Building a new Arcology (or, What good is the future if we’re all assholes?)

We already live there in our minds.

We lampoon the death of newspapers and the rise of the tablet. We exalt media that gives voice to the audience. We salivate upon technology that gives rise to the user.

Content has given way to “social” media. Social has given way to location. And now location is dead, compared to almighty Utility.

We long for Geo-fencing to take hold in our cities, and the ability for our bodies and devices to be assaulted by coupons and notifications when we wander into a shopping mall or entertainment district.

We dream of the day when we can wave the implant in our wrist across the vending machine and automatically be debited for that ice cold bottle of bleach water.

Or how about if the surrounding signage, screens and billboards detect through heat and body scans that you’re pregnant and begin to display advertisements for Target and Babies ‘R’ Us?

For some of us, this world is just around the corner. For some of us (I’m looking at you, Tokyo), this world is already here.

But what good is all this technology if you can’t change for the better, not the world, but individual lives? Where is the chapel in our virtual arcology?

The ecosystem where all commerce is mobile, all content is custom, all media is participatory and all brands are social is, indeed, “just around the corner.” But we still live in a country where 60% of people still own cassette players and 37% still read newspapers. No offense to all you analog, print-lovers.

Saying that the “future is now,” would be like those few hardcore meditators (able to drop into Delta/REM states simply by staring at a wall) saying that the next evolutionary leap in consciousness is “just around the corner” when human rights are still not being embraced (let alone practiced) worldwide. In fact, according to Integral Theory, most people are still at conventional blue and orange levels of development. If the only thing, then, that helps individuals gain greater perspective and awareness is taking the role of other, how do you shift the worldview (or consciousness) of an entire community?

Content Management and Audience Engagement in 10 Easy Steps (Creative, Branded or Otherwise)

1. Concept and Brainstorming

ou sit up in the middle of the night, suddenly and fully awake. An entire story, song, manuscript, screenplay or idea has come to you, fully-formed, in the black stillness of your room. It has blossomed in your brain – spreading like ink in the water by the grace of God or the muse next door or the residue of the conversation at last night’s party – glowing, burning, aching to manifest itself in the real world. It’s all there – including the title, storyline, dialogue, captions, pull quotes, production timeline, marketing campaign, the whole shebang. All you have to do now is write it down before you forget. Quickly now. Where was that pen? Oh shit, that’s not paper, that’s a magazine. You turn on the light. Wait, what was the name of that character again? Oh, no, it’s fading. What was that part before the last section where … oh, no … it’s gone.

Or worse, you’ve struggled for weeks to meet a deadline and can’t come up with an idea to save your life. Your editor, producer, publisher or label is waiting for your creative output, and the longer you wait, the more time (and money, you are told) you lose. You’ve tried moving your chair, you’ve tried moving your desk. You’ve tried working off-site, you’ve tried working under your desk. You can’t come up with a good idea to save your ass, and you can’t seem to get the ideas that you do have to make any sense.

The concept and brainstorming stage of the creative process is hard enough. But to make matters worse, this is the stage where you should be thinking about what this published content might look like. Is this a symphony or a short ballad? For journalists, is this a short blog post or a long, investigative piece? Are there any special online features this content will have? An audio portion (bonus interviews) or video? Setting goals before you begin can greatly reduce stress by defining the expectations around the level of research and the proposed outcome.

Keep a pen and paper with you at all times to jot down any fragments or ideas. It may also help to sketch out (or “mind map”) the concept on paper or a dry erase board before you write a single word. Some people use a voice recorder (or even their phone) to record their thoughts as they happen.

What will your content look like?

2. Writing and Research

This part is easy. It’s the actual work. Keep it simple. Write what you know. Check your facts. Take yourself out of the piece. Tell a good story. If it’s a song, it’ll need to be completely fresh, but with a sense of familiarity. You get the idea.

It’s best to carve out a regular space and a time, where you will not be interrupted, and you can allow yourself to channel your creativity. If you don’t allow it the silence in which to surface or the space in which to arise, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t.

UPDATE: For writers, don’t forget the importance of linking. Define terms by linking to their topic on Wikipedia, identify/cite sources by linking to other (previous) coverage, and for bloggers/media, drive traffic to your other content by linking to things on your own site. Don’t worry so much about using (target=”_blank”) tags in your posts. This choice should (and will, ultimately) be left in the hands of the user’s browser settings.

Always be writing.

