo is another international company that tapped into local expertise to target Chinese consumers online.

Diageo faced tough competition from Pernod Ricard, which had already established itself in China by appealing to the Chinese preference for Chivas and green tea, a popular drink at Chinese bars and karaoke clubs.

Diageo partnered with acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke to produce a series of brief documentaries entitled the Yulu Project.

The documentaries feature 12 individuals from different backgrounds who all share one thing in common: a willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve their dream.

One example is Zhou Yunpeng, a blind folk singer and poet who recounts the challenges he faces on his path to performing professionally. Xiao Peng has a different dream. He seeks to create a successful company after returning to China from his studies overseas.

The campaign tapped into the fact that, according to the 2011 Chinese Market and Media Survey (CMMS), Chinese netizens between the ages of 15 and 34 spend an average of over two hours per day watching online video.

Diageo chose not to make the video segments advertisements, but rather inspirational branded entertainment, only flashing the Johnnie Walker logo briefly at the end of each segment.

According to Diageo, the campaign generated 20 million video views over the course of eight weeks. Given the success of its first campaign, Diageo plans to run a second Yulu campaign later in 2012.

IKEA: Engaging customers on their turf

In China, marketers understand they need to have a presence on social media, but the problem is that they do not always know the best sites to invest in (the Chinese social media landscape is more fragmented than in the West, where only a few sites dominate).

Inside an Ikea in Nanshan, Shenzhen. Image by dcmaster, via Flickr.

Like Starbucks and Diageo, Sweden’s IKEA did an excellent job leveraging a Chinese social media site to engage customers. IKEA created a profile on Douban, a popular Chinese social networking site that allows users to recommend, comment on and compare their favourite books, films and music.

In September 2011 IKEA launched an event on its profile page called “The Dream Home in Films.” Users were encouraged to upload screenshots of their favourite home furnishing styles from famous films and write a description of the scenes. The most thoughtful entrants won IKEA products.

IKEA’s online campaign provided potential Chinese customers with an outlet for self-expression, giving them a positive impression of the IKEA brand in an online environment they were already familiar with.

Go local

The examples of Starbucks, Diageo and IKEA demonstrate that the true Western champions in China’s online space are not those who simply transplant and translate their existing model, but those who play within the existing frameworks of China’s internet.

Companies need to build internal local expertise or partner with domestic firms and social media sites to win the hearts and wallets of China’s 500+ million netizens.

Toronto saw an influx of digital creators last month for FITC 2012. Also held in Amsterdam, Tokyo and San Francisco, FITC (which stands for Future, Innovation, Technology and Creativity) made its way to Toronto for the 11^th year  and featured more than 70 speakers working within the digital field.

What I took away from the show was a newfound respect for the creative process and an inkling that the future of digital technology is all about humans engaging with the physical world, using all fives senses.

Fall in love with your technology

Disney's Ivan Poupyrev speaking at FITC

In his presentation “The Thing is Your Friend: Making the World Alive One Bit At A Time,” Disney research scientist Ivan Poupyrev said that it takes 10 years from the time a technology is invented to the time it is put on the market. In other words, the future is being created as we speak.

Poupyrev emphasized that his work is about building relationships between humans and technology on a personal level and less about aesthetics. His most recent project is to create “tactile feedback” by adding surface texture (like bumps or ridges) to digital screens through an electric field, allowing humans to physically connect with the technology through touch.

“You want people to care about technology – take care of it, don’t break it,” Poupyrev said. “The only way to do that is to have an emotional connection with the object.”

Be a creative rebel

Jason Theodor speaking at FITC

One of the four pillars of FITC is innovation and, as Steve Jobs said, being innovative is all about building and improving upon an existing idea. Take pancakes, for example – classic, satisfying, and delicious.

Now add tasty swirls of cinnamon sugar to turn your pancakes into makeshift cinnamon buns – innovative, very satisfying, even more delicious.

Jason Theodor is a Creative Director at Blast Radius who specializes in “creative ideation.” In his session “Create More, Better, Different,” Theodor suggested that “it’s not how creative you are, it’s how you are creative,” meaning that in order to be innovative, one must be defiant, think outside the box and focus on the creative process rather than the final product.

So go ahead and create your own crazy-flavoured pancake. Be what Theodor calls a “creative rebel.”

Driving a car with your hands and feet is so 2010.

In a session called “Back to the Good Old Tangible World,” Riccardo Giraldi, Creative Director at B-Reel London, talked about the need to create technology where users can engage all five of their senses.

For example, B-Reel teamed up with ad agency 180 Los Angeles and Mitsubishi to create Mitsubishi: Live Drive. Users can log onto a microsite and remotely test-drive a vehicle from their home computers.

Giraldi explained that the project combines state-of-the art GPS and robotics technology, allowing the “driver” to steer the car in real-time while watching the live-streaming view out the windshield from their live-drive course in Southern California.

The idea, according to Giraldi, is to immerse people in a “virtual reality” (remember that?). This was emphasized by Giraldi through a project that B-Reel worked on using the Arduino board, Scalextric slot cars and a Mindwave headset that allow users to use their brain waves to power a slot car set.

Basically, a code is set up that lets the Arduino board connect to the computer, which is then connected to the Mindwave headset. The code lets the board tap into readings from the headset, which allows the user to control the car with their mind.

Ten years from now, we may be able to drive cars just by the thinking it. Let’s hope they spend another 10 years perfecting the safety features.

Like most events, FITC was a great source of inspiration and one piece of advice that stuck with me came from Ivan Poupyrev: If you don’t feel that tingly feeling in the pit of your stomach that makes you excited about an idea, it probably won’t work.

Not only did I meet a lot of knowledgeable people at FITC, but it also left me inspired to create in new and innovative ways.

Did we mention we were nominated?

The National Magazine Awards Foundation is a not for profit institution that celebrates excellence in Canadian digital and print publications.

This year Sparksheet received a nomination in the category of Best Digital Design. We’re up against digital heavyweights like The Walrus, Fashion Magazine, and Toronto Life, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Last year we won Silver in the same category. Can we best ourselves? We’ll find out on June 7 when the winners are announced in Toronto.

In the meantime, thanks to all our loyal readers and supporters. We couldn’t do it without you. Congratulations and good luck to all the other nominees!

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

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

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

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

“Creative thinking is commercial thinking”

Cindy Gallop

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

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

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

Andrew Davis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reanna Evoy

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

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

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

Helen Klein Ross

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

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

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

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

Frederic Bohbot

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

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

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

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

Jay Vidyarthi

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

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

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

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

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

Ron Tite

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

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

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

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

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

But more than 200 journalists, scholars, and media executives congregated at the University of Texas at Austin from April 20 to 21 to share ideas about the future of web journalism.

Yes, the event lacked the fanfare of SXSW Interactive, and yes it had its share of sobering messages (newsflash: journalism is in turmoil!), but for those who attended there was plenty to blog about (and some of it optimistically).

The IOSJ took place in the auditorium at the Blanton Museum of Art on The University of Texas at Austin campus. Image by Georgia Popplewell, via Flickr.

The Nieman Journalism Lab’s post-event coverage included themes familiar to Sparksheet, like design, mobile and social media.

ISOJ’s all-star data panel made clear there’s a distinction between art and data that sometimes gets blurred at the expense of user experience. Pretty graphics must provide context and useful information to be journalism.

A more extensive takeaway roundup came from ISOJ co-organizer Amy Schmitz Weiss. For Weiss, the event’s most important panels focused on user-friendly content, monetization strategies, social networking and training.

As [Google’s Richard] Gingras mentioned, it’s time for media companies to recognize their prize possession – their valuable content and how they can maximize its use beyond just publishing it and presenting it once on the website.

A recurring and much blogged symposium highlight was Los Angeles Times’ Ben Welsh’s presentation on “creating ‘robots’ in a journalist’s image,” or, using automated scripts for the same reason that mathematicians (I assume) use calculators: so they can spend more time problem solving and less time taking jobs away from computers.

We’ve all heard it before: design without content is meaningless and content without design is impenetrable. Raju Narisetti, The Wall Street Journal’s deputy managing editor, made this point in his presentation with the caveat that people will only be willing to pay for news in the future if it’s packaged in the right way. That is, if content is turned into an experience.

Monetization was a recurring conference theme. Image by Jon Lebkowsky, via Flickr.

Pedro Doria, digital platforms editor at Brazil’s O Globo discussed (and demonstrated) the power of tailoring digital content to users’ preferences with the creation of the “evening edition” (a Mais), a daily update for tablet readers that takes into account the more relaxed “lean-back” approach to nighttime reading.

The results? Average time spent per day on the O Globo app jumped from 26 minutes to 77 minutes. Now, what was Narisetti saying about experiential content worth paying for?

Don’t have enough time to chew through all the live (or post) blogging verbiage? The #isoj hashtag delivered snackable bits of content all weekend, with plenty of links to pictures and videos.

Human-assisted reporting, mass intelligence, and mobile mobile mobile: What we learned at #ISOJ nie.mn/JULz5u #ISOJ12

— Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) April 24, 2012

#ISOJ research journal on online journalism available via Kindle, Nook, and print bit.ly/IaEgWU #ISOJ12 — Rosental(@Rosental) April 23, 2012

— Alberto Cairo (@albertocairo) April 21, 2012

Look, I’m not saying we can save journalism with a giant carwash fundraiser, but are we not even going to DISCUSS the idea!? #isoj12 #isoj
— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) April 21, 2012

SXSW Interactive it wasn’t, but without the 24-hour party atmosphere and pervasive question: “Yeah, but how can we make money?” the ISOJ was afforded a robust and focused atmosphere instead, with everyone’s energy focused on the content. Who says journalism is dying?

The Savoy after renovations in 2010. Image via weareprivate.net

When Duran Duran released its lush, ten-minute comeback video “Girl Panic!” in November, the real star wasn’t the band or the five 1990s supermodels (Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigová and Yasmin Le Bon) who played the roles of the vintage new-wave rockers, but a sixth show-stealing beauty: London’s Savoy hotel.

In the part-mockumentary, part-music video created by director Jonas Åkerlund (whose previous musical mini-movie, the sexy, stylized Lady Gaga-Beyoncé collaboration “Telephone,” has nearly 136 million YouTube views), the pedigreed models wake up in an elegantly appointed (but slightly trashed) suite, seduce female groupies outside the hotel’s iconic entrance, rock out in the ballroom and have to be wheeled back to their room in a bellman’s cart.

To the public, the video is pure eye candy. To hospitality industry insiders, it’s a stroke of marketing genius.

Hotel with as character

“Girl Panic!” is just one example of the emerging trend of hotels appearing as “characters” in short, subtly branded films. As TiVo and Netflix make the 30-second ad spot a thing of the past, such co-pro “advertainment” is quickly filling in the gap.

For the Savoy, that meant a handshake agreement with the filmmaker in which the hotel offered to host the 300-member crew for a whirlwind 48-hour shoot; the payoff was a priceless piece of publicity that will live online forever.

The Savoy, managed by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, reopened its doors in 2010 following a three-year, 220-million-pound renovation. In Europe, the 10.10.10 launch didn’t just make the newspaper travel sections, it made the front pages.

The historic hotel on the Thames is the stuff of legend, the place where Oscar Wilde carried out the affair for which he was later tried, where a young Princess Elizabeth first appeared in public with suitor Prince Philip, where Maria Callas performed an impromptu concert in the ballroom and where Bob Dylan stayed while filming “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in an adjacent alley.

For more than a century, celebrities have danced and drunk and sometimes behaved badly under the Savoy’s sparkling chandeliers and behind its heavy chintz draperies. It was the first hotel in London where women could dine in public – and later smoke. But rather than sweeping its vices under the rug, the Savoy readily embraces them.

“Not many hotels would have done this,” says Savoy director of communications Brett Perkins. “But the Savoy is a sexy hotel. It’s often said that we’ve done events for royalty and rock royalty.”

Luxury hotel brands with historic properties in their portfolios like to speak of “hotels as destinations” whose storied personalities beckon visitors as much as their locations.

With this music video, the Savoy played its character – regal, with an edge – to perfection. Aside from showcasing the interiors, brand recognition was facilitated by a lengthy establishing shot of the hotel entrance and signage, as well as a title screen indicating that the video was “Shot at the Savoy hotel, London, 6th of June 2011.”

The publicity didn’t end with the video release. The world premiere at the Harper’s Bazaar UK Women of the Year awards ceremony was followed by a cover and 22-page shoot in the magazine with hands-on styling by Dolce & Gabbana.

The result? More than 5.3 million YouTube views and, according to Perkins, countless phone-in requests from guests, media and event planners to use the spaces seen in the film.

The next generation

Luxury Collection by Starwood Hotels and Resorts, the elite tier of the company that runs Sheraton and W Hotels, among other brands, took a slightly different approach to its foray into filmmaking.

Here is a short film conceived by Indo-American actor Waris Ahluwalia (along with friends actress Tilda Swinton and artist Sandro Kopp) after he became the Luxury Collection’s brand ambassador.

This time the film was created solely for use by the hotel group and has its own branded microsite. Ahluwalia has said the concept was inspired by the brand’s slogan, “Life Is a Collection of Experiences. Let Us Be Your Guide.”

In the 15-minute short released in January 2012, we find another supermodel, this time England’s Agyness Deyn. Styled like a Hitchcock classic of the 1960s (all tailored clothing and Technicolor palette), the story follows the platinum-blonde heroine as she’s led by a series of clues on an elaborate scavenger hunt to three of the brand’s most illustrious American properties, the Equinox in Vermont, the Phoenician in Arizona and the Royal Hawaiian on the island of Oahu.

Deyn navigates through the most spectacular aspects of the properties: the Equinox’s British School of Falconry and its bucolic lakeside setting; the Phoenician’s enormous mother-of-pearl pool and vistas of the pink Camelback Mountain; the Royal Hawaiian’s Royal Beach Tower and its lush tropical grounds.

Actor Agyness Deyn at Equinox’s British School of Falconry. Image by Alessio Bolzoni.

Ahluwalia describes the hotels as characters in the film. “I picked three properties that seemed intriguing, that seemed to tell a story, that seemed to cover the landscape,” he says in the film’s behind-the-scenes video.

Behind the scenes is also where we find other big names: actor-musician Jason Schwartzman created the score; celebrity costume designer Heidi Bivens styled the wardrobe, including dresses by Versace and Yigal Azrouël and jewellery by Ahluwalia’s own line, House of Waris.

Luxury Collection created advance buzz by allowing Starwood Preferred Guests to bid on a chance to see the exclusive premiere and stay at the Chatwal, a Luxury Collection hotel in New York.

