Monday, September 19, 2011

20 Ways To Tell A Better Brand Story

1. Name and claim a new category.
2. Clearly articulate what you do, without being boring.
3. Give people a great back story that explains why you exist on your about page, bio, profiles and in marketing materials.
4. Back up the story by doing great work.
5. Concentrate on speaking to customers with a particular worldview.
6. Paint a picture of the world as it is.
7. Then show your audience the world as it could be.
8. Uncover the essence of a problem and tell the story about how you solve that.
9. Appeal to all senses, stories aren’t just written, spoken or directed.
10. Use a variety of media to convey your message, show and tell.
11. Have a singular purpose and make yourself known for that. This doesn’t mean getting stuck in a box. Missions can work across products and industries.
12. Consider what one person says to another to recommend your ‘thing’. Make it easy to share.
13. Speak to your customer’s heart not just their head.
15. Tell people how and why you are different.
16. Avoid using jargon, simple language works, write as you would speak.
17. Don’t smooth away all the rough edges, be human and authentic. Honesty travels further than perfection.
18. Be consistent. Everyone in your company must understand your mission and the story you want to tell.
20. Don’t try to be the ‘next blank’. A flawed original is better than a perfect imitation.

20 Ways To Tell A Better Brand Story | The Story of Telling

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

About the Commons

The commons is a new way to express a very old idea—that some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good of all.

The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come. The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as shared social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research and creative works.

Read more here.

1000+ Cloud applications

Very cool! Pitched at NGOs but available to commercial enterprises as well. Check out the CiTaNGO Project

3 Commandments for the Next Online Content Leaders

1. Build Authority

As new delivery mechanisms and distribution platforms emerge, both new and established media are able to reach a mass audience. Those media outlets now find themselves contending with hundreds, possibly thousands of competing brands. And the lines only continue to blur for consumers.Therefore, authority will become the next sought-after currency for the app-social generation.

2. Curate

There’s an overabundance of distracting media clutter. It seems everyone has a megaphone and access to a million or more channels they’re using to share their thoughts, spanning everything from world politics to their lunch menu. With all of this noise, people have begun seeking safe havens in the form of trusted sources. Those sources provide a valuable, curated experience that selects and spotlights the best news, sports, music, technology, etc.

3. Provide Context

While authority and curation are important, without context, they mean nothing.Context adds essential meaning to information. It answers the questions: Why should I care? What does this mean for me and for society? Brands that can clearly articulate the proper context around curated information will build authority by bringing the big picture into focus for their audience.

Read more detail here.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Tell stories that make your audience TALL (Think, Act, Laugh, and Learn)

On this page you will find 20 stories that you can listen to, dissect, and hopefully use to take your own stories to new heights and make your audiences TALL (Think, Act, Laugh, and Learn)

URBANSCREEN site specific projections

Awesome compilation here.

The Storytelling FAQ

Huge resource here.

10 Principles To Streamline The Innovation Crowd

1. Be sure to use the right business model
Crowdsourcing is not a process that's taking place in an isolated cocoon; it's a mixture of different approaches coming from a crowd of diverse people: your company's employees, its partners, the customers, and even competitors. Reflect a moment on the impact this can have on your current business model. Should it be adjusted in order to function with the crowd? Because the things you need from the crowd – ideas, something solved, or funds - determine which model is the best fit for your business.

2. Be sure you turn to the right crowd with your challenge
Different problems and objectives call for different crowds. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Flexibility to apply different methods of crowdsourcing for different goals is essential to successful crowdsourcing: it's obvious that a crowd focusing on decisions and creation need more expertise than a filtering or funding crowd. The basic rule of thumb is the crowd members should at least be somewhat knowledgeable about and interested in the topic of the challenge.

3. Make sure the crowds are big enough
Next to a "credible mass" (see principle 2), there's a ‘critical mass’ needed. Although it's very important to source the right people rather than just the most people, it's obvious that results obtained through assessments and discussions by a large group of diverse and qualified people are more representative than those obtained by a small crowd. You want numbers? There are still different opinions on that. I've read 5000 people are a decent crowd, but we have been successful with crowds below 500. It actually depends on the average level of activity or engagement you reach. An intuitive and user-friendly tool is essential, and good community management can make a huge difference.

4. Be sure your employees support the crowd-principle
Get them on board and stimulate them to spread the word. Use different means to promote your challenge, like email promo, blog, twitter, regular PR... Find the right connectors and early adopters and give them easy ways to reach out to their peers and invite them in.

5. Provide guidance (with a gentle hand:)
Be a guide, not a dictator. Tell the crowd what you want from them: give room to get creative, but at the same time, make sure the challenges lead in the direction you want to head. See "How to: effectively canalize your company's creative ideas" for some tips.

6. Understand the motivations of your crowd
Have you established a clear reward system (not necessarily financial rewards, but a comprehensive system that encompasses different types of motivation)? The right incentives have been proven to attract and keep participation high.
Word of caution though: prizes alone won’t make your open innovation successful, let alone sustainable. But it’s still a vital component in your crowdsourcing effort. Read more about that in "Rewarding Idea Generation Efforts - Trick or Treat?"

7. Expect the majority of the contributions to be poor
An adage from Theodore Sturgeon (an American science fiction author) says that "ninety percent of everything is crap". It won't be different with contributions in an innovation management tool. Just keep this in mind and don't be disappointed - the other 10 percent are definitely worth it!

8. Don't demand large chunks of time of your crowd
Keep in mind that spending time in the innovation management tool isn't the main job of your crowd. Think of the spare time the crowd members have - even 30 seconds is useful for someone to vote on an idea. So try to break the tasks and questions down into small call-to-actions. Don't make them go through long complex procedures.