How to Write a Press Release: The Basics and Best Practices for the Most Important Part of Your Marketing Plan

by T. Hampton Dohrman and Joran Slane Oppelt
re-posted courtesy of Hampton Arts Management

t happens to us all. You are suddenly struck with the most brilliant idea for a project or event, so you spend months (sometimes years) developing and planning. Everyone calls you a genius. You hand out flyers, tell all your friends, you set up a Facebook event, your friends tell their friends. But the media (print, blogs, radio, TV) show you no attention.

Why aren’t they talking about you? Why don’t they support community efforts like yours?

Well, my friend, they do. All the time. In fact, they’re constantly seeking out new stories and content to feature. The hard truth is that (unless you’ve pissed someone off) chances are, they don’t even know you exist.

Learning to write a good press release (and get it to the correct person) is one of the most important things you can do to promote your exhibit, concert, event, human interest story or anything else you want the media to cover.

Newsroom staff are generally very busy so it’s important to do much of the work for them. If they can grab a blurb directly from your release and you’ve already attached a nice, high-quality photo then you’ve got a better chance of getting covered. And increasing your odds and staying top-of-mind is half the battle. The other half is actually creating quality work.

1. Writing the Press Release

Letterhead
At the top, include information about who is sending the release. Use your organization letterhead if possible – If you don’t have letterhead, make some up.

Header
Including 1) the text “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE,” 2) Date of the release and 3) Contact Information (e-mail and phone number). If you don’t have a professional email address then get one. FirstInitial.LastName@gmail.com or something similar is fine. If you’ve got a website, make one like press@yourwebsite.com. Whatever you do, don’t use your BigSexyMama@hotmail.com account.

Website
Get a website for the project, even if it just has one image (maybe the poster?) on it. Facebook doesn’t count. If you don’t know how to make a website, ask a friend for help – or better yet, work out a deal with (read: pay) one of the really talented web designers we have in the area. They are guaranteed to have a lot of friends who might also be interested in supporting your project. Or, better still, learn how to do it yourself. The basics of HTML are not that difficult and once you have the skills, you’d be surprised how handy they are, not to mention how they will change the way you perceive most websites. Many free hosting solutions are available (DreamHost and WordPress are two examples).

Date of event
Don’t forget to include this information. Just don’t.

Headline
This is a modified version of your subject line (or vice versa), and can also be adapted when Tweeting or texting. Keep it around 140 characters.

Description
A one-sentence, exciting narrative about the project – If you can’t summarize your concept or event in one sentence then you may need to revisit your concept – it may be too complicated. This is also your “elevator pitch.” Pretend you have a potential investor or sponsor’s ear for 30 seconds. What would you say?

First Paragraph
Begin with the location “Tampa, FL – “ or wherever the project takes place. The first paragraph should contain all of the most important information: Who, what, when, where, why should I care? Date, time, location, what is it, how much does it cost, etc.

Second Paragraph
This is your “sell” paragraph, like your pitch about why this thing you are doing is awesome. It should be written as if you were writing it directly for publication in print – Media people are very busy and if the second paragraph is well written (and relatively objective) they will often grab it word for word. This is an example of how you can make their job easier and therefore increase the likelihood that it will get picked up.

Other paragraphs
Highlight what is interesting. You can even say, “Highlights include:” and provide a bulleted list. A bulleted list is great for on-air personalities (anchors, DJs) who read press releases at a glance and prefer information distilled into easily readable bites. For this reason, don’t use too many big words in this section. This is also a good place to use press or critical quotes, “What people are saying about BLANK:”

Last Paragraph
Include some form of the language, “If you have questions, please contact Your Name at your@email.com or (your) phone-number.” This is for the media, if they need more information or possibly additional photography, but also for people with questions about the event or project. Once you put your phone number in print you will get people calling you with really weird questions – this is unavoidable. Change your voicemail greeting to something semi-professional and short.

Fonts
Although it might not look as fancy, you should always use ‘Web-safe’ fonts in your release. Web-safe fonts are standard on all computers, so using them ensures that the documents will look the same no matter who opens them. You can do a google search for a complete list of Web-safe fonts but some standard favorites include Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana.

The total length of your press release should be one page if possible, but certainly no more than two.