Fashion and luxury-brand writers then blogged and tweeted the 31-second trailer ahead of the film release. (Starwood wouldn’t release the number of hits received on its microsite but the video on YouTube has just under 200,000 views).

The result has been increased brand awareness for Starwood’s top-shelf properties, and engagement with the next generation of luxury hotel guests. As Melanie Brandman, founder of the New York-based high-end travel PR firm, the Brandman Agency, told Luxury Daily, “I believe their vision was to showcase these properties in a narrative way that would entice prospective guests to visit and build a new audience – younger, savvier, more artistically inclined – that may have not considered these properties before.”

With most new luxury hotel openings focused on ultra-modern interiors and amenities, these competing historic properties have upped the ante by drawing on their cultural cachet. Through these videos, hotels that once hosted Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly are showing a new generation that they’re also the choice of the glitterati of today.

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

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

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

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

Miranda Mulligan with NPR's David Wright at SXSW 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BostonGlobe.com's responsive web design

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

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

The Globe has been publishing web-first for five or so years now. The newsroom cultural transition happened well before my time in Boston, as I have been with the Globe for a little over a year and a half.

Jeffrey Zeldman once told us: “Content informs design; design without content is decoration.” How would you characterize the relationship between content and design in the editorial world?

Well, I am not sure anything is different in the editorial world, per se, though I have been known to liken the relationship of design and content – as well as the relationship of visual design and development – to the popular sand ceremony often performed during weddings.

In this ceremony, a couple pours various colours of sand into a vessel symbolizing their union. Like the grains of sand, once combined the relationship between content, design and development is very difficult to separate.

By now, I would hope that we have all learned that designing in a vacuum is a big “no-no” and design systems defined without real content tend to fall flat.

There was lots of talk at SXSW about designers playing leadership roles in newsrooms, acting as bridges between silos and departments. I believe you used the term “power brokers” during your talk. How do you see your role as a designer within your organization?

The work of the web designer goes well beyond pixel-pushing beautification and rare is the project that has no need for a designer. At one point or another, nearly all departments cross paths with the design team in order to execute a project, and the most successful ones engage the designer from concept to completion.

Therefore, a designer is uniquely positioned to be one of the most informed people in an organization, knowing most of the idiosyncrasies of all the moving parts. As an aside, this is also the reason that I think web designers make really powerful product managers and project managers.

Newspaper websites have been around long enough that certain design elements and practices have almost become cliché (as your co-presenter David Wright put it, “We’re passing around these coding and UX habits like a dirty needle”). What are some common editorial design tropes that need to be purged?

Oh wow, where to start?! Dave and I both like to talk about how many design decisions get made following the determination of advertising positions.  Occasionally we bemoan that, as an industry, we refer to these positions as “requirements.” This, like in the “above the fold” question, is something we inherited from print.

On top of that, since the industry also needed a system that could be standardized for advertising networks, we created a design pattern that includes “the right rail” and “banner-blindness” problems. We cheapened our own products.

In terms of designing stories, specifically, editorial web designers depend far too heavily on software (i.e. Flash). Learning to write real code is not magic, it’s just hard work.

Also, I feel strongly that web design needs more editorial designers, especially in key positions at medium- to large-scale publishers. The best editorial designers are good at enhancing, often deepening, readers’ understanding of stories and published content.

Thanks to decades of establishing best practices and relationships with writers and editors, their strength is in the additional value added to content when the written word and visual design are skillfully and strategically combined.

More on The Sparkbeat: Miranda Mulligan explains how BostonGlobe.com’s cutting-edge responsive design affects the newsroom. 

Responsive web design is close to our hearts at Sparksheet. Since last summer our own website has been 100% responsive, meaning that it adapts to whatever screen or device you consume it on.

The beauty of responsive design is that publishers don’t have to design from scratch every time a new gadget or operating system comes out, saving time and money. It also means that content consumers are treated to the optimal experience, whether they’re on the train or in their living rooms.

The Boston Globe introduced their responsively-designed website last fall. The site contrasts sharply with the old Boston.com site, which used to serve as the Globe’s primary web destination. Earlier this month the Society for News Design named BostonGlobe.com the “World’s Best Designed” news website:

The Globe’s responsive design is remarkable and deserves to be noted as one of the key moments in media design history, akin to USA Today’s embrace of color and graphics. Its impact will affect a generation of digital journalists and is an example of what’s possible when smart design and rich content is balanced with a focus on being standards compliant and future-friendly across all platforms.

In an in-depth Q&A with Miranda Mulligan, The Boston Globe’s Digital Design Director, Sparksheet asked Mulligan how the site’s responsive framework affected the editorial and design process at the paper. Here’s what she told us:

The single biggest challenge is the necessary culture shift for the entire digital business. From the developers, to the designers, to the editors and content creators, to the business-money-making side, everyone has to change their thinking and process. And well, change is hard. Here are some of the challenges that profoundly impact editorial:

• Designing and building interactive information graphics and practising data visualization storytelling relies on a significant change in the design and development process.Traditionally, most newsrooms have relied heavily on Flash to execute interactive stories and data visualizations. Since Apple’s iOS and Flash do not play together nicely, finding another way to tell these stories is paramount. Also, designing interactives and data visualizations for mobile has, by and large, been an afterthought. Now, designing for mobile must be the first thought.Also, this design process relies heavily on rapidly prototyping and creating the visual design within the browser. The process is smoothest when the experience has been designed and coded using mobile-first techniques, and then designing and enhancing for wider, more fully featured browsers. It seems awkward at first, but gets more and more conformable with practice.
• One significant upside for content producers and site editors: Character counts in headlines become less of an issue because there is no way to know the exact (to the pixel) location it will be on the page for the user. Letting go of pixel-perfection is quite freeing.
• Most modern news websites rely heavily on third-party relationships: i.e. advertising networks, a video management and serving relationship, events and calendaring solutions, games, obits, etc. However, the code served from these vendors will most likely not play nicely on a flexible grid unless it has been specifically written to do so.
• Flash movies/games will not play on iOS devices. There are a variety of techniques around handling and crafting experiences with this type of content. However they all involve some significant hands-on haranguing.

It’s the first part of that sentence that counts.

Carr’s observation appeared in his article documenting the trial and tribulations of Apple and five major publishing houses. Simon & Shuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan and Penguin have been charged by the Department of Justice for price collusion in an attempt to loosen Amazon’s stranglehold on the e-book market.

According to the allegations, back in 2010 Apple and the five publishers worked out a deal behind closed doors to fix e-book prices and adopt the agency-model. The publishers arranged to sell their books through Apple’s iBookstore for $12.99-$14.99 (versus Amazon’s bargain price of $9.99).

In contrast to the wholesale model, where retailers (i.e. Amazon) determine the value of e-books, the agency model allows publishers to set the price and the retailer (i.e. Apple) takes a 30 percent cut of the earnings. So far, three of the five publishers have settled, leaving Apple, Macmillan and Penguin to defend in court.

Image via socialmediachimps.com

This is where Carr’s throwaway line gains significance. It’s no secret that the industry is struggling to cope with technological drift: People just don’t buy books in print like they used to. Instead, as a 2011 report indicates, the future of publishing lies in e-books, while print sales are at best flat lining and at worst, dropping.

And that’s what makes this case so important. The competing business models (wholesale versus agency) will directly impact the nascent (but growing) industry.

Image via socialmediachimps.com

Mark Coker of Smashwords, an indie e-book publishing and distribution company, argues that while conspiracy is never a good thing, the agency-model is far superior because it gives the smaller fish a chance to compete with the big ones.

When retailers set the price, not only does it kill competition, but authors and publishers don’t see the same profit margins. It boxes out the competition and may even lead to higher prices for consumers in the long run.

Coker also contends that the conditions of the settlement are especially burdensome because at the very moment when publishers should be given the flexibility and nimbleness to react to technological change, they’re being forced to spend money complying with monitoring requirements that will slow them down: They’re being legally mandated to stay dinosaurs when what they need is to evolve.

Image via socialmediachimps.com

While this particular chapter may have come to a close, expect the saga to continue as Penguin, Macmillan and Apple do their battle in court. In the meantime, check out the Justice Department’s Competitive Impact Statement for a more technical version of the case. If you rather know how this will affect e-book pricing as a consumer, check out Paid Content’s predictions.

What do you think, is the lawsuit killing the publishing industry? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter.

Revelers enjoying the party, Epa Rei. Image by Renata Acioli

“Quem não chora não mama! Segura, meu bem, a chupeta. Lugar quente é na cama. Ou então no Bola Preta” (If the baby doesn’t cry, he doesn’t get his pacifier).

The chorus of the classic samba song, written by Nelson Barbosa and Vicente Paiva, belongs to Rio’s most popular Carnival parade, Cordão do Bola Preta.

Originating in 1918, Bola Preta is an important part of Rio’s heritage and remains steeped in the region’s folk culture. The event also draws huge crowds. This year alone 2.3 million people attended, making it an enticing event for brands and marketers.

Besides Bola Preta, most of the city’s biggest parades, such as Monobloco, Empolga às 9 and Simpatia é quase amor, receive sponsorship from brands.

This year, beer brand Antarctica, in partnership with the bank Itaú and the marketing agency Dream Factory, sponsored all 485 of Rio’s Carnival parades. The Rio Times estimates that Carnival generates revenues of R$1.45 billion in Rio alone.

Carnival unbranded

Renata Correa dancing at the Bola Preta. Image by Raphael Crespo.

But branding and revenue only tell part of the story. Several smaller parades organized by young people across the country have emerged in response to the commercialization of Carnival. The focus of these parades isn’t brand appeal, but Carnival-inspired spontaneity and creativity.

Filmmaker Roberto Souza Leão is one of the organizers, though he doesn’t work alone. One of the essences of Carnival is its artistic collaboration, which means that Leão’s group, which he formed with his friends, collaborates on everything, from costumes to band rehearsals.

“We don’t have any pretension of transforming the parades into a business. This is the place and moment where we can have fun with our friends,” says Leão. “One of the requirements to join the group is to love the Carnival party.”

Carnival lovers

From 2005 to 2008, the group organized a boat parade called Se melhorar, afunda (Literally, “If it improves, it sinks”). The parade was held on a barge, which floated revelers from the nearby city of Niterói to Rio.

The event was a huge success but soon after it became famous, the organizers decided to jump ship.

Leão explained that with popularity comes commercialization, resulting in a loss of the sense of play and spontaneity that made it popular in the first place. By repeating the same parade year after year, it becomes a brand “and we don’t want it to,” says Leão.

Like many other Brazilians, Leão’s group opposes the commercialization of Carnival. “In Rio, it’s increasingly difficult to play in a parade. We need to register, to schedule a start and end time, and we’re given a designated place to perform,” he says. “It’s losing what we consider the most beautiful part of the party – the sense of spontaneity and the free celebration.”

The “O Centrão vai virar mar” party. Image by Pedro Esteban.

To maintain this sense of spontaneity and freedom, Leão’s group decided to adopt different themes for each year. After Se melhorar, afunda they organized Exalta Rei (“Glorify the King”), in honour of singer Roberto Carlos (known in Brazil as the King of Jovem Guarda music).

Given the group’s stance on brand endorsements, it should come as no surprise that they have also organized a protest against the commercialization of Rio’s Carnival in the form of another carnival party, aptly named “Êpa Rei” (“Oops, King”).

“Our generation discovered that we can ‘Carnavalizar’ (literally, “transform into Carnival”) different rhythms. The gist is this: leave home in costume, meet your friends, and play,” says Leão. “Each parade needs to be a unique experience.”

Saying no to social

Although Brazilian brands are increasingly looking to the web to spread their content, the focus of these non-commercial parades isn’t to engage people through social media – everything is still word of mouth.

“We don’t have to spread the word too much,” says Leão. We never divulge the date and time. And even when only using word of mouth, we begin with 15 people and end up with thousands.”

This year, the group adopted the theme Baianada, an expression used to honour the state of Bahia’s unique musical culture. During the parade, more than 100 participants entered Santos Dumont Airport – the second largest in Rio – where they danced and sang different Carnival songs.

Baianada playing in the Santos Dumont Airport. Image by Pedro Esteban

“We did it in a very spontaneous, funny and cheerful way, playing in a public space but respecting people and the airport infrastructure,” said Leão. “In fact, I would like to congratulate people from the airport because they understood the joke.”

Carnival is a unique celebration that brings people from all backgrounds together to revel in music and fantasy. It can be organized through social networks, take place at big venues or on the streets.

It can be funded by brands using digital and traditional ad campaigns or it can be organized independently, by people who want to wear funny costumes, meet friends, and follow the sound of the tambourines around the corner and be free.

Image by Michelle B., via Flickr.

For some years I have been banging on about how thought leadership is the new sales Trojan Horse – the way to equip sales teams with the game-changing insights they need to differentiate them from their competitors.

Then two weeks ago I came across a wonderfully evocative phrase: “Content is digital bait.”

It appeared in WPP’s Atticus volume 17 as a summary of The Future of Selling white paper produced by OgilvyOne Worldwide and Ogilvy & Mather. The paper delivers a telling insight into how the world of selling has changed, and how it’s all about providing useful, insightful content that shows we understand our customers.

From consumer to ‘contsumer’

The selling game has changed irreversibly. The sheer weight of information available to buyers these days means the buyer is in control. They are less reliant on sales people and they build trust in the brand long before they come into physical contact with it.

I call them ‘contsumers’ (though others have called then “prosumers”). ‘Contsumers’ seek out as much information as possible to help inform their decisions.

And given the amount of information available online (brand websites, review sites, aggregators) they have as much control over the flow of information as salespeople.

Contsumers have conversations with brands via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs – not to mention other consumers – creating their own path to purchase. Salespeople need to identify where the customer is on this journey of discovery and help them by delivering insightful content on whatever platform they want to consume it.

Useful content vs. thought leading content

There is a distinction between useful content and thought leading content. Hints and tips about health and wellbeing, insurance, savings and retirement, the pitfalls of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, for example, fall into the useful content bucket.

Thought leading content is not peddling an opinion, putting out a list of hints and tips, nor curating other people’s content. Instead it is offering a new, fresh perspective, preferably one based on empirical evidence that delivers value beyond the product or service.

Image by Ogilvy

Thought leadership and sales

For brands to lift their content from useful to thought leading content, marketing and communications departments need to be working with their sales teams.

The better understanding a brand’s marketing team has of the day-to-day challenges their sales team faces and the questions customers are asking them, the better their thought leading content will be.

As the Ogilvy paper says, “Selling may have once been an individual event, but now it is a team sport.”