9. Let them express what's valuable and what's not
There is no law that says you have to implement what the crowd decides, but you need to be ready to acknowledge the crowd’s input and broadcast the action you are taking and why.

10. It's a matter of GIVE and take
A fundamental question when building a highly valuable crowd pool is to ask yourself, “What can I do to help the crowd to generate interesting ideas?”
Instead of saying “Who could help me?” or “What can I get from the crowd?”, an Innovation Management Tool is a place to extend your reach by helping others. So reverse your thinking and start thinking about other people first. This will boost both quality and quantity of the contributions!

Read more at The Jazz of Innovation

Collaborative Consumption Examples

Extensive list of links to collaborative consumption social media platforms here.

QR Codes in the Tourism Industry

Many tourism organizations have jumped on a QR code initiative by developing marketing programs aimed at increasing exposure in the mobile phone market. Read all about it here

Terry Gilliam (Monty Python) Shows You How to Make Your Own Cutout Animation

Put aside 14 minutes and Terry Gilliam, the legendary Monty Python animator, will show you how to make your own cutout animations via Open Culture

10 Completely Free Wireframing and Mockup Tools

There are several avenues you could take for sketching a wireframe, most notably pen and paper (the easiest and most cost effective way), but for the sake of this article we have focused on apps that are not only highly effective and easy to use, they are also completely free.

Tips for emotional storytelling

Create content at the intersection of what makes you happy and what the world’s “deep hunger” is.
  1. Aim high: What are your goals and missions? What would your one word be to summarize them? Choose your bulls-eye, pick your target, and create content to serve this.
  2. Be original: Dig for the story within the story. (Does the content support your mission?)
  3. Get very specific: Collect information with an eye to the most important details.
  4. Find the right voice to deliver the content – your genuine voice: Circle the wagons to determine how donors/ customers/ supporters see you (e.g., ask people who actually know, not just the CEO). Then, put a face on that voice with your content.
  5. Choose the right words: As Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
  6. Listen wholeheartedly: This may be the hardest step!
  7. Stories keep people alive: Know your audience. Think of one person that you’re writing for.
  8. Use all of your senses: For instance, even video on its own doesn’t engage all the senses (e.g., smell). Get involved and feel the story, then present that richness to your audience using as many senses as you can.
  9. Show me: What are the rich details that show through the content?
  10. Ideas are everywhere: No editing when you brainstorm.
  11. Tell the big story small: What is yours? Is it memorable, like the story of a 14-year-old buying a home? And leave out the parts that others will most likely skip. Instead, go straight to the essence of the story (e.g., pick one angle to begin and end with).
  12. Who tells great stories? Identify these people beforehand.
  13. Create a story box: This is like a suggestion box to encourage stories.
  14. Reward your storytellers: Find ways to incentivize your readers for sharing their stories.
via Content Marketing Institute

Digital Storytelling for Communities

Lots of words that make the case for Digital Storytelling in Libraries + this wonderful Prezi here.

10 Rules for Visual Storytelling

via Teaching Online Journalism

The Power of Story



Why we need new approaches to digital narrative

The way we tell stories in print has been mostly the same for some time now. Space constraints and graphic layout have made the narrative flow a broken one. With the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, the pressure is on to rethink how we produce and present our stories. Looking into why the broken-narrative experience happens may help us figure out how to prevent it in digital publishing.

Read more at Nieman Storyboard

Digital Detox


Click to enlarge.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Kogeto > 360 degree panoramic video for iPhone

Dot™ is a stylish, durable and pocketable 360° lens that snaps on the back of your iPhone 4. Capture and share panoramic videos from the palm of your hand. Check it out here.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Connecting Communities

Download Connecting Communities report
Videos from the Digital Inclusion Summit are online here.

Move aside NBN, the future's already here

In a landmark trial, the research network announced yesterday that it successfully boosted the delivery speeds of its existing fibre optic network simply by placing 40GB "muxponders" - supersized transponders - onto either ends of the cable. The trial showed data travelling much greater distances through the cable without the need for regeneration.

Don Robertson, the chief operating officer for the not-for-profit network that services 38 Australian universities, told news.com.au that the research was well ahead of its time. “We’re complementary in that we will be doing things than the NBN might be doing in 10 years, except we’re doing them today,” Mr Robertson said.

Continue reading here.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/uni-researchers-unlock-nbn-speeds-today/story-e6frfro0-1226084171779#ixzz1XE5Zigxc

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Digital Storytelling for Communities

The case for Digital Storytelling in Libraries here

The Complete Guide To Freemium Business Models

The idea of offering your product or a version of it for free has been a source of much debate. Pricing is always tricky. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs don’t give it enough thought. They will often copy the pricing strategy of similar products, base their decisions on pompous statements made by “experts” or rely on broken rationale (we worked hard so we should charge $X).

Free is even trickier and with so many opinions about it, we thought it would be refreshing to take a critical approach and dive deep into why some companies are very successful at employing the model while other companies fail. We’ve looked into economics academic papers, behavioral psychology books and strategies that worked for companies to come up with the key concepts below.

Read more at TechCrunch

How to Catch and Manage Innovative Practices

Most innovation happens at the boundaries between disciplines or specializations. It is when people meet across the boundaries that new knowledge is generated or integrated and new innovations comes up. We know this, but we also know the relative complexity to manage innovative processes at a given boundary.

Read more at Open Innovation Forum

Public Art in Non-Urban Contexts Symposium

Recently, I travelled to Blackall in Central West Queensland to document this symposium. I particularly enjoyed the first two clips in the playlist below: pitched at Council employees (who comprised the audience for the presentation), Sam Di Mauro's workshop provides a framework for successful public art projects.



Thanks to Desert Knowledge Australia Outback Business Networks for the travel assistance and to both Arts Queensland and the Blackall-Tambo Shire for the professional engagement.