Book Review: Medill on Media Engagement

“Content may be why people visit a site, but community is why people stay.” – Business Week executive, late 1990

f you are a business owner or work anywhere near media, marketing or branded content, listen up. Many of you are still loading up your “content shotgun” and blasting it out (in one-to-many fashion), blindly connecting your Twitter feed to your Facebook wall, posting updates or links to blog posts and not ever returning to interact in a conversational way with your audience (the people who follow you). Those of you (yes, you), now officially have two options. 1) Quit what you’re doing, because not only are you doing it wrong, but you’re probably pissing people off, or 2) read Medill’s 2011 study on Media Engagement and learn how to do it right.

There is no longer an in between.

If you’re like me, you have a healthy ‘suggested reading’ list and have to decide which book recommendations (Amazon or otherwise) make it into your wish list or shopping cart. Titles like McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, the classic Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, the oh-so-trendy Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations pop up for me daily.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these titles. They provide a range of humor, encouragement and education, and if you’re a small business owner who has moved their entire advertising budget from print and (God forbid) radio to paying a college student to maintain your Facebook page, they’re probably telling you what you need to hear. And if you’re growing your lists (and your bottom line) and sleeping better at night, then more power to you. The problem is that all these titles tell you ‘you should engage,’ and not enough tell you how or why. These books state the well-educated opinions of their respective authors, and while most are entertaining (and some are even well-written) none of them are necessarily wrong, and this is where they succeed. If someone thinks you should engage your audience, you could try to debate them, but you’d lose.

What sets the 249-page Medill study apart from many of the self-help new media best-sellers is that it is crafted around volumes of rich, empirical research and data – a collaboration between Northwestern University’s Media Management Center, the Readership Institute and the Medill School. To give you a sense of the history Medill has with the subject, George Gallup (author/creator of the Gallup Poll) instructed a course called “Reader Interest” at Medill back in 1931.

It is, at its worst, a “textbook” – using big words (like “receptivity”) and speaking sometimes too directly to larger businesses or media companies. At its best, it is a comprehensive, 21st century map of how we interact with media that obliterates once and for all the line between concepts like “news” and “entertainment.” It is the new media bible, a definitive resource for those attempting to understand and succeed in audience engagement and other than your own market research and case studies should be the only book you grab in the event of a fire at the office.

Barcamp Tampa: Understanding the “un-conference” (with video)

I still have very fuzzy memories about the morning this happened. It was September 2009, and I had been wrangled into speaking at something called Barcamp at the Tampa USF campus by my friend Julia Gorzka. She’d signed me up for a panel to talk about media, marketing, changes in the industry, whatever. Another day, another panel. I was assured it was no big deal, “in and out.”

Was I ever in for a goddamn shock.

My chauffer (Ms. Gorzka) and I arrived at the lobby of the Business building around 8:45 a.m. (a good 15 minutes before we were supposed to “go on”) only to find there were no session names listed anywhere at eye level. No speakers’ photos on display on flimsy wooden easels. No moderators assembling their notes and tending to their panelists. No sense of order whatsoever. Worse yet, my name and photo was not on any programs, collateral materials, table-top placards or imprinted plastic lanyards that I could take home and hang on my bookshelf. There was no catered breakfast or VIP area for the scheduled speakers. There were no speakers, there wasn’t even a schedule. I was in a tailspin. Julia had lied to me!

“What is this place? And what the hell is going on?,” I thought.

The unwashed masses – the public, for God’s sake – were simply being allowed to sign up (first come, first served) and create topics of discussion on the spot, organizing panels on subjects ranging from iPhone development to e-commerce to online publishing with whomever happened to be hanging around. It was a fucking uprising! I’m not even going to talk about the “hula hoop thing.”

Here’s a video from that morning, obviously taken before I’d had my morning coffee. (I’m at around the 4:42 mark).

Barcamp Tampa Bay 2009 Intro from Gavin Stark on Vimeo.

Barcamp calls itself the “un-conference,” a sort of open-source approach to workshops, allowing panel discussions to self-organize around attendees (a typically healthy showing of marketers, developers, programmers and designers). The events originated in 2005, as an answer to Tim O’Reilly‘s stuffier, invitation-only “Foo Camp.” (Foo. Bar. Fubar. Get it?).

Barcamp 2010 will be held at K-Force in Ybor City on September 25 and 26. Attendance is free. And a word of warning, for those accustomed to the conference scene, don’t come to Barcamp expecting the speakers to drop a bunch of knowledge on you from their wooden risers and plastic podiums. Come prepared to take notes and participate in an open discourse with your fellow tribe members, community peers and a group of natural leaders. You might just “un-learn” something.

Web-first content on 7 platforms: My SXSW 2010 panel

A big thank you to everyone at SXSW for having me (and my Creative Loafing compatriots) out to Austin for the 2010 Interactive Conference.