Successful selling has always been about the customer and that should never change. But tomorrow’s successful salesperson is the one who anticipates their customers’ changing behaviour, analyzes their needs and finds ways to solve their problems.

This goes to the very crux of what thought leadership content should provide to a brand’s audiences: Information that delivers insights to help solve a problem or view their challenges in a different light, all the while positioning your brand as the “go-to” expert.

Selling has changed irrevocably

The “Future of Selling” paper saw Ogilvy research more than 1,000 sales professionals in the U.K., U.S., Brazil and China. One of the key findings was that 73 percent of those surveyed said that selling will be radically different in the next five years.

The key difference? Information asymmetry – in other words, the number of online channels and information a brand owns, allowing it to gain a head start on competitors.

Brands not driving new content or demonstrating thought leadership will come second.

In his book, Lehrer uses Glaser’s obsessive dedication to detail (which he learned from his mentor, Giorgio Morandi), “his ability to stick with a problem until it surrenders,” to remind us that creativity isn’t always about epiphanies. A lot of the time it’s about hard work.

Lehrer illustrates this point with the story of the creative process behind Glaser’s I ♥ NY ad campaign. Even though an initial design had already been approved, Glaser couldn’t give up on it. Finally, after weeks spent ruminating, he came up with the iconic design while scribbling on a scrap of paper in the back of a cab.

The moral of the story? Success ♥ Persistence. Or, as Lehrer calls it, grit.

Below is a selection of some of his work to jumpstart your own creative impulses.

Milton Glaser and Clay Felker founded New York Magazine in 1968

You should look at every problem and think, “What can I learn by doing this?” And if you think you can learn nothing, forget about doing it.

Glaser designed the "B" to resemble the Brooklyn Dodgers' logo to give the brewery a sense of history

My definition of design is this: it is going from an existing position to a preferred one. It’s everything.

Milton has designed the cover art for all artists on the Tomato Records label, including Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong

Failure and ambiguity are hard concepts to sell to a client who just wants to sell more cans of tomatoes.

Glaser designed this Bob Dylan poster in 1966, which became one of the most widely distributed posters of all time

The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire and persistence.

Glaser modified his design after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The black smudge represents the location of the World Trade Center on Manhattan island

There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.

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.

This surpasses both The Twilight Saga: New Moon as well as Spider-Man 3, making this the third-highest grossing premier weekend of all time. This shattered any predictions made by experts, and it left many wondering: How did they do it?

The answer, of course, lies in the marketing strategy.

The Hunger Games was made to be marketed

The mockingjay pin logo

The Hunger Games’ success can teach marketers about the importance of having a solid product. This is the reason that the book had such a large following in the first place. First, the story had an amazing logo. The mockingjay pin was used on the cover of the novel and become key to the branding of the film. In the novel, the pin stood for courage and spirit. Lionsgate knew what the logo meant to fans of the novel, and put it in every trailer, poster and ad.

Second, the novel puts a heavy emphasis on partnerships. Spoiler Alert: Although only one person was supposed to win the games, two came out victorious. The novel is full of instances where one person could not have survived without the other, and this is something that can transfer over into the marketing world.

Having partnerships with other companies can strengthen your brand. Although you may not want to sync up with your competition, working with a complementary brand could help bring you a new audience.

Actors Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth

Marketing the movie

Aside from what the novel brought to the table, the film’s producers were able to create a few little marketing tricks of their own. Word-of-mouth became very important for those charged with marketing the film.
The film had different social media accounts for the different “districts,” or groups of people, that were described in the novel. If you wanted to see what one district thought about something in the news, all you had to do was head over to that district’s Twitter account.

Tributes: We welcome you. We salute your courage – and your sacrifice…

— The Capitol (@TheCapitolPN) March 28, 2012

PANEM ALERT: The Hunger Games Adventures are now open for all of Panem. Visit bit.ly/PlayTHGAdventu… & start exploring Panem today.

— The Capitol (@TheCapitolPN) March 30, 2012

Marketers also created social media quizzes that let fans find out which district he or she would live in if they were in The Hunger Games’ story world. Once again, bringing the story to life really worked. There was an element of interaction to this marketing tactic, and teens everywhere couldn’t seem to get enough (In case you were wondering, I would have lived in District 8).

Most importantly, the social accounts never gave away any scenes from the film. The integrity (and suspense) of the story was preserved.

If you were to read the novel, you would likely find many more marketing lessons that relate directly to your business. Unfortunately, you will likely be too wrapped up in the story to really
pay attention.

In the 1997 satire Wag the Dog, government officials hire a Hollywood producer to help cover up a scandal. Image via imdb.com

If you’re not in the public relations industry, it’s likely your perception of PR professionals is that we plan parties, coerce journalists, and lie for a living.

And, really, there is no reason you’d think any differently. From Wag the Dog and Phone Booth to Lizzie Gruman and Kim Kardashian, popular culture’s portrayal of PR pros is all of the above.

That’s part of the reason the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) recently took on the initiative to redefine the industry.

But when the New York Times reported the new definition, they described the initiative like this: “People submitted 927 proposals in an effort to update the definition of public relations for an age of social media and spin doctors.”

All that effort to still be called spin doctors.

The old definition of PR

The last time the PR industry defined itself was in 1982:

Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.

While it doesn’t say much, it’s what the industry used for 30 years. PR was all about organizations and their audiences working together.

Then Al Gore invented the Internet and social media turned everything on its head. The industry was left trying to figure out how it was going to help organizations work with their audiences through paid, owned, and earned media.

The industry suddenly went from “publics adapting mutually to each other” to trying to figure out where social media, owned media and other forms of digital storytelling fit into the model.

As an industry we’re accustomed to telling stories. Now we do it online as well. And the old definition of PR no longer fits.

PR’s new definition

This past November PRSA took on the gigantic task of changing the definition. Embracing the new digital tools that had changed everything for the industry, the organization decided to crowdsource the new definition using a social platform to gain insight, feedback, and votes.

But the process they came up with was like Mad Libs for the PR profession. Rather than inviting people to submit their own definitions, they asked people to fill in the blanks:

Public relations [DOES WHAT] with/for [WHOM] to [DO WHAT] for [WHAT PURPOSE.]

I can imagine sorting through hundreds of unique definitions, agreeing on the top 5 or 10, and putting those to a vote would have been an impossible task.

So I understand why they did it that way. But the system was flawed. Instead of fostering a discussion about what public relations does for an organization, it led to a definition that was easy to assemble from hundreds of responses.

The new definition was announced in the same New York Times article that called us spin doctors:

Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.

Say what? Can we possibly have any more corporate lingo bingo in one sentence? Does this help you understand what the industry does? Does it remove the perception that we’re party planners or spin doctors?

The cast from Kim Kardashian

Where does PR go from here?

The PR industry has a perception issue. The “modern” definition doesn’t help the cause. Where are the results?

Becoming a PR professional has an extremely low barrier to entry. There isn’t an industry-wide discussion about how to measure our efforts. There isn’t a regulatory body that ensures the practice is done ethically and soundly. Even large, well-known PR firms are skirting the ethics edge to include big brand names on their roster.

The fight for where social media belongs is still on (perhaps it belongs to all of us, and not one industry). The perception of the PR industry still is one of liars and snake oil salesmen. Spin continues to suck.

But we have a new definition.

Harry Phillips' printing press, c1910; image by Blue Mountains Library via Flickr

Flashback to 2003. Had anyone told me – a rookie reporter covering the foreign affairs and international news beats at one of Sofia’s biggest newspapers – that brands of the future would become publishers in their own right and that I would be working for one of them, I would have dismissed the idea as sheer lunacy.

Journalists had the exclusive privilege of gathering, filtering and analysing information, and presenting it to a readership of passive media consumers in an easy-to-digest format. And I was revelling in the notion that I was working for the public good.

Flash forward to the present. Content marketing is the buzzword of the year and empowered businesses are pumping out editorial content in a race to spread their messages and reach an increasingly active community of online users.

For many traditional newsrooms, meanwhile, digitization appears to have spelled little more than doom and gloom – squeezed advertising margins, dwindling circulations, editorial layoffs.

As for me, I’ve joined the fast-growing ranks of “brand journalists,” media practitioners producing, curating, editing and disseminating content on behalf of a business. The “novice journalist” me of eight years ago would have screamed in horror.

Seeking to find out what it means, exactly, to be a journalist in this ever-changing digital ecosystem, I embarked on a postgraduate research journey last year. Below is a summary of my most prominent findings. As it turns out, the notion of brand journalism isn’t so horrifying after all.

The Guardian has adopted a "digital first" strategy

The rise of the dynamic brand

In my research I compared marketing software company HubSpot with British newspaper of record the Guardian. What I found out is that mainstream media organisations are increasingly acting like brands (creating new products and services), while brands perceive themselves as publishers by adopting traditional production practices (think editorial calendars) and even values.

HubSpot, for instance, subscribes to journalistic values such as transparency and the supremacy of hard data over opinion, as the company’s online values statement indicates.

The Brand Republic, a U.K. niche news information service, meanwhile, doubles as a recruitment and events network. Similarly, the Guardian, which in 2011 adopted a ‘digital first’ strategy, has a growing number of business tiers, while engaging in SEO, social media, events promotion and other traditional B2B marketing activities. In tune with this trend, Wired U.K. recently launched an in-house business consulting service.

Anyone can be a publisher! Really?

In his 2006 book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins writes that new content creation tools and distribution platforms “have lowered the barriers of entry into the marketplace of ideas,” blurring the distinctions between “producer and consumer, between consumers and citizens, between the commercial and the amateur, and between education, activism, and entertainment.”

The proliferation of content curation platforms like Percolate, Themeefy, Scoop.it and as of late, Pinterest, has levelled the playing field for just about anyone to create, own and publish their own personalised publications. Once pushed into the digital space, stories can be remixed, reused and recycled for as long as the internet shall live.

And when content production barriers are continuously pushed down, virtually anyone can be a journalist and achieve authority in the digital space as long as they gather, filter and distribute content in accordance with journalistic values.

There is, however, one vital ingredient that you need in order to be a credible publisher, and that is readers’ trust. You simply need it, and you need lots of it.

Despite all these new players, my research demonstrated that traditional publishers are still a trusted voice. So it’s incumbent on brands to build credibility and gain their audience’s trust by adhering to the same values and standards as non-branded publications.

Shared values

The bottom line is that to stand out in the glut of online voices, a branded newsroom needs to meet three conditions: It has to be open, transparent and rigorous; it has to adhere to journalistic values; and it has to embrace technological innovation (which, I might add, many branded newsrooms are doing better than traditional ones).

As someone who has crossed the divide between journalism and marketing, this conclusion makes me embrace my former journalistic self even more. In my experience, the tensions between being a journalist and being a marketer have disappeared and the boundaries between the two fields have long blurred.

Retailers aren’t just tapping into the past on baby boomers’ behalf – they’re playing on a generation’s nostalgia for a time they never knew.

While some brands are cashing in on their own rich cultural cachet (see: Coca Cola or Adidas), others are hopping on the retro bandwagon, providing eager young buyers with faux (but fashionable) relics faster than you can say Lana Del Rey. But this instant aura of authenticity may ultimately be their downfall.

“The ironic fate that extinguishes so many trends built on suggesting and exploiting authenticity is that their very popularity extinguishes that which made them popular,” argues Nathan Jurgenson in the online sociology journal The Society Pages.

Jurgenson adds that faux-vintage photos made through Hipstamatic and Instagram serve “to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past.” (And this was written before Facebook Timeline became standard.)

For posterity’s sake, here are some of my faux nostalgia finds in the world of fashion, film and more.

Fauxtography

A Harcourt portrait of actor Jean Dujardin

The tweeted photo: a quiet, snowy street scene. The comment: “It was so beautiful I didn’t even need Instagram.”

We’ve gone from grainy, faded polaroids to disposable cameras to crisp digital photos to… grainy, faded digital photos. The new mantra: When in doubt, add a filter. That way you’ll place “yourself and your present into the context of the past, the authentic, the important and the real,” according to Jurgenson.

But if you want to be really original, you’ll take a photo that can’t be Photoshopped. On a recent trip to chic Parisian department store Franck et Fils, I happily paid €10 (one tenth of the price of my last digital camera) for a single picture from a photo booth.

Developed by legendary photo studio Harcourt, the booth debuted at Cannes and produces bright, flattering headshots that are a far cry from the stark portraits made at your local DMV.

Vintage reinvented

Banana Republic’s Mad Men capsule collections aren’t just cashing in on a sexy, award-winning series set in the 1960s – they’re appealing to men who collect bowties and women who long for the days when Marilyn Monroe’s voluptuous figure was the standard of beauty (whether these days even existed – just try nailing down Marilyn Monroe’s dress size, I dare you – is another matter).

The first collection, created in collaboration with Mad Men costumer Janie Bryant, was promoted through an online casting call that let fans reenact and upload scenes from the show.

Banana Republic's Mad Men clothing launch. Image via PSFK.com

In a nod to (or a swipe at) the copycat series Pan Am, the second collection launched on a branded Virgin America flight from JFK to LAX, with a suspicious number of fashion bloggers on board.

The cinched waists and tailored tops are accessibly retro, whether you’re a Peggy, Joan or Betty, but never stray into kitschy costume territory. And no girdles required. Can Debenhams’ Downton Abbey line be far behind?

Classic cocktails

Singapore Sling, from Fairmont's "Everyone's an Original" website

Forget alcopops and molecular mixology. Old-school spirits are front and centre in hip bar and hotel menus like Fairmont hotels’ Classic Cocktails program, which lets guests order a Singapore Sling, Boxcar or Brandy Alexander at any Fairmont property in the world.

Not only is Fairmont appealing to a prohibition party-throwing, Boardwalk Empire-watching crowd, each drink serves as an intro to the hotel brand’s illustrious history. e.g. The Jazz Bar at The Peace Hotel in Shanghai, or The American Bar at The Savoy in London, former home to bartender Harry Craddock (who created The White Lady and published the seminal Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930).

Fairmont is also using the program to send fans to their social networking microsite – Everyone’s An Original – for recipes and tips.

Found footage

Popularized by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project (or, if you must, 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust), the found-footage genre is running strong in movies such as Cloverfield, The Devil Inside and the Paranormal Activity franchise.

With less of an air of manipulation than a mockumentary, found footage gives viewers an “authentic” alternative to scripted scenes and slick CGI. In the case of recent teen comedy Project X, the goal is “simply to look like the wildest viral video of all time,” wrote The Globe & Mail’s Andy Nayman.

And while early faux footage films may have strained audiences’ credibility – what kind of person would keep the camera running with her life at stake? – in 2012, it’s all too believable that someone would document every waking moment of her life, assuming it will interest someone else (see also: Twitter updates).

