Archive for June, 2009

Creativity Behind SparkSpace

Creativity is a loose term. In the advertising agency world, we think of “creatives” as graphic designers or even brand strategists or copy writers. Musicians are creative. Painters and sculptors are seen as being creative. I get the feeling that most people think creativity must be tied to a being an artist of some sorts.

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Building Relatioinships and Onions

Please pay attention Twitter business users.  Twitter is not a mass medium like TV or radio or print.  Micro-blogging is NOT about pushing your messages out to as many people as you can.  Micro-blogging is a tool that helps you communicate with the people around you so that you can find and build better offline relationships.  There is no free lunch or magic bullet here.  You still need to do the work. For God sake, please turn off your auto-responders.  I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t care about your free giveaway or your one-time special offer or the discounted products you sell.  Really, I don’t care.  I don’t care because you are already showing me you don’t care one bit about me. Why then should I care about you? For instance, @Ryenterprises looks like and may be a really nice guy.  But on Twitter, he is failing. Seriously?  @Ryenterprises, no disrespect with this, but I’m not interested and I’ve stopped following you. Relationships are Like Onions My background in communication theory has helped me learn how to navigate the social market place and use tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the Ning networks to reach my business development and marketing goals. One of my favorite ideas was developed in 1973 by Irwin Altman and the late Dalmas Taylor, both of which were communication and psychology university scholars. Their concept of Social Penetration discusses how relational closeness is developed through the gradual process of mutual disclosure of personal information. The process starts with the sharing of superficial layers of information (i.e. what you do for a living, where you live, your hobbies, etc.) and than moves to the deeper layers of what makes us who we are (like our core values, our faith, our belief structure).  Altman and [...]

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A New Rennisiance

Sarah and I have been watching a PBS documentary on The Medici family, known for being one of the most powerful families in Florence during the Renaissance period.  I’ve always loved learning about the Renaissance. The middle ages had been dominated with political control, tyranny, and poverty among the serf class.  With most of Florence hit hard by Back Death, you can get the picture as to why an era of rebirth was welcomed and embraced by the people of the time.  The Renaissance was about this birth of new ideas and new ways of thinking.  People were willing to challenge the norms.  Artists and thinkers like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and  Leonardo da Vinci were some of the media rock stars of the time. It was also a period where media thrived.  Media symbolized this era of  new thinking and drove the spreading of  new ideas.  Keep in mind that paintings and music and plays were the media of the day.  Lorenzo de’ Medici was noted as being the patron saint of these arts, often contributing significant amounts of capital to fund artistic projects that would produce returns in status, power and respect. {Fast forward to present day} I can’t seem to ignore the similarities between the Renaissance and our present day movement toward social media technology.  The canvas is a bit different, but it’s driving our culture to be reborn.  Here was what was going through my head at 3AM this morning.  (Yes, I am a nerd.) There’s a ton of new media going around. But instead of the Sistine Chapel, today  we have Facebook and YouTube and Ning.  Millions of people stand in awe of the creations of a small group of technology innovators, and what’s even cooler is that those media creation make it possible to continue to [...]

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