We came, we spoke, we took notes, we wrote daily blog posts, we shot video, we stayed for the music portion, we swore we’d never party that hard again (again).

Here’s the updated 7-platform model that we debuted at the panel and talked about extensively (click the thumbnail for a full sized image). For an explanation of the 7-platform model, click here.

There will be a podcast of our panel posted soon by the South By folks and we will post a link to that as soon as we get it.

You can also watch a video here of our pre-panel shenanigans in the hallway of the Austin Convention Center.

See you all next year!

It’s a brave, new “TV Party” world

In 1978, Glenn O’Brien and Chris Stein rented a dingy Manhattan public access TV studio. They began producing a show called “TV Party” that would air until 1982. Their guests were local artists, musicians and bohemians. There was no script, and the “crew” was not experienced at handling audio or video equipment. Their friend, a little-known artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat occasionally took a turn at the titling console, typing random messages across the screen, as the cameras zoomed, swept, panned, cut quickly back and forth and captured otherwise low-key conversations. In fact, much of the program, in addition to musical performances, consisted of the cast and crew sitting around drinking, smoking joints, and – well – partying. It was a natural evolution of media forms, just as the alt-weeklies (Village Voice, et. al.) were the next logical step for the counter-culture “underground” press. The freaks had officially taken over the airwaves.

Check out this clip, featuring Blondie, Klaus Nomi and others.

Considering the sensation of “reality” television and our thirst for new, voyeuristic experiences, “TV Party” was definitely ahead of its time. The only thing to my knowledge that predates it is William Greaves’ legendary film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.

Social Fresh Tampa: social media conference wrap-up

The words “social media” typically scare the hell out of business owners. Either you don’t have the time, you don’t understand it, or it’s just beneath you – perceived as something your teenage kids do instead of focusing on their homework. If you’re one of those brave souls looking to make moves in the world of social media, or simply learn more about it, the Social Fresh conference held on Monday, February 8 at the Doubletree Westshore in Tampa was an ideal place to begin. Individual presentations, group panels and small roundtable sessions ran from 9 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. and included some heavy-hitting speakers from companies like Best Buy, General Motors, MTV, USAToday and a keynote from Social Media Group‘s Maggie Fox.

Fox’s keynote was primarily about the scalability of social media forms. She presented three types of known media – owned, paid and earned – and an easy-to-remember scalability formula, “Earned + Paid x Owned = Scaled Social Media.” Some good background on this concept – and some visuals – can be found here (courtesy of Dave Fleet). The model allows businesses to leverage content (owned); advertising (paid) and reviews, articles and awards (earned) to achieve a true social media mix.

For small business owners, the creation of content is rarely a top priority, what with the daily tasks of running the actual business. However, Fox (and plenty of others over the course of the day) asserted that all companies are now media companies, and should start thinking like one.

Change the rules, not necessarily the game

In the car on the way to school this morning, I was explaining to my four-year-old daughter the importance of not excluding your friends from the games you’re playing.

“If you do this,” I told her, “you risk hurting their feelings.” Like she had done the night before when she chose to sneak off with her boyfriend in the aisles of the library (don’t get me started) and utterly ignore her cute little French friend that had tagged along.

“Say you’re playing a game for two people and a third friend shows up. What do you do?” I asked.

“Play a different game,” she said.

“That’s right, and sometimes you can still play the same game, but change the rules of the game to allow more people to play – so that everyone feels included.” (The veiled lesson in social responsibility was working like a charm!)

She seemed to understand. But then she started to crunch the numbers.

“So, if 15 people show up, we have to change the rules 15 times?”

“No,” I said, “you change the rules one time, making it a 15-player game. Now, give me an example of a 15-player game.”

“Hide and seek?” she answered.

“Great idea.” I said.

“What about zero players?” she asked.

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a zero-player game,” I cautioned.

“Yes there is,” she said confidently.

“Give me an example of a zero-player game,” I demanded.

“Sleep.”

Is your customer experience worth the wait?

This past weekend, my wife and I visited Universal Studios Orlando and braved lines sometimes longer than an hour to immerse ourselves in our favorite films and gawk at the most popular attractions. As these lines wound through turnstiles; in and out of buildings; past video screens and around huge, detailed and awe-inspiring resin sculptures; I was reminded that the customer experience is never just about the ride. It’s about when you get on, how you get on, and how you’re treated once you’re off.