Even more believable? That in the future, all footage will be found with iMovie’s Aged Film effect already applied.

Did I miss anything? Live performances of podcasts? Joysticks for your iPad? New albums on vinyl? Mobile phone attachments that look like rotary handsets? Feel free to weigh in with your favourite old-school-inspired goods.

Original photography in top image by Yu Tsai.

Case in point: Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign. In just five days, the cause marketing video reached 100 million viewers, making it “the most viral video of all time.” And that’s despite being 30 minutes long (an eternity in web time) and about an emotionally difficult subject. In other words, it’s not your typical viral hit.

Invisible Children's website provides a downloadable "action kit" with posters and flyers.

Founded in 2004, Invisible Children uses video campaigns to raise awareness about the infamous guerrilla faction LRA and its leader, Joseph Kony. Earlier this March the campaign exploded, thanks to the release of a 30-minute documentary describing Kony’s atrocities and providing a call to action.

Read Write Web’s Alicia Eler put it this way: “By the end of the video, Kony’s face is burned into our brains – we fear him, we hate him, we want to make him famous and then murder him.”

Cause marketing lessons

It’s hard to deny Kony’s impact on the digital (and real) world. As Eddie Reeves wrote in the Huffington Post, “The Kony 2012 campaign is, quite simply, one of the most significant marketing promotions in recent history, ranking alongside the likes of Philip Morris’ introduction of the Malboro Man and Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl spot.”

Invisible Children has 414,263 followers on Twitter, 3.1 million likes on Facebook, a Tumblr page and YouTube channel with nearly 86 million views of its documentary. #Kony2012 trended globally, with celebrities, politicians, and activists getting in on the discussion.

PLEASE go to t.co/E4GvJifH Even if its 10 minutes… Trust me, you NEED to know about this! #1LOVE

— Rihanna (@rihanna) March 7, 2012

Thanks tweeps for sending me info about ending #LRAviolence . I am aware. Have supported with $’sand voice and will not stop.#KONY2012

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) March 6, 2012

Good to see such strong interest in #stopkony – a key step to helping those most vulnerable.

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) March 8, 2012

A Kony 2012 poster in Hong Kong. Image by Chun Lam, via Flickr

Content marketing blog iMedia Connection argued that the video’s weakness (at least according to critics) is also it’s greatest asset: simplicity.  The video was easy to watch (well – produced), easy to understand (plain language) and easy to respond to (with a click of a mouse you could donate, download posters, or write to a political official).

Social Media Today notes that one of the keys to the campaign’s success  (after the slick content) was that they targeted celebrities to act as brand advocates for the cause. The eruption on Twitter might not have happened had Justin Bieber not tweeted about it.

Invisible Children urges people to contact "Policy Makers" and "Culture Makers" via Twitter through a direct link on their homepage

Australia’s Marketing Magazine provides some lessons of its own, suggesting that the consistency of the campaign across channels made it easy for people to understand what the campaign was all about. They could jump from Tumblr to YouTube to Facebook and would see the same message.

The beauty of social media is that it lets brands keep the conversation going. In this case, when the conversation turned skeptical, the organization was able to respond immediately and across channels.

They provided links on their site directing users to more in-depth content, they pointed people to their budget, they aired YouTube videos addressing the concerns and they encouraged conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskICAnything.

And the campaign isn’t over yet. Expect to see a Kony 2012 Part 2 video released in the very near future, and much more conversation as the story unfolds.

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.

With that kind of growth, it’s no surprise that an increasing number of brands are tapping into Tumblr’s uniquely engaged community.

Described as a content network by its 25-year-old founder, David Karp, Tumblr has settled comfortably at the intersection of design, content and social media.

Tumblr founder David Karp. Image by Scott Beale, via Flickr.

Tumbleloggers (as they’re known) can display and share 140 character posts, lengthy blog entries, high-resolution pictures, personal charts and lists, quotes, songs and videos, in one customizable space.

While continuing to foster a unique and dedicated user base of over 13 million visitors, Tumblr has avoided being lumped in with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter by maintaining its focus on visually rich content.

Meanwhile, Tumblr’s strong social component and easy sharing have made it a more popular blogging platform than WordPress, which it now surpasses in numbers of blogs.

The community

Tumblr’s community is considerably younger than many of its competitors. Where recent statistics have pegged the average Facebook and Twitter users as being 38 and 39 years old, respectively, 50 percent of Tumblr’s users are under the age of 25.

To reach this young, international community, Tumblr has begun sponsoring local meetups around the world. On a monthly basis, tumbleloggers are receiving up to 9,000 nametags and 3,000 Tumblr stickers from the platform’s community organizers in order to facilitate these Tumblr-centric events.

In June, the Tumblr team even received a happy birthday YouTube serenade from a few hundred Brazilian fans meeting up for the platform’s biggest get-together yet. Tumblr’s community was also a driving force behind this winter’s mass online protest against a pair of proposed anti-piracy bills in the U.S.

What’s in it for brands (and what brands should be on it)

What all this means is that Tumblr provides brands with an opportunity to engage a young, media-savvy community with smart, relevant content.

But it’s not a perfect match for everyone. The demographics, for one thing, indicate that marketers should focus on brands that already resonate with the Tumblr community. So life insurance companies, stay away.

It’s also worth bearing in mind the site’s layout. Like upstart Pinterest, it’s all about the visuals and snappy content: Think Twitter plus pictures. This makes the platform perfect for companies that regularly roll out new products or content, namely: broadcast media outlets, magazines, record labels and fashion brands.

J.Crew's tumblog

Take J.Crew, for example. Marketers found a way to make the retail brand’s photogenic merch feel right at home on Tumblr. The brand’s tumblelog has secured a faithful following by inviting followers to tag along with their favourite designers on “inspiration trips” to Paris and Italy while listening to the Brit-pop playlists that fuel their creative genius.

Unlike Facebook, Tumblr is not a one-size-fits-all social network. But as J.Crew can attest, if you’re targeting the cool kids, it’s a shoe-in for success.

Image via blog.spoongraphics.co.uk

Something that has stuck with me is an idea from one of Amber Naslund’s webinars that I attended last year. Why are many big brands so uncomfortable with letting their employees represent their brand on social media? This is not a social media problem, in Naslund’s view. This is a hiring problem. You need talent you can trust.

The way I see it, social media is a tool. A tool that will either emphasize parts of your business that are great, or bring the not-so-great to the public eye, painfully.

Sometimes the problem is that big brands want to jump on the social media bandwagon so quickly that they never implement a social structure within the organization. But if it doesn’t work from the inside, then what you put out on the outside won’t work either.

Brands need to be social in every department, not just marketing or communications. Making social media a skill for each and every employee instead of a full-time job for one, will make your business social in operation.

Instead of looking at social media as your silver bullet to virality or some spaceship into relevancy, brands need to look at social media as a tool to make all aspects of your operation work better, and be better in the eyes of your consumer.

Social on the inside

The keys to building a truly social business are training, guidelines and empowerment. The transition will be slow, which is why some big brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on third-party agencies to take it off their plates.

Using a platform like GetSatisfaction, for instance, can make your customer service social by nature. It can be implemented on your Facebook page and all incoming support inquiries will be indexed so that if someone has an inquiry that’s already been answered, they will be prompted to look at that answer instead of creating a new case. This will save your customer support agent’s time, and the department money.

Public relations have embraced social media faster than most departments. No longer do you have to push your pitches via email and pray that media will pick them up. You can create and maintain relationships with press through Twitter, having short conversations daily rather than only talking to them when you need something.

Brands can also use tools like PitchEngine, which makes news releases social media friendly and turns PR professionals into media outlets in their own right. In the social business age, many PR pros have reputable blogs and Twitter accounts with thousands of followers which allow them to connect with mass influencers without using the mainstream media as intermediaries.

Creating social leadership

Image by ChrisL_AK, via Flickr

While social should permeate all aspects of your brand, it’s still important to have the right leadership to define overall strategy and look over individual elements of your social media presence.

This can either be one person or a panel of people, each responsible for a different area of social (PR, Marketing & Sales, Customer Service, Product Development, etc).

Collaboration has never been more important to bridge the silos that traditional business has created, and which are the enemy of social.

Big brands are the slowest to adapt, when people may expect (with all the money that they have) that they would be the quickest. Redesigning your business to be social by nature trumps having 100,000 Facebook Fans, because doing it right is more important than getting it done.

Atos' CEO, Thierry Breton

CEO Thierry Breton, who’s steered clear of internal emails for more than five years, claims that the amount of time spent sorting, organizing and responding to an ever-expanding inbox (estimated at about ¼ of an employee’s workday) calls for a serious change in the company’s communication approach.

Though the concept may seem quirky at first, Atos is simply the most recent in a long line of forward-thinkers that have questioned the efficiency of email in professional settings. Recent trends are already showing that younger internet users are weaning off their inboxes, which they often perceive as overly formal.

So what medium will Atos have stepping into email’s 40-year-old shoes? They will deploy a combination of crowd-sourced documents, internal and external instant messaging systems, social media platforms, text messages, phone conversations and (gasp!) face-to-face meetings.

Radicati, a technology market research firm, has recently released research indicating that the use of these formerly unconventional communication devices is spreading like wildfire in corporate settings.

In 2009, the firm reported 219 million corporate IM users (of both internal and public IM platforms) and predicted numbers would rise to 524 Million by 2013. Social networking is also gaining professional credibility, with Radicati’s recent surveys revealing that 55 percent of respondents now use internal and external networks for business purposes. 

Unified Communications effectively streamlines messages and communications from every platform

Unified Communications

At the turn of the millennium, while some were stocking up on water and non-perishables, writer and consultant Art Rosenberg was working on a new term to designate an emerging kind of synchronized, streamlined communications. He coined it Unified Communications; a term that would eventually encompass all previously mentioned new and not-so-new mediums.

Today, UC solutions stand for a set of applications and tools that make information as fluid and platform-agnostic as possible by seamlessly integrating and streamlining all the tools one might use to communicate.

At the heart of UC is the concept of “presence,” comparable to an online/offline/busy/away messenger status, but applied to every facet of your communications tool belt. UC allows you to organize contacts and keep them updated on your ‘communication status’- so colleagues, partners and customers can constantly be kept in the loop on whether you’re currently available to chat, IM, text, talk on the phone, conference call, Skype, crowd source, data share or video message.

If you’re unavailable, UC tools and settings will efficiently streamline the information to you through the appropriate device as soon as you’re available.

Despite great hype, Google Wave never quite the splash it had hoped to

The medium is the message, but don’t shoot the messenger

Previous attempts have been made at lightening the email load, as can be seen with the now quasi-obsolete Google Wave and with Facebook’s anticlimactic Project Titan (which in 2010, had techies predicting the end of Gmail and today, barely rings a bell).  In a recent Fast Company piece, Steve Rosenbaum steps way out of the box by suggesting that the United States Postal Service take over email platform management. This, he argues, would allow for the US Postal Service to remain relevant while reducing junk mail by attributing a cost to email advertising.

But not everyone is quite ready to bid free-access electronic mail goodbye. The medium, some argue, is not the problem. The true solution lies in teaching staff proper email etiquette and empowering them with a suite of equally relevant and useful communication tools.

Smartertools.com built this infographic based on 2011 email stats

According to TED curator Chris Anderson, a few golden rules may well be enough to establish a first set of corporate email guidelines and cut down on the clutter. In June 2011, the two sought out solutions to their overcrowded inboxes through his personal blog. More than 75,000 people read the duo’s cry for help and drafted up a helpful 10-point Email Charter.

It may seem basic at first glance, but think again, as a look at your inbox will likely reveal a few infractions. Here’s a hint: it’s all about efficient subject lines, short and courteous messages and distinguishing CC’s, from Forward’s, and Replys from Reply Alls. Now if all else fails and ten rules still feels like too much to handle, let me suggest the tried and tested KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

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” 

The Frost Bank Tower (aka "The Owl") lights up the Austin skyline

As we noted last year, SXSW is huge. At any given moment there are dozens of panels, meet-ups, keynotes, showcases, “core conversations” and branded events going on throughout Austin.

That means that no two experiences at SXSW are alike, and that it’s nearly impossible to distill five days of sessions and spectacles into a handful of tidy trends.

But as Robert Scoble noted during a conversation about – what else? – the future of events, SXSW is a good indicator of where things are headed over the next year in the digital space. Here are my top five takeaways.

We have the tools we need

It may have something to do with the chilly rain that dampened the first two days of the conference, but SXSW 2012 had a more sober feel than last year’s edition. (Figuratively speaking – there was no shortage of free booze flowing as per usual.)

At SXSW 2011 the Arab Spring was still fresh, the iPad 2 was flying off shelves for the first time, and nearly every session brought up those viral Old Spice ads that were supposed to change the face of online marketing. But this year I can’t think of a single news event, technology or viral campaign that set Austin abuzz.

The closest thing was Kony 2012, a 30-minute film about the former Ugandan warlord, that reportedly drew as much as 100 million views this month, but is already facing a backlash for oversimplifying a complex world issue.

Ogilvy Notes presents visual summaries of SXSW keynotes

That no so-called “game changer” emerged this year is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, as digital research superstar Danah Boyd mentioned in her talk on “The Power of Fear,” the Arab Spring turned out not to be a quick social media fix of that region’s problems.

Meanwhile, 2011 buzzwords like gamification, localization and paywalls (remember how everyone was up in arms about The New York Times?) were nowhere in sight on this year’s schedule.

So perhaps the lesson here is that we have the tools we need. Or, as The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston put it in his inspiring keynote, it’s time to “marry the creativity of the tools with the story.”

When it comes to media, it’s all about the brand

Google erected its own "village" on Rainey St. near the Austin Convention Center

I focused on web journalism trends in my SXSW 2012 weekend review, so I won’t dwell on it here. But one of the overriding (and encouraging) lessons from Austin this year is that we’ve officially entered the age of the media outlet as brand.

Yes, media outlets have always been brands. Print magazines like The New Yorker and TV shows like Dr. Who have understood this for years. But for the past decade most online publications have operated as commodities, focusing on “clickable” content that will attract “eyeballs” for their advertisers.

I don’t think I heard anyone use the word “eyeballs” or even the word “traffic” at SXSW 2012. Ann Friedman, Executive Editor of Good, whose motto is “for people who give a damn,” explained how Good is all about catering to a specific “affinity group” through web content, videos, and events.

France's knitted booth on the trade show floor.

Good’s “mission-driven” brand is an “easy sell” to advertisers, Friedman said, because running ads on the site “is about having a point of view, not just buying inventory in space.”

