We’re Now Blogging At Rassak.com Itself. Come On Over.

We’re now blogging at Rassak.com itself. See you there.

Talking Digital Community Building with Ad Agency Planners

Mark Lewis is a very cool and interesting guy. He’s originally Belgian — though he sounds very British. He’s been in the San Francisco Bay area for many years now. He is Group Director for Brand Strategy at the San Francisco ad agency Venables Bell and Partners. (Check out their very funny and spot-on “Green Police” commercial for the Audi A3 TDI at their website — you might need to scroll through the commercials on their homepage to find it — they don’t allow posting to the individual video itself)

Mark also started the Planningness conference last year. It quickly became a major hit with his fellow ad agency planners (the people who figure out what  the strategy/plan for what a company should do with their brand or message — before handing the case off to the “creative department”).

Mark also taught Rassak’s Dylan Thomas in ad school… and Dylan’s been giving Planningness a little helping hand from the beginning with their website.

This year Mark asked me to come out to Planningness and run a workshop on digital community organizing — a big topic for a lot of brands. The Planningness format is cool — after a talk by the speaker, the audience breaks into groups and has to solve a problem posed in the talk.

I brought my little Kodak flip-like video camera and got some nice little clips of the groups in my session. You can see them below after my slide deck. My talk was on leveraging social networks to organize commnities. My assignment for the attendees was to pick a group they care about and think hey they could teach them tools so they could better organize their own communities.

Planningness 2010 … Barak Kassar, Rassak Experience

BTW, Mark blogs here at Planning from the Outside.

Great Example of Communication … Now Give Blood!

Check out these three videos made by an “ad agency” (of sorts.. they, like us, are quick to throw in the “of sorts”) named Jigsaw in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA. The videos are for the BloodCenter of Wisconsin. These do a great job communicating. They show real people who highlight a message the center wants to get across. They are dramatic. They are persuasive.  Time to give blood!

Could your business or organization benefit from telling stories like this? Not every organization deals with life-and-death drama as a blood center does. But, very often, there are smart ways to tease out what is interesting in (or often around) your organization and tell your stories in very compelling ways.

As always… comments welcome at facebook.com/rassakexperience. Join our community there.

iCame iSaw iPad (Perhaps)

Comments appreciated at facebook.com/rassakexperience

The iPad is undeniably a sweet little sliver of a new media paradigm. Well… it’s not that new. I, and a number of people, have been experimenting with presenting and working on a tablet for years (an HP for me). But Apple made it good — or certainly good enough.  And being the geniuses that they are, it seems new to the world — and therefore it IS new to the world.

Traditional print media people  (books, magazines, newspapers) LOVE the iPad… They see themselves in it … and why not? One of the beauties (perhaps a dangerous beauty) of the iPad is that it feels so much like paper. So, in that way, it’s a great transitional technology. It allows very smart “traditional media” people (the paper kind) who didn’t “grock” tech before — at the level that would let them start to free-associate about possibilities and begin to self innovate  –   to start thinking about what they could do. And it excites them.

This is fantastic!

But.

A good number of smart traditional media companies are launching straight into iPad apps …  and quite a few are jumping blithely over a set of tech/media innovations that preceded the iPad innovation: And that is the social/sharing aspect of media. Social media/tech is CRUCIAL to building media businesses .. to marketing, branding, product development. It is actually quite a lot more subtle to develop for. “Porting” print content to the iPad is still very much within the comfortable paradigm of an expert creating content for a market — one-to-many.

The iPad media apps (e.g. Flipboard) that were developed fresh by people who cut their media teeth in the social era are fantastic examples of  applications that takes full advantage of the knowledge and innovation-thinking that’s been going on for the last several years — it’s “papery” and very very social (another good example is this from the Guardian in the UK) .

A number of other applications simply don’t. They have papery goodness… but just aren’t social. So the content ends up in a person hands… and then it just sits there. That reader is an end-node in a traditional one-to-many distribution schema that might appear beautiful on a new beautiful device, but is missing out on a big big part of the media revolution — many-to-many networks. This limits growth — a lot.

We could see a lot of media innovation investment going toward replicating old models on a new screen — because the screen is so compelling (and it is!). I’d like to see the companies investing in this area weave people who really get social media onto their teams.

That’ll lead to incredible leaps forward, real innovation.

Down Home Advice for Online Community Builders

I must have walked past this sign/poster thousands of times and simply not paid attention to it before. It is behind the glass on the noticeboard of a community ministry in my neighborhood of Noe Valley — in San Francisco. I’m posting because  I talk to so many corporate marketers who are frustrated that their online community building efforts are not taking off. And when I look closely at their communities, I see that they are so focused on the “online” and they so often forget the “community” … and, in the end, so many basic tenets of “plain old community building” as described in this poster, just are not present.  I will likely write more about this in the future, but for now just think about how your company or organization can do its version of the acts the poster calls for. What does it mean for you to, for example, “sit on your stoop” or “find a lost dog” or “help carry something heavy” ? If your corporate communications goals include having a vibrant community, this sign is worth reading and thinking about.