Similarly, The Office star turned web entrepreneur Rainn Wilson invoked the “B word” in a funny keynote about Soul Pancake, a website that seeks to “de-lamify” spirituality by fostering conversations around religion, philosophy and creativity.

With regular spots on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and a TV pilot in the works, Wilson proudly proclaimed that “Soul Pancake is becoming a brand.” And so is Rainn Wilson, it seems.

Design is everywhere

Last year in Austin there were lots of discussions about content and lots of discussions about design. But at SXSW 2012, content and design were treated as two sides of the same coin, as they should be.

The Boston Globe’s Miranda Mulligan and NPR’s David Wright

One of my favourite SXSW sessions, “Journalism’s Got 99 Problems: Design is #1” (the title is a nod to rapper Jay-Z, who performed in Austin the night before), saw NPR’s David Wright and the Boston Globe’s Miranda Mulligan hold court in a room full of designers, publishers and advertisers.

Wright complained that “too many journalists think designers are people who colour in for a living,” arguing that design thinking needs to be brought into strategy sessions from the get-go.

In a panel called “It’s Not News It’s Business,” former Washington Post digital director Justin Ferrell suggested he’d like to see more designers, developers and programmers in executive positions at newspapers and magazines (they’re already calling the shots in Silicon Valley).

What’s clear is that the next generation of media websites is going to be heavily inspired by social news startups like Flipboard and Instapaper, which everyone seems to agree are at the vanguard of editorial design.

Latin America is hot

It was nice to see more non-English speaking markets get attention at SXSW this year and one of the hottest topics was the emerging Latin American consumer.

Austin-based Dell put up a plexiglass wall in the convention center that attendees could sign

In a fascinating talk on Brazilian youth, researcher Carla Albertuni characterized Brazil’s young influencers as “bridge youths” who use a combination of online and offline social networking to reform (but not necessarily “disrupt”) the country’s traditional class system.

In another session, “Have Latin American Media Become Social?” Mexican editor Valdir Ugalde explained how media brands in different Latin American countries are embracing the web.

In Colombia, according to Ugalde, user-generated content is hot. Argentinian newspaper Perfil publishes an online magazine called “140” all about trending topics on Twitter.

Chilean outlets rely on Faebook for generating traffic, while Mexican broadcasters use Twitter hashtags to generate online conversations on air.

Events are platforms

If you follow Sparksheet on Twitter, you’ve probably already heard bits and pieces of the lessons above. That’s because, along with a huge chunk of the estimated 24,500 SXSW 2012 attendees, we tweeted live throughout our five days in Austin.

Robert Scoble, Brian Duggan and Loic Le Meur fielding questions during the session "Events are Now Platforms"

Twenty four thousand is an incredible number. But when you factor in everyone who followed the conversation online, it’s clear that SXSW is much more than a face-to-face event. It’s a platform for quality content, delivered in real time. At least that was the lesson of a “core conversation” with Loic Le Meur, founder of Europe’s biggest tech conference, Le Web.

Le Meur said that his small organization spends roughly half a million dollars a year on video and live streaming and that the Paris-based conference (Le Web will be branching out to London this year) is “just a studio” where the content is created.

In other words, without a sales and marketing team, Le Meur relies on this year’s content to promote next year’s event.

Of course, what the online audience doesn’t get are the face-to-face conversations, unexpected connections and real world relationships that only a live event can deliver. And that’s why you can count on finding us back in Austin next March.

The Austin Convention Center

Over the past decade or so the formula for success in online publishing has been something like this:

Post a lot of content.

Keep it short.

And do it fast.

The assumption here is that people look to the internet for simple, snackable content in “real time.” And with its reverse chronological template, the web’s first indigenous news medium – the blog – was designed to deliver just that.

But over the course of the weekend here at SXSW, this model has finally been challenged and it seems as though fast, short and abundant may be giving way to slow (read: thoughtful), long (read: in-depth) and scarce (read: quality over quantity).

Curating quality

Maria Popova and David Carr

This web publishing paradigm shift became apparent to me during a Saturday morning session entitled “The Curators and the Curated,” featuring an all-star panel with David Carr, the curmudgeonly New York Times media critic, Mia Quagliarello, content curator for digital magazine app Flipboard, Max Linsky, co-founder of longform.org, Maria Popova, a blogger, and Noah Brier, co-founder of brand curation tool Percolate.

Although the panelists failed to see eye to eye on the monetization question (Carr: “I’m so glad you’re all here to repackage and repurpose me. By the way, that’s how I eat!”), they agreed that content should be judged on relevance rather than timeliness.

Popova decried what she called the “newsification of the web,” while Carr lamented “the tyranny of the new.” Lansky insited that “new stories and old stories get clicked on the same amount” and claimed that his site experienced no decrease in traffic when they scaled back the number of daily posts (although this wasn’t mentioned in the panel, that squares with Salon’s recent revelation that the online magazine’s traffic actually increased after they committed to posting less, but better, content).

SX-Men: Gawker vs. Slate

The old and new paradigms of web publishing came head-to-head in the form of two simultaneous sessions Sunday morning (I managed to catch about half of each, running from the Austin Convention Centre to the Hilton next door).

The first session was a live Q&A with Nick Denton, the founder of mega-popular blog network Gawker Media. Denton, who doesn’t so much court controversy as seduce it, defended Gawker’s gossipy, nouveau yellow style of journalism, summing up Gawker’s philosophy as “don’t consider too much before you put it down on the page.”

Prompted by interviewer Anil Dash to reveal the contents of a voice message by Brian Williams (Denton recently alienated the veteran news anchor by publishing a snarky email Williams had sent him), Denton joked, “I’m not getting page views out of this so what’s the point?” Which sums up Gawker’s editorial mandate pretty neatly.

Dr. X and Magneto playing Chess in X-Men film

The second session featured David Plotz, the editor of online magazine Slate, in conversation with Evan Ratliff, a contributor to Wired magazine and the editor of mobile publishing platform The Atavist.

As Plotz explained in a Sparksheet Q&A last year, Slate sees itself as a bastion of long-form journalism on the web and encourages staffers to spend months reporting on pet projects that manifest themselves as multi-part, print magazine-length pieces.

The session was dubbed “140 Characters vs. 14,000” words, but Plotz said that “it would be a mistake to think of social media as the enemy of long-form.” On the contrary, Plotz argued that by satiating our thirst for quick news and pithy headlines, Twitter was “driving out” what he called “commodity news” and “aggregation journalism” (Plotz didn’t say where Slate’s own news aggregation site, The Slatest, fits in to all of this).

Although Plotz didn’t call out Gawker by name, my guess is that he would put Denton’s content in the latter category. As I tweeted during the session (in a geeky nod to X-Men), Denton and Plotz are sort of like the Magneto and Professor X of web journalism, two very different sides of the same coin. Only time will tell whose vision for the future of web content will win. But I guess it’s pretty clear which one we’re rooting for.

For the uninitiated, SXSW Interactive is one of the biggest digital media and marketing conferences in the world, drawing thousands of participants and hosting over a thousand sessions.

If you’re staying home, these guides will give you a glimpse into the social media, tech, and marketing trends we should expect to encounter in the near future. Twitter and Foursquare exploded after SXSW in years past, so it’s safe to say that it’s worth paying attention to what’s happening.

This guide from .net magazine provides a broad list of 10 must-see sessions, including Designing for Context (Friday) and a panel discussion called The Curators and the curated (Saturday).

Matthew Knell, the social media director for AOL put together a list of sessions he will be attending for Huffington Post. It’s full of sessions that appeal to those interested in the intersection of business and social.

And in case you’d like to build your own guide from scratch, check out Lanyrd’s unofficial guide and schedule builder. They’ll even email you content from sessions you missed… perhaps while hitting up one of SXSW’s countless parties (here’s a list of startups to be featured in the now annual Startup Crawl).

Sparksheet’s editor, Dan Levy, will be on site for the five-day conference, tweeting and blogging about his adventures. If you’re looking for information about content, tech, and social media, make sure to follow Sparksheet on Twitter.

Perhaps the biggest surprise at the Academy Awards this year was French film The Artist taking home Best Picture, the most prestigious award at this most prestigious awards show. Even if you weren’t surprised The Artist won, you were surprised that you weren’t surprised The Artist won. And that’s because the film’s success spoke to some universal truths about what makes great content great.

About The Artist

In case you’re out of the loop, The Artist is directed by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius and stars actors Bérénice Bejo and Jean Dujardin, who also won the best actor title for his part in the film.

The film takes place in 1927 Hollywood and is both witty and fun. And the most surprising thing about the film: It’s almost completely silent.

The Academy wasn’t alone in praising the film. The Los Angeles Times called The Artist a “wonder of the age, as much a miracle as Avatar, though it comes at things from the totally opposite direction.” Twitter users weighed in with 140-character praises like “a silent film that left me speechless!” In other words, everybody seems to have fallen for The Artist.

What does this have to do with marketing?

Flashy, tech-powered films such as Transformers and Harry Potter were nominated in a few different Oscar categories, yet it was the silent film that took home five awards this year. There are a couple of important lessons here for marketers, businesses and content creators.

First, it’s possible to create something great without fancy toys or inflated budgets. Whether you’re working with digital or social or print, it all comes down to the content, not the platform.

Second, people still appreciate simple. The most up-to-date technologies are great, but sometimes they simply aren’t necessary to get a story across. Just because audiences are used to fancy tricks doesn’t mean that they don’t know great content when they see it.

What this all comes down to is that people still respond to quality. A great story is a great story. We tend to think that our world is full of people who can’t sit still to watch one commercial (thanks, TiVo) or read a newspaper ad. But maybe the problem is the content and not the audience.

The Artist’s producers took a risk and got it right. You can too.

In celebration of IWD, here’s a roundup of links, news, and videos that are sparking conversations about women’s issues.

Perhaps the biggest (read: most controversial) social media story relating to IWD is the “Rock The Lips” campaign, backed by advertising agency AKQA.

With a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and more, the campaign invites women to upload photos of themselves wearing bright red lipstick and share them on whatever social network they use. The goal is to raise awareness by getting over 1,000,000 women to upload photos.

The Washington Post warns that because the campaign doesn’t link to the IWD site, followers of the campaign “may never learn the substance of the women’s issues being raised.”

In the run-up to IWD, AdWeek published The Women’s Issue, composed of a series of articles that provide a consumer-centric breakdown of women in three age groups, “The Indie Woman,” “The Mom Achiever,” and the “Alpha Goddess.”

The issue is chock full of stats and trends (who knew that women aged 55-65 spend more on consumer electronics than their Gen Y counterparts?). Forbes, however, had a thing or two to say about the depiction, suggesting that despite AdWeek’s optimism, the “Millenial Ms.” has “a lot more on her plate than sex, social media and shopping.”

image via Forbes, via Wikipedia

Forbes’ article paints a more even-toned portrait in response to AdWeek’s issue, including stats that tell a less rosy story (“83 percent of college-aged women diet, regardless of their weight”).

A recent post by Fast Company let women do the talking, featuring advice for women looking to climb the corporate ladder by peers who’ve already made it to the top. The advice (“go where the opportunities are”) probably works just as well for men.

You may or may not have seen this hugely popular TED Interactive presentation by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, but in case you haven’t, her message is as relevant as ever: When it comes to leaders in the workplace, we need more women.

Speaking of careers, the hugely successful Little Pink Book, a free digital content provider designed for businesswomen, is getting a boost from top-notch brands. PR Newswire reports that in celebration of International Women’s Day, Coca-Cola and FedEx will be running marketing campaigns on the site.

Little Pink Book screenshot

Finally, for information about women in politics, check out the guardian’s coverage. The Third Annual Women in the World Summit will be kicking off in New York today, with speakers Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee in attendance.

Jeff Jarvis speaking about his latest book, "Public Parts." Image by the American Library Association, via Flickr

Professor, media consultant, prolific blogger, social media advocate and public speaker. It’s safe to say that Jeff Jarvis wears many hats.

This February, the acclaimed internet intellectual came to McGill University in Montreal to speak about internet privacy, an area he has been thinking a lot about lately.

The talk, Protecting our Tools of Publicness, summarized the major points from his recently published book, Private Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live.

An ardent defender of an open internet, Jarvis spoke about his worry that government regulation could stifle the web’s potential to improve our lives. As he explained: “We need to protect our great tool of publicness because we don’t know what it is yet.”

Even the terms “public” and “private” mean different things in the internet age, said Jarvis. This, in part, is because the web is changing the way we share information. But as Jarvis suggested, government regulations don’t reflect this shift.

He explained that we’re moving in the direction of complete transparency, so fighting to limit the ways information is shared is akin to sticking tires on a horse-drawn carriage. Society has moved on.

Here comes the revolution

Offering Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press as an analogy to enforce his argument, Jarvis explained that thanks to Gutenberg a lot more people became literate and a lot of political fallout happened as a result.

Sure there was bloodshed, but as the story goes, the printing press also gave rise to the middle class, public education, and unprecedented cultural self-awareness.

But no one really appreciated the impact of the invention until much later – at least one hundred years later.

Fast forward five centuries and here we are, at the cusp of another information revolution, said Jarvis.

As he explained, where once there were clusters of experts who wrote books on highly specialized topics, now there’s a network that enables instantaneous information flow. Everything is linked. Knowledge isn’t hierarchical anymore, but is instead remixed, curated and most of all, open to the public.

Throughout the talk, Jarvis emphasized that for better or worse, the internet has transformed the way we think about information, meaning our norms are changing, too.

These changes are pushing us towards a new kind of public, of which Jarvis is a fierce evangelist. “We should be open by default, secret by necessity,” and that’s true for government, corporations and our personal lives.

So instead of trying to limit the technological potential of the web through regulation, Jarvis argued that we should focus on how people and institutions choose to use that information.

For Jarvis, we’re only beginning to appreciate the implications of our changing norms. From governmental transparency (check Sweden’s national Twitter feed for proof) to social corporations, the curtain is being lifted.

Like it or not, he concluded, publicness is the new social norm, and limiting technology through regulation is akin to stopping the presses.

“It’s a more fractured marketplace,” says Patrick Reynolds, EVP of Marketing at Triton Digital, a company that provides streaming and ad services to radio stations. “People can pick and choose how they consume this particular kind of content.” And with the proliferation of services like Pandora, Spotify and Slacker, which let people customize audio content to their whims, it seems as though this century-old medium is more popular than ever.

Crossing over

When podcasting took off in the mid-2000s, the idea was to provide downloadable audio content online so that listeners didn’t have to tune into a radio station at a specific time.

This American Life (TAL), the popular public radio program hosted by Ira Glass, came to the streaming and podcasting party earlier than most (its first stream dates back to 1998), and it’s now one of the most downloaded podcasts in the world.

Eventually, TAL was adapted for TV on the premium cable network Showtime. Though the televised series was short-lived, it can still be purchased on DVD or via iTunes. TAL’s website also offers CDs, web streams, mobile apps and mp3 downloads. What TAL does especially well is make its program available in as many formats as possible.

Another example of an audio program crossing over to multiple platforms is The Ricky Gervais Show. Originally a free podcast on The Guardian’s website, it featured hilarious banter on science and religion between Gervais, co-creator Stephen Merchant and seemingly simple-minded producer Karl Pilkington, who became the show’s star.

Using the existing audio, HBO developed an animated version of the podcasts in 2010, illustrating some of the absurd scenarios the three men discussed. The same year, Gervais developed the Sky1 TV series An Idiot Abroad, with Pilkington making off-kilter observations during his world travels. Essentially, it’s a riff on the original podcast’s running joke: Pilkington himself.

Over in Canada, it took host Jian Ghomeshi’s on-air showdown with actor Billy Bob Thornton to make CBC Radio One’s daily variety show Q an international sensation. It helped that the video made it on Perez Hilton – but that wouldn’t have happened without Q’s YouTube channel.

Like many non-Canadians, Reynolds hadn’t heard of Q until the infamous video surfaced. Q exemplifies Reynolds’ assertion that radio content should be “agnostic to delivery mechanism.”

Whether the radio experience is delivered on-air, online, via YouTube, a blog or a podcast, what matters is the strength of the idea, the passion of the people powering it, and its relevance to an engaged community.

Choose your own radio

Music services like Pandora, Spotify or Slacker are a big part of radio’s enduring appeal. While some critics are quick to dismiss such services as “not radio,” saying they’re the “audio equivalent of solitary confinement” or glorified “playlists,” media consultant and author Mark Ramsey is less cynical.

“Pandora’s not a perfect match to what a radio station does,” Ramsey says, “but that doesn’t mean it’s any less fulfilling of the need that people go to radio for.”

Slacker lets you listen to pre-programmed playlists or create your own

What people go to these music services for is the ability to tailor the content to their tastes. With Pandora, you create a “channel” by entering a song or artist to generate a stream of similar music. On Spotify, you can create playlists from an exhaustive selection of music, then share those playlists with other users or your Facebook friends.

Slacker allows you to listen to pre-programmed stations or create your own based on your musical preferences. It also includes song lyrics, news and sports content.

All three services operate on the “freemium” model; that is, users can upgrade to an ad-free version by paying a small subscription fee. Though Pandora hasn’t revealed how many of its 100 million users pay for its service, Spotify counted 2.5 million paying subscribers in November 2011, prompted in part by its Facebook integration.

It proves that, unlike print content – the jury’s still out on the newspaper paywall experiment – people are happy to pay for a customized radio experience.

Branded and satellite radio

The three big music services point to a trend towards commercial-free radio, but Custom Channels is in the business of creating radio stations for brands. When you walk into a Whole Foods grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, for example, you won’t hear elevator music. Instead, you’ll discover alternative mixes that reflect the brand’s progressive image. At Floyd’s Barbershop, you’ll hear a selection of oldies and classic rock, with a stream available on the company’s website.

Then there’s satellite radio, which once seemed poised to be another victim of the internet. Sirius XM radio (originally two competing companies) once faced skepticism because of its subscription-based, ad-free model. But the brand has consistently delivered exclusive high-quality content, which has secured it a relatively small, but committed listenership.

Willie Nelson hosting his radio show, photo via Facebook

From the beginning, Sirius’ programming has been helmed by talented, celebrity DJs like Howard Stern. Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour was something of an enfant terrible during its three-year run, with listeners relishing Dylan’s deadpan delivery and encyclopedic knowledge of music, while Willie Nelson’s Willie’s Roadhouse had a similar impact on the country music scene.

Sirius’ recently revamped mobile app is getting great reviews for its enhanced user experience, as well as its live and on-demand functions.

Radio reborn

That sort of adaptability has allowed Sirius to stay relevant in an increasingly fragmented radio world. Indeed, all the “death of radio” prophets of the last decade may have simply confused fragmentation with weakness.

But all these examples suggest that, on the contrary, radio is in the midst of an exciting renaissance – and all renaissance movements are marked by versatility and big ideas. There’s no shortage of either in radio land.

Selection of Jeremy Lin Pins

Four weeks ago, an unassuming Taiwanese-American kid walked onto an NBA basketball court and did the unthinkable. Seemingly out of nowhere he smashed through a ceiling placed over him by scouts and coaches since high school.

Now, this undrafted Harvard grad is sharing a spot with basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal in the record books and leading the New York Knicks on a string of wins. His name is Jeremy Lin and people are calling it Linsanity.

Nearly three months ago, a tiny Palo Alto startup, popular among American women, broke into the mainstream.

Now, the site is the darling of tech sites like Mashable and TechCrunch. And it drives more referrals than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ combined. Let’s call it Pinsanity.

What is Pinterest and what makes it special?

Pinterest is an online scrapbook. Find something you like online? Set up a Pinterest bookmarklet and you can start pinning images to the bulletin boards on your page. People can choose to follow you (like Twitter) and can comment on your pins (like Facebook).

There are lots of popular sites similar to Pinterest. Sites with web-native names like GetVega, olioboard, and stylmee. But they differ from Pinterest for two reasons: They tend to be niche sites (go to stylmee if all you want is fashion or olioboard if you’re interested in interior design), and they’re a lot smaller.

Pinterest, on the other hand, lets you post pretty much anything on any topic. You can be a gaming geek and pin images of your favourite RPGs or you can be a bride-to-be and pin your fantasy Vera Wang dress.

It also happens to be addictive. That’s what the super users are saying, anyway. The company’s mission statement says it all: “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.”

As it turns out, it’s pretty easy for brands to find out what people like and convince them to buy them, as the site’s high referral traffic attests to.

The back story

Before we get into how brands can engage with Pinterest, here’s a little background.

Back in 2009, startup incubator Cold Brew Labs began developing the site out of Palo Alto, Calif. Co-founders Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann launched the site in beta status by March 2010 and shortly after began operating the site as an invitation-only open beta. And then it started growing. Fast.

Between September and December 2011 the site grew by 429 percent. In December it had 7.2 million unique visitors (that’s according to PR Daily). By early February, TechCrunch was reporting that Pinterest had “hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.”

According to a Sharehaolic study, Pinterest now drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. It’s still behind Google, Twitter and Facebook – though not by much (well, a lot behind Facebook).

TechCrunch awarded it a “Crunchie” for 2011 startup of the year and it was named among the top five social networking sites of 2011 by Time magazine.

Tell stuff, don’t sell stuff

Like Instagram, Pinterest lets images do the talking, which means when people visit Pinterest, they are less concerned with showcasing themselves as showcasing the things they love. That notion is reflected in the search hierarchy. The results are organized by pins then boards and finally, people.

Search results appear in the order of Pins, Boards and People

If you are into Gap’s style, for example, you don’t go to Pinterest to find out what Gap is selling. That’s what Gap’s website is for. You go to Gap’s Pinterest because you want to discover what Gap thinks is cool (actually, Mashable says Gap goes a little too far, using Pinterest as an online catalogue rather than providing value-added content).

And that’s the first lesson. Remember the adage “pretend your brand is a person and ask yourself whether you’d want to invite it to a party?” Well, Pinterest is a place where that’s not a tired cliché: It’s actually kind of true.

Take this advice from Mashable, for example: “Pinterest etiquette clearly states that it’s not a platform for self-promotion – it’s not a broadcast mechanism like Twitter or Facebook – so brands need to approach the site a little differently.”

So what does that entail? It means taking a content marketing approach and using the platform as a way of building a lifestyle around your brand.

Whole Foods is often touted as a standout brand on the site. They have a couple dozen boards with titles such as “Eat Your Veggies,” “Delicious Art,” “strength” and “Whole Planet Foundation.” Almost none of the pins link back to Whole Foods (save for the Whole Planet Foundation which links to their charity site).

Instead, on display are curated visual lists of recipes, gadgets, motivational photos and gardening tips. It’s a value added content experience without the annoying direct advertising.

Given the way the search function prioritizes pins over pages, if Whole Foods does a good job tagging, people may visit the Whole Foods page by accident, and stay because they like the content. And that’s how you get a new customer – or at least some brand awareness.

Turning Pinterest into a focus group

Pinterest isn’t for everyone. If you’re a venture capital firm, chances are your customers won’t really care as much about your lifestyle choices, and your following will be limited (unless, it turns out, they’re from the UK, where there seems to be a great deal of “pinterest” in VC).

image by monetate

But if you’re a sports franchise, or an emerging tech company (despite what TechCrunch says), it might be a novel platform to showcase what you do, what you think is neat or to engage people without preaching to them.

Tech company AMD, for example, uses its page to appeal to women by featuring feminine laptop carrying bags, gift ideas, and even a board titled “Pretty in Pink.” Given that the site is free to use, putting a little effort into marketing to those outside the target demographic isn’t such a bad idea.

The site also works as a focus group for marketers. The more followers you have, the more you can look at what your followers are doing on Pinterest, which gives you a glimpse into their interests.

While the analytics here aren’t exactly scientific, at least they offer some broad strokes intel, which might be carried over to other social media platforms. If you notice your followers are posting a lot about a certain photographer, for example, you might post an interesting link about that photographer on your Twitter feed.

Is Pinterest here to stay?

Despite copyright issues already cropping up, Pinterest is tantalizing for consumer brands because the commercial element is built right into the platform; the site features a “Gifts” browsing link on its homepage, with nearly every pin leading back to an e-commerce site.

That said, the jury is still out as to whether Pinterest will be more than just a flash in the pan.

There’s been some grumbling about how the company makes money (adding an affiliate link to some pins – this story was pretty big for awhile), it’s still invite-only (though it’s pretty easy to sign up) and there’s lots of design kinks it has to work on (like crashing).

The bottom line: Don’t expect the hype to diminish anytime soon. Chances are, as long as Pinterest’s referral traffic keeps growing, marketers will stay interested. Pinsanity, indeed.

A samba school dancer at Rio Carnival 2012. Image by Leandro Neumann Ciuffo, via Flickr

Booze, bunda and bright shiny objects. That’s modern-day Mardi Gras in a nutshell.

Theologically, the celebration heralds the season of lent, when Christians practice repentance, prayer and almsgiving for the 40 days leading up to Easter. Across the world, Mardi Gras marks the last moments of unrestrained revelry before the season of austerity kicks in.

In some parts of the world (read: Rio de Janiero and New Orleans) the event is a full-blown tourist attraction worth hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

But here’s the interesting part. Since it’s a Christian holiday, unlike say, the World Cup, many cities prohibit sponsorship, meaning brands have to find special ways of inviting themselves to the party.

New Orleans Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras is an enormous moneymaker for the struggling city of New Orleans. Because the event is free, it’s hard to know exactly how much money it brings into The Big Easy, with estimates ranging from $144 to $500 million.

As far as official sponsors go, since it’s a Christian holiday, there’s no such thing. The one exception was in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina when Glad was brought on as a sponsor to help with cleanup.

But that hasn’t stopped Zatarain’s, a local brand selling Cajun-inspired food, from going guerilla. Zatarain invited a bevy of lifestyle bloggers to act as brand ambassadors during the celebration, and encouraged them to use the hashtag #JazzItUpNOLA every time they tweeted. The company also created a Facebook app and playlist on Pandora. 

LGBT love in Sydney

Sydney’s Mardi Gras festival is one of the biggest LGBT celebrations in the world, with over 300,000 spectators alone attending the parade. And gay-friendly brands are paying attention.

Durex, for instance, released a print ad campaign in the lead up to the festival, with posters popping up in gay bars across town.

Not exactly subtle, they feature a giant… rooster with the tagline, “Dress yours up for Mardi Gras.”

Caaarnaaaavaaaaal!

For five straight days, millions of people flood the streets of Rio de Janeiro (and other Brazilian cities) to cut loose at the world’s biggest street party.

Given the proportion and reputation of the event, Carnival is one of the few Mardi Gras celebrations that does have sponsors.

YouTube made a splash at Carnival this year, devoting a channel to the festivities and sponsoring live performances at the event.

Celebrities also flocked to the city, some of them as brand ambassadors. Jennifer Lopez, for example, was invited to watch the Samba contest as local beer company Brahma’s brand ambassador.

In the run-up to Carnival, Lopez was featured in a Brahma ad campaign. The commercials included the neologism “Sapucar,” which, according to AdAge, means “have lots of fun at Carnival.” Apparently the term has since become a regular in the  lexicon of Carnival revelers.

Here’s one of the spots (it’s in Portuguese, but the images say it all)

Social Media Week

But Toronto isn’t alone. Cities across the globe, from Hong Kong to New York have organized their own versions of the event.

Wherever Social Media Week took place, young professionals rubbed shoulders with industry leaders as they attended sessions led by social media managers, marketing analysts, creative directors and web developers.

And the best part? It was free for everyone.

Your online identity crisis is over

Remember when it was the norm to create false identities online? You could be a 40-year-old professional mountain climber living on a vineyard on your MySpace page, while over at your MSN account, you were an aspiring poet studying philosophy at Berkeley.

Jennifer Rossini, associate creative director at Y&R, calls this the “Online Disinhibition Effect.” In the past, websites like MySpace made it easy for us to loosen our social inhibitions and abuse our online anonymity by saying and doing whatever we pleased.

But now, says Rossini, “the recent popularity of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts sparked a shift in identity, where we’ve begun to use our real names and attached them to our online identity, where being faceless and anonymous is now a negative thing.”

Say goodbye to the days of online make-believe. Whatever you say or do on social media is permanent and traceable. Not even your alter ego, Henry, the 35-year-old FBI secret agent, can save you.

Miranda Voth and Meg Button presenting at the Grip Limited office on February 15.

Switch up your event invite list

The good people at Grip Limited, a multiplatform ad agency with a slew of international clients, hosted a session on the dos and don’ts of planning branded events.

Turns out the same groups of people are getting invited to the same industry events, which in turn makes these events repetitive and boring (#firstworldproblems).

Meg Button, associate art director at Totem, and Miranda Voth, Grip’s community engagement manager, made it clear that when it comes to spreading the word about a party, it’s best to use brand influencers instead of social media celebrities.

Thanks to their numerous Twitter followers and Facebook friends, social media celebrities have the power to change a brand’s reputation. But brand influencers are passionate about the brands they love, making them more suited (and willing) to trumpet a brand’s message.

Ads and content go hand in hand

Let’s face it: online ads can be annoying. Pop-ups and embedded ads that play during streamed shows drives people nuts. They’re also often useless because they don’t relate to the content. But there’s good news, folks: Advertisers are noticing.

Panelists at the AgilityCMS presentation, for example, suggested that as long as the ads are relevant, audiences won’t mind.

The consensus among the panel of web designers, user experience experts and content producers was that the future of online advertising depends on the respect it earns from the industry as a whole. Because it’s so new, it has yet to prove itself. This is a great opportunity for ad agencies and marketers to find innovative ways to stay ahead of their competitors.

Israel Diaz, COO of Y&R Canada

Selling a story > Selling a product

On the same panel, Laura Baxter, President of MitreBox Media, argued that there’s a difference between copywriters and content marketers. The former sell products, the latter sell stories.

This difference was emphasized throughout SMW. Josh Muirhead, founder of Socialmark Media, for example, thinks that in the future, advertising content will be created by editorial and writing teams. That’s because journalists and screenwriters are trained to tell stories, and stories sell.

Sometimes you have to piss people off

Lindsay Renwick, social media manager at Critical Mass, hosted a discussion about the power of social storytelling and the strategies that make it work. Renwick claimed that typically, 25 percent of a company’s marketing budget is devoted to content.

During his presentation, John Muirhead argued that content is designed “to inspire people and at the same time piss people off.” In other words, content is successful if it elicits an emotional response –  whether it’s inspiration or frustration.

In sum, Social Media Week provides a great opportunity for folks across industries and disciplines to share ideas, strategies and stories. Too bad it’s only a week.

Image by Andrea Schwaim, Flickr

If you’re serious about talking to Muslim consumers, then one of the first things you need to understand is the meaning of the term halal.

In colloquial parlance, the term halal is used in reference to meat that has come from an animal slaughtered according to Islamic prescription, which is remarkably similar to – although not identical to – Kosher guidelines.

Products must also exclude ingredients that are forbidden to Muslims, like alcohol and pig-derivative products. Halal means “permitted.” The opposite is haraam, “forbidden.”

When the Quran talks of halal it uses a broader description of “goodness and wholesomeness”; the essence is that the product from its origin through to its final consumption should exhibit purity, care for the animals and the environment and ethical treatment at every stage of its production.

In a world that over recent decades has moved towards mass production and away from traditional farming methods and local goods, Muslims – like other consumers – are increasingly concerned about their produce being ethical and organic. Muslims consider these to fall under the wider definition of halal.

However, to consider a whole marketplace of products is more than one short article can handle. So here we are going to stick to the basics of food.

There’s another reason for doing so: In our research looking at Muslim perceptions of the sharia-friendliness of a range of well-known brands, the ones related to food and beverage topped the list.

Muslims believe that their physical intake directly affects their spiritual life. That’s why Muslim consumers are so intent on ensuring what they consume is halal. And considering that the halal market is estimated at around $500 billion annually and growing, brands should pay attention.

Images by mattcflynn, via Flickr

Certified halal

There is no global standard of halal; local boards pop up in every country. If you’d like your product certified halal, then the first step is to identify the certification bodies that will be most relevant to the Muslim consumers you are targeting.

If your product is entirely vegetarian, and contains no alcohol, then it’s worth noting that clearly on your packaging. The Chicago Tribune looked at the trend of rising farm-to-fork consciousness among Muslims, reporting that “some Muslims are making sure their food is not just halal, but organic, free-range and tayiib – Arabic for wholesome. They care as much about how the animal was killed as they do about how it was raised.”

Their concerns are part of growing consumer awareness and demands for ethical and organic food. In fact, a Dutch insights company called Innova published 10 key food trends for 2012 which included the values of purity, authenticity, sustainability and corporate social responsibility.

These values show a remarkable crossover with halal values, which point to the idea of wholesomeness, goodness and purity.

Pure and good

For marketers looking to engage Muslim consumers – in particular in developed markets – there is an opportunity to capitalise on this growing intersection between the organic/ethical market and the halal market.

In the US, Whole Earth Meats is halal and organic. It markets its burgers based on tradition and wholesomeness, using these values to appeal to Muslim consumers first, underlining them with its halal status.

Consumers who are not Muslim also state that halal (and kosher) foods are preferential due to the care and cleanliness that goes into preparing them.

In the Ningxia region of China, which has a high Muslim population, Malaysian firm Fahim is about to implement a Halal Integrity Management solution. This will deliver exactly what we’ve been discussing here – an end-to-end solution for monitoring halal status from farm to fork. It’s an exciting development for Muslim consumers.

The Chairman of Fahim’s parent company explains the potential for crossover in his region: “Our target is not only the Muslims but also the non-Muslims. I was told by some Chinese people that they preferred halal food products to allay food safety concerns as halal in Chinese literally means pure and good.”

The lesson to take away from all this is that the potential for halal to appeal to Muslim consumers (and beyond) is open to all businesses and brands wherever they may be. The simple, and lucrative, first step is to reach out to Muslim consumers by ensuring your products are halal-compliant, and making sure that your Muslim consumers know it.

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”! 

Heather Armstrong book signing. Image by rbucich, via Flickr

In a recent conversation, the manager at a publishing house told me about their marketing plan for a new book, set in New York City. The outline included Foursquare tie-ins and a Facebook account that would leave tips about the hot spots mentioned in the novel, which is due out later this year.

After reading an advance copy of the book, I checked out some of the restaurants on Foursquare and later liked a status on the official Facebook page. As of last night, I was one of 18 Facebook fans and the only person who had checked in on Foursquare.

Why was this campaign such a failure? It wasn’t the product; the novel is quite good. It was the strategy. The marketing plan essentially asked potential readers to interact with a story they hadn’t been told.

A reader has no way of knowing what certain restaurants, museums or the Brooklyn Bridge mean to the protagonist before they’ve read the novel. Without a story or narrative, there’s just no value in a Foursquare account or Facebook page.

Telling stories about stories

In the traditional publishing world, a marketing strategy for books means public readings, author signings and press blitzes.

But as the e-book market matures, publishers need to take a page from other parts of the content industry (games, music, magazines) that rely on free, interactive content to build audiences and generate sales.

The latest installment of The Iron Fey, published by Harlequin

The idea is to give readers more than a book excerpt, but a stand-alone piece of content that can be distributed through traditional e-book devices and online stores as well as new, net-native platforms such as Facebook.

In order to draw readers into their narrative and create viral interest before launch, writers are creating supplementary content such as short stories, videos or novellas that expand the story universe of the book itself.

Harlequin, the romance and young-adult publisher, has been particularly adept at this. Between installments of her four-book series, The Iron Fey, author Julie Kagawa created a novella that focused on some of the series’ supporting characters.

The book was available for free on e-book platforms and tablets and helped introduce some of the characters to new readers and entertain existing fans until the next novel was available.

Taking a different approach, other publishers have provided high quality video content for online media outlets, bloggers and the authors themselves to use on their websites and social media platforms. Book trailers, interviews and graphic or comic interpretations of a text are all forms of content marketing that book publishers can use to reach new audiences.

The good news is that none of this will be new for publishers. Content marketing is an extension of what they’ve been doing for centuries: telling and curating stories. These stories are just being distributed and consumed in new ways. By continuing to do what they’re good at, publishers can create new audiences for books ­– ­­­­even before they hit stores or e-readers.

Image by darkroom productions, via Flickr

When I landed at the Luxury Travel Expo (LTE) in Las Vegas this winter, I noticed a few grim faces on the trade show floor among the showgirls, hula dancers and baby kangaroo in attendance.

While travel advisories and tornado warnings are par for the course for most tourism boards, tour operators and travel agents, 2011 seemed especially fraught with travel catastrophes.

Whatever your views on the ethics of “disaster tourism” (vacationing in a site recently hit by a natural or political disaster), there is no getting around the fact that with disaster comes devastating financial consequences for an industry reliant on foreign dollars.

A month after last year’s magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami, Japan experienced a 62.5 percent decline in tourism, according to reports, while Egypt’s minister of tourism recently announced a drop of 3.7 billion in industry revenues for 2011.

The long-term effects of the Jan. 13 Costa Concordia accident on the cruise industry have yet to be measured. Though Bloomberg news reports no notable drop in bookings in the wake of the tragedy, parent company Carnival Corp. has suspended broadcast, digital and direct-mail advertising “for the time being” and the loss of the ship will cut the company’s earnings by up to $95 million.

From civilian unrest to natural disaster, here are just a few of the problems presented – and some of the solutions proposed – at the conference.

Crisis: Political turmoil
Solution: Be the experts

It turns out the very same reasons luxury tour operators are sought out by discerning travelers are their strengths in times of political crisis: teams on the ground with strong ties to state departments, embassies and locals in-the-know, from concierges to car services.

The same brands which promise five-star hotels, charter flights and insider experiences are the ones that can access safe havens, flights abroad and first-hand information.

It also helps that luxury travel clients often seek out adventure and remote locations that might turn off less-experienced tourists. Rather than ask for a refund as soon as their tour stop shows up on CNN, they’ll follow up on the headlines with in-depth research, or simply place a call to their tour provider directly – not really an option when you’re booking last-minute at an all-inclusive resort.

The bottom line: Crisis can flare up anywhere. “All you can do is provide good, accurate information,” said Scott Wiseman, president at Abercrombie & Kent, USA, during a panel discussion titled Handling Challenge and Change. “In the end, customers make the final decisions.”

Crisis: Natural disaster
Solution: Make a deal

"ANA 787" Advertisement displayed in Haneda Airport following the tsunami. Image by Infradept, via Flickr

When there were rumours that the Japanese government was going to be handing out 10,000 free plane tickets to Japan in the wake of the earthquake, any fears international travellers may have had about travelling to the country were quickly quelled (just look at the giddy reactions to this piece in the Guardian).

The plan was later dropped for budgetary reasons, but the idea behind the promotion is sound: If you discount it, they will come.

As Wiseman pointed out, a good deal can outweigh even health and safety concerns: “When we put [trips to] Cairo at 20 percent off, no one was interested. At 30 percent off, same thing. But at 50 percent off, everyone was suddenly interested. More were prepared to travel there in 2012 than the year before, without the same concerns.”

Other panelists noted the same trend in the U.S. after September 11, when seemingly insurmountable safety concerns were lessened thanks to the power of the price cut.

Crisis: Global recession
Solution: Sell memories

This is one point where everyone in attendance was in agreement (perhaps unsurprisingly, as most luxury operators offer one-of-a-kind experiences, from after-hours tours of the Vatican to artist studio visits in Beijing).

Image by luisvilla, via Flickr

Rather than turning travel into a dream out of reach, the financial crisis may have actually elevated the value of vacations.

People with (relatively) diminished budgets want to be travellers, not tourists, said Tauck CEO Dan Mahar. They want to spend money on experiences rather than trendy goods, and they would rather come home with a story than a shopping bag.

They also want to spend valuable time with family and friends, and 2012 predictions included the continuing popularity of destination weddings as well as the rise of destination-based family reunions.

Crisis: The apocalypse
Solution: Have fun with it

Image by AmateurArtGuy, via Flickr

There’s no doubt that Mexico’s tourism board has had to balance a lot of negative press with promises of safe, serene getaways far from border towns and violence… but, on a lighter note, how do you put a positive spin on doomsday?

“Everyone says 2012 is going to be the end of the world,” explained a tourism rep for Mexico during LTE, “but we believe it is simply the end of the Mayan calendar – a time of hope and renewal.”

And they’re backing it up with a series of happy-go-lucky events and projects, including a countdown clock in Tapachula, a gathering of shamans and spiritual leaders in Cancun, and the opening of new archaeological sites to tourists.

The Mexican tourism board predicts an extra 30 million people will travel to Mexico in 2012 – and, with any luck, they’ll return in 2013.

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.

Sharp-eyed Sparksheet readers may recognize the cloned feline in our latest Feature Article “cover image” as Maneki Neko, the “beckoning cat” whose ceramic likeness is seen in restaurants and shops around the world. They may also be wondering why we used a Japanese icon to illustrate a story about China’s copycat brands.

It turns out that the so-called “lucky cat” is frequently mistaken as being Chinese in origin due to its popularity in Chinese communities. But, of course, we’re worldly enough at Sparksheet to know a Japanese cat when we see it. In fact, our adoption of Maneki Neko for this story was no accident at all. Here’s the story behind the cover image, from the mouth of Sparksheet Creative Director Charles Lim, who created it:

So when we first take a look at illustrating a Feature Article, it’s important to have some idea or concept before attempting a visual execution. Pushing pixels around without any solid idea often results in the ultimate shame: banality.

For this piece, we looked at the word “copycat,” and eventually honed in on the Lucky Cat (Maneki Neko). Yes, we were aware that the cat’s origin is Japanese, but it made sense within the context of counterfeit brands, and how Chinese communities adopted the sculpture to the point where it’s frequently mistaken as the original. We turned the cat into a repeating background, and gradually degraded the quality and alignment until it looked like a bad photocopy.

Choosing a suitable type is always informed by the article’s content, so in this case we used a trendy condensed Franklin and used its industrial-ness to contrast with the humanity of the Pigeon font underneath. To reinforce the copycat theme even more, we offset the type using a slighly greenish neon yellow and a warm magenta, which vaguely recall China’s national colours – but not quite.

Check out the article: Shenzhai: China’s Brand Copycats.

Corner of Huaihai and Liulin, Shanghai. Image by beltzner, via Flickr

“All war is based on deception.”

— Sun Tzu

After spending several days in the small towns of Liaoning, a province in China’s northeast, I was looking forward to my night at the Shenyang Marriott. The wide main street that snaked through the city was lined with Chanel, Versace, Gucci and Louis Vuitton boutiques. Our taxi drove past the Kempinski, the Sheraton and pulled into a glittering, golden atrium. My eyes fell upon a brass plaque: It said ‘Welcome to The Marvelot.’

It was nearly 10 p.m. and I was hungry. I dialed room service. Practically nothing on the menu was available at that hour. I went down to find the waiters at the Chinese restaurant cleaning up after what appeared to be a lavish banquet. It took them nearly 90 minutes to present a simple pasta meal; the room service boy was trailed by a sheepish manager with a basket of fruit. I was left marveling at a lot of deceit.

Marvelot Hotel, Shenyang

As the number of millionaires in China’s second and third tier cities grows faster than in the top tier cities, they are demanding expensive-looking brands and services, authentic or not.  No wonder local automakers such as Geely are designing cars that make no apologies to resembling the Mercedes-Benz Gullwing. A concierge in a big city hotel would sneer if you drew up in a Geely Gullwing, but not at the Marvelot!

Copycats

Over the last few years, several commentators have written about the Shanzhai (copycat) phenomenon. Shanzhai companies were known to target less developed areas and tier three and tier four cities with mobile phones called Nokir, Samsing and Anycat, and food brands like Haagon-Buzs, Pizza Huh and Buckstar Coffee.

Since major companies ignored these less developed regions, the Shanzhai companies faced a strong demand for their products. Lower price levels, regionalized features, an in-depth understanding of local markets and a higher responsiveness to evolving markets helped the Shanzhai companies gain market share and exploit growth potential.

Image by Caveman Chuck Coker, via Flickr

The result: a market shakeout. In the initial stages, Shanzhai operators attempted to take their products online, hoping that consumers, especially those living in smaller cities, would be gullible in the new shopping environment. They were disappointed. Eagle-eyed buyers complained, compelling Taobao, China’s largest online retail platform, to find ways of cracking down on vendors selling fakes.

Now, there are far fewer fly-by-night operators than before. But those who dreamed and planned big ­have survived. It’s a policy that seems to work for all businesses in China, and the deceivers are no different.

The Marvelot Hotel is a great example of reaching high. The National Games, to be held in Shenyang in 2012, has chosen the Marvelot as its official hotel, serving as a badge of honour assurance for most guests (barring me, of course). Any slip-ups in service could be excused, blamed on a stray staff member. This hotel had the government’s support, after all.

A visit to Fashion Town

Through the following days of my stay in Shenyang, I realized that the brand imitators in second-tier Chinese cities had taken their game to a whole new level. Three years ago, they were fly-by-night operators happy making copies of Olay cream and calling it Oily, imitating Avon and calling it Avoid. But now, there was a “Hiyatt Boutique Hotel” rising 20 floors high.

Image from myopera.com

The next day, I visited 0101 Fashion Town in the heart of the city. Shop owners and salespeople asked us not to take pictures (but I surreptitiously did). It was easy to understand why. I could see brands like S-Squared (a knock-off of D-Squared). The audacity of “Jack Walk” was stunning – they had a store right next to Jack Jones.

There were Rabex watches, and they weren’t cheap. Rosht and Manjaz chronographs proclaimed their Swiss origins, while Ederbo, an apparel brand, was all about ‘England Style’ since 1901. I’ve known Horacio Pagani as a specialty Italian automaker, but it was news to me (as I’m sure it would be to him) that he had diversified into menswear in China.

In the central square a vendor sold knock-off iPod shuffles for 30 kuai (less than $5). I kept my eyes peeled for a Dolce & Banana store – I had seen a picture, but couldn’t find it.

Brand authenticity and consumer education

In the end, the Chinese brand copycat phenomenon is a lesson in brand authenticity. In emerging markets like China, consumers are looking for greater meaning and sincerity from the brands they choose.

This search is fuelled by a desire to connect with things that feel safe, certain and unambiguous. At its heart, authenticity is about practicing what you preach; being totally clear about who you are and what you do best.

Established brands must make the effort of educating lower tier Chinese consumers about the true meaning of brand authenticiy. For a brand like Hermes, that would mean thinking about creating experience zones; showing consumers the craftsmanship of a bag, not just on Shanghai’s glitzy Huaihai Road, but also in a humble Shaoxing or Shenyang shopping mall.

Editor’s Note: Yes, we know the ”beckoning cat” in the image up top is actually Japanese in origin. Get the back story on The Sparkbeat.

The social Super Bowl

Goodbye Super Bowl on TV, hello Super Bowl online: NBC and Verizon Wireless are teaming up to provide live streaming of the game for the first time. But given that the 2010 Olympics and World Cup were both available on the net, the real question is: why the wait?

Another first is the social media command centre headquartered in downtown Indianapolis, the city hosting the event. For 15 hours each day a team of 20 will assist local fans and tourists with everything from finding parking spaces to restaurants – using channels like Facebook and Twitter to do it.

And then there’s mobile discovery company Shazam. Similar to how QR codes act as portals to digital content, the Shazam mobile app ‘listens’ to sound cues in the physical environment and directs users to content online.

The NY Times reports that nearly half of this year’s Super Bowl ads will be “Shazam enabled,” meaning more consumers will be directed to more content during commercial breaks (think coupons, free videos and gift cards).

Polar bear’s first word

Coca-Cola is doing its best to distract audiences from the game on whatever device they’re using to watch it.

On Sunday people can attend the Coke Polar Bowl event on Facebook or follow the bears’ real-time reactions on Twitter. It’s a bold move for the company – the bears have never had a chance to ‘speak’ before.

More buzz is coming from another precedent-setting move: Coke execs will be on-site at NBC studios to select which version their commercial to air. Will it be the bear with the Giants or Patriots insignia who “catches” the Coke bottle?

Ferris Bueller’s Pay Off

Everyone’s a sucker for nostalgia. That’s what brands Proctor & Gamble and Honda are betting on with their spots. If they pull it off, the recession-weary audience will enjoy revisiting some iconic moments in Super Bowl commercial history.

P&G are doing a re-make of Coke’s classic Super Bowl ad “Mean Joe Greene,” replacing the can of Coke with Downy.

Honda and actor Matthew Broderick team up for a long-awaited sequel of sorts to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

And Jerry Seinfeld dusts off some of his old Seinfeld catchphrases (and characters) in a spot for Nissan.

The Super Bowl is the biggest advertising event in the U.S., which means there is just too much content for one Sparkbeat post to cover. We haven’t mentioned VW’s “The Dog Strikes Back,” why Pepsi Max chose to go gimmicky, or whether GE’s decision to ditch celebrity glitz will pay off, for instance.

But given that most of these commercials already have millions of views on YouTube, and NBC’s post-game Google+ Hangout is already scheduled to discuss and decide which ad was best, it looks like we needn’t worry. Thanks social media – see you at the game.

As someone who used to work at a sports bar, I understand the chaos that occurs during the Super Bowl. I had the pleasure of working at Buffalo Wild Wings as a waitress in Chicago in 2007 when the Bears made it all the way to that last game. This was the first time in 21 years that our team made it, and boy did I underestimate the amount of excitement that was in store for me when I walked through those doors.

I was being high-fived and hugged by complete strangers as I tried to deliver mozzarella sticks, our usually-quiet phone systems were ringing off the hook, the wings were taken out of my hands before I even set down the plate, and I was hit several times with blowup footballs that my managers so kindly gave away to one of my tables. Needless to say, the sport has a following in North America.

Literally. The sport has a huge following on Twitter. Not only do the majority of the players and announcers have their own personal Twitter accounts, but the National Football League (NFL) has its own account with roughly 2,799,121 followers. In other words, social media has a big impact when it comes to the reputation of the game. Twitter works like a domino effect: The NFL could tweet something, and then one of their followers tweets it to their followers, and so on and so forth.

Fan and player interaction

Defensive Justin Tuck of the New York Giants. Image via nfl.com

As with any other big TV event these days, social media gives fans an opportunity to interact with others watching the game. This makes it more fun. When I think about my uncle who lives in a house with four football-hating women (even the dog is a girl), I think about how much he enjoys being able to trash-talk on Twitter. It’s a way for fans to connect (and compete) with others who are watching the game in a different place.

The interaction between fan and player has also changed, as players now have the ability to talk directly with fans via their personal accounts. For example, New England Patriots’ superstar quarterback Tom Brady can explain to fans (after the game) that the reason he fell at a pivotal moment is that an opponent grabbed his facemask. So social media is also an opportunity for athletes to maintain their own personal brands.

Watching it for the ads

Finally, we have those advertisements to discuss. Brands have been leveraging the Super Bowl, America’s biggest TV event, for years with blockbuster commercials and special Super Bowl deals. But brands have also begun to increase their social media efforts before, during, and after the game.

A scene from one of the five competing Doritos Super Bowl ads

Budweiser ran a campaign on Facebook that asks fans to guess Super Bowl scores and answer Super Bowl trivia in order to win special deals.

Pizza Hut bought a “promoted tweet” for #ReadySetHut so that Twitter followers would consider buying their product for the big game. Meanwhile, both Doritos and Pepsi let fans vote via Facebook on which commercial would air during the game.

In other words, whether or not you’re a fan, there are plenty of good reasons to watch the Super Bowl.

Check out our roundup of this year’s best Super Bowl ad campaigns.

Hyderabad, India: Image by byte via Flickr

There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the marketing world about engaging in emerging markets – especially at a time when mature markets seem unable to generate anything but gloom. The size of the populations in emerging markets and the rapidity of their growth have big global brands salivating.

Many brands are primarily looking to the major cities of the developing world – and in the travel industry often just the largest two or three cities. But there are millions of potential customers in smaller cities and towns who are largely overlooked.

In China, for example, less than 5 percent of the population lives in the “Tier 1” cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. In total, 113 cities in China have a population of more than 1 million people and at least 50 have a critical mass of high-income consumers.

If you include Tier 3 and 4 cities, brands are looking at roughly 2,000 cities and 250 million consumers in their marketing plans. Many of these cities have industries and services (like manufacturing) that support  a burgeoning middle class.

At the same time, the operating costs of setting up in these cities are much lower and these largely forsaken consumers are hungry for your attention.

Cities in emerging markets range in population

Not your big city consumer

People in second-, third- and fourth-tier cities want very different things from brands than their counterparts in Tier 1 cities.

Having been bombarded with less information, consumers in lower tier cities are often hungrier for the basics. They want transparent communications from brands that focus on the direct benefit their products will deliver.

This doesn’t mean these consumers lack sophistication, just knowledge and experience. In fact, it turns out that consumers in Tier 2 and 3 cities and towns are actually as likely to say they want experiences as material goods from brands.

To reflect this, Nokia has developed a series of apps called Life Tools that are specifically targeted at the needs of consumers outside major cities. For example, Nokia Education Life Tools offer English courses and tips for exams, while Nokia Entertainment provides content on cricket, Indians’ ruling passion. By doing this, Nokia can learn more about its customers while giving them a reason to engage with the brand.

Contrary to popular belief, consumers in smaller emerging markets are looking for experiences from brands as much as products (even more than their big city cohorts)

They’re also different from each other

Regionality also plays a huge part in shaping consumer behaviour, so cities within a similar region (say Shenzhen and Guangzhou or Hyderabad and Bangalore) will have more in common with one another than with other emerging, second-tier markets.

Some scalability is thus possible within regions. This is particularly relevant for a market like China, where the densest concentration of these emerging cities is along China’s eastern seaboard.

But remote cities and towns present opportunities of their own. Take Recife, in Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco. It’s geographically remote, but with a population of nearly 1.3 million inhabitants, this city has earned the moniker of the “Brazilian Venice” by building its wealth and growth through tourism and other resources.

So Recife is a highly attractive target market that sees itself very differently from the second-tier cities of the south. Brands should take account of this.

Recife, Brazil: Image courtesy by Márcio Cabral de Moura, via Flickr

And they want you to recognize that they’re different

Second-tier cities in emerging markets have at least one thing in common with second-tier cities in mature markets: They tend to have a great deal of civic pride.

Being among the first to serve them can build a lasting connection. Remember the Pakistani businessmen in my post on walking in the customer’s shoes? This is just as true for an entrepreneur in a second city. By coming to his city – or, increasingly in emerging markets, her city – you are explicitly recognizing his success.

Once again, the opportunities for travel brands are abundant. By some estimates, international travel out of China’s second-tier cities has doubled in the past two years. I heard at the World Air Forum in Amsterdam last year how China Southern Airlines is one of the drivers of this. The airline is building a hub and spoke strategy to connect as many of these cities as possible to welcoming overseas destinations.

Bring them to you

As a destination, Australia (where I am based) has been among the leaders in recognizing and seizing this opportunity. Organisations like Tourism Australia, Business Events Australia and the Association of Australian Convention Bureaux (AACB) have set their sights on second-tier cities.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) airlines, led by Emirates, serve Mumbai and Delhi, but they also serve Kozhikode. While this is driven in part by access to labour markets, it also opens up a connection to the wider world for local businesses and continued growth in the Indian diaspora.

What this all means is that consumers in second-, third- and fourth-tier cities are now more connected to the global economy than ever. The time is now to take your business to them. But make sure you understand who you’re dealing with. Look before you leap, but don’t look too long.

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

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

Plastic Mobile had more than eye candy at its booth

So long, silo

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

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

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

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

TV host Amber Mac conducted interviews on the trade show floor

Welcome to the real world

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

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

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

Louis Vitton gets creative with QR codes

Place still matters

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

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

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

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

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

The old media are new

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

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

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

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

We’re only human

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

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

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

Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy interviews Radian6 Marketing Director Jon McGinley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of life serial, via flickr

One of the more sobering realizations you might have upon completing a pitch or a book is that generally, no one asked you to write it. There are no agents, publishers or readers out there waiting with bated breath.

Whatever. No one asked Steve Jobs to start Apple. No one asked Rosa Parks to sit up front. No one asked Hendrix to pick up a guitar. In fact, most of the exalted moments of humanity are the result of people starting off on ventures that no one asked them to pursue.

With today’s technology, it’s easier now than at any point in the history of the world to create content. But that doesn’t mean the best content is getting to the right audience. That’s why editors and publishers need better tools to help them separate the wheat from the chaff.

Cognitive surplus

Cognitive Surplus author Clay Shirky has touched upon the fact that we are currently dealing with the down sides of living in an era of excessive creative content. There are more of us producing more content than ever before, which has resulted in ever-increasing competition for our attention. Books and ad campaigns now compete with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, even your mobile phone.

Historically, as Cory Doctorow pointed out in an article he wrote for The Guardian, there have been three steps in the publishing paradigm: identifying stories (curating); writing them; and connecting those stories to the right audience. While most technological advances have focused on making steps 2 and 3 easier, the first step (identifying stories) has gotten exponentially harder.

Publishers and editors now deal with more unsolicited manuscripts and pitches than ever before, not just because there are more of them coming in, but because there’s absolutely no tension on the process. It’s just too easy for writers to click send.

It’s become a numbers game. Writers send out more and more pitches because they’re competing with more and more pitches from other writers. Ultimately, this model is unsustainable.

Tension and curation

The simplest way to cut down on low-quality pitches is by imposing a $2 to $3 charge to put some “tension” on submissions. That will decrease spam and ensure editors only receive manuscripts and pitches targeted at them.

The other way to make life easier for editors is through technology. Cloud computing has drastically decreased the cost of creating powerful curation tools that empower editors to curate and edit.

Once editors have these processes and tools in place they’ll be able to realistically engage with unsolicited content and get back to the business of finding and publishing unique and unknown voices.