• work on big meaty problems
• do meaningful work
• grow my skills
• balance creative and strategic work
• focus on the team and culture
• earn my keep

I’m very happy to say that I found a place where I get to check every box on the list. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be joining Klick. My mandate is to bring a creative perspective to the strategy practice.

If you know me, you know that I’m slightly passionate about diving to the heart of a problem and getting to the story behind the data. At Klick, this will be a big part of how I get to spend my days, collaborating with an fantastically strong digital strategy team.

I’ve got a ton to learn on the healthcare side. My brother the Dr may be hearing from me a bit more frequently in the coming weeks.

The past month was a gift. I spoke with so many smart, kind, helpful people, and made a couple of new friends. I am a very lucky man.

I have a “what I learned while drinking coffee and talking about the state of the digital industry in Toronto for 30 days” post half written. I’ll finish it shortly. The takeaway: I’m keeping the coffee circuit up. Way too many amazing people to stop. Ping me. We’ll have coffee and talk.

I moved because there’s a lot of interesting energy in the market now. It seems like a really good time to put one’s self in opportunity’s path. So that’s exactly what I’m doing: keeping an open mind, and having lots of conversations. It’s wonderful, and great conversations with great people are their own reward. Each discussion opens a new path, some leading very interesting places.

My skill set is pretty broad. I’m a three-time entrepreneur with a decade experience doing social and digital strategy, I’m a pretty talented designer, and a burgeoning storyteller. I’m totally nerdy for people and technology. I’m looking for opportunities where I can bring my full skills to bear.

I have no idea what the next 6 months will look like for me. I’m blessed to have an incredibly supportive family, but I’m not sitting on piles of cash. To keep the lights on, I’m taking on consulting projects. Since 1997 I’ve consulted with billion dollar enterprises, with small startups, and everything in between. If you’re looking for creative solutions for marketing in 2012, let’s talk. I can help with

• ROI focussed social media and digital strategies
• Agency pitches
• Presentations
• Training sessions
• Web design

If you’ve got an interesting problem, and are looking for a senior digital marketer to join your team, check out my resume, or my LinkedIn profile. We should talk too.

This is exactly what I’ve been harping about on Twitter lately. Without vision it’s very hard to make progress. Storytelling is an extremely effective way of transferring vision. As strategists and designers we need to get really, really good at weaving engaging stories in order to get our points across in a way that they become actionable.

Instagram, the iphone social network photo app thing, has me seeing things.

I’m enjoying the process of looking for a shot.

Often looking up and around, checking out the view.

The omnipresent iphone makes for a willing collaborator.

It lets me focus on composition, then use apps highlight shape and form.

I look for interesting shapes or textures.

It’s been some time since I’ve used my DSLR. It looks like it might be a while.

I use a combo of Hipstamatic, Instagram, 100Cameras, Mill Colour, Camera+, and TiltShiftGen. Mostly shot in Hipstamatic.

SXSW is huge. Tens of thousands of people descend on Austin for two weeks of Interactive (aka web), Film, and Music programming. It is the largest web conference in the world. Media, pundits, and bloggers have written a million words or more covering SXSW over the past few years, and with good reason: SXSW offers a unique view of where the web (and culture in general) is headed.

When I first attended SXSWi in 2005, the emphasis was squarely on web design and development. This was pre-Twitter, when you still needed to explain what a blog was, and the Palm Treo was the hot gadget. As the web has matured, so has the conference. Today, the web touches most aspects of our lives. Design and development are still covered, but the keynotes, talks, and panels on business, marketing, community, non-profits, journalism, startups, psychology, culture, storytelling, games, etc outnumber the once dominant conversation by a huge margin.

There are 3 main reasons I go to Austin every year: to spark ideas and inspiration from the talks, to meet brilliant and inspiring people, and to bathe in the zeitgeist.Not much is written about this last point, probably because it’s hard to quantify. Rather than give a highlight reel of the talks I attended, this post will attempt to capture some of the energy and trends one observes by simply being at the heart of SXSW.

Geek culture = popular culture

While no one was looking, the geeks inherited the earth. As global culture has shifted online, the people building and designing the software, hardware, and interfaces we use have been elevated from fringe to centre stage. Mastery of digital tools, once a reason for derision, has become table stakes just to sit at the big kids’ cultural table. By building the tools and platforms the world uses to talk, share, learn and entertain, the geeks dominate and direct popular culture.

Game mechanics in the “real” world

Games engage humans like few other non-survival activities. Strategists, developers, and marketers are figuring out how to use the very things that make games so engaging in non-game scenarios. I’m not talking about making everything into a game, rather the application of certain motivational hooks to move people through a process. This will be absolutely fascinating to watch.

We live in a post-PC world

There were more iPads and smartphones being used to take notes than laptops. There were tens of thousands of photos taken, and very few dedicated cameras. The age of the PC is moving past us. Tablets and smartphones have taken over. SXSW attracts an early adopter crowd. Within 18 months, laptops will start to vanish from most business meetings.

Group messaging is the next big thing

Group.me and Beluga were two of the “winning” apps this year. Both programs allow the user to send short messages to a group via SMS, email, web, or directly in the app. This simple fact has huge implications. It allows for the creation of cross platform ad hoc social networks. In Austin, the main use was to coordinate meeting places with friends. In the near future, we’ll see these apps used for news reporting (topic specific updates), collaboration, permanent small-group networks, and ad-hoc event based networks. The ability to create segment specific networks (all my vegetarian friends in Austin) opens a whole new world of social media.

Location, location, location

First there was Foursquare and Gowalla. Then came SCVNGR, Facebook Places, and now Google Latitude. Despite a growing ennui from some, the money’s on Location Based Services exploding over the next couple of years. And with good reason. The combination of loyalty incentives (check in to a store three times to unlock 25% discount on your 4th purchase), growth in smart phones and new sensors and protocols like NFC that will allow auto-checkin makes for a potent mix of culture and marketing. Lots more action here in the coming years.

Influence

Everyone is talking about it. No one really agrees on how to measure it. To some, an influence score is the holy grail of social media. To others, it’s a terrifying reduction of the human experience into a single metric. One thing is for sure, influence and the conversation about it are not going away any time soon.

Information overload

Too. Many. Options. How do you reach your audience when they are increasingly scattered (in both attention and location)? This year, there were hundreds of just-launched apps vying for eyeballs. Noise, distraction, and infinite choice characterized both the streets around the Austin Convention Centre and the web in general. The number of destinations we can visit and the devices we visit them with are going to continue to increase. Organizations are going to have to become very adept at monitoring and engaging in multiple locations and in multiple formats in order to reach their audiences.

Is it worth it?

Absolutely.

It’s the damned middle; the non-peaks. Coming off a peak, the relative dullness of a given situation is magnified by the non-peakedness of the moment. Not only does one feel off because of the relative dullness, one magnifies the intensity of the displeasure by resisting the descent from the peak. IE, I feel droopy, I feel shitty about feeling droopy, and I feel shitty about not being on the peak. Triple whammy.

At it’s simplest, the study of culture is the process of paying attention to stuff and writing it down. Culture is like oxygen: it’s omnipresent, and invisible. But stop and notice, and it’s all around us.

Within the context of community strategy, the study of culture is mega important. We already notice things like modes of dress (formal wear or bathrobes?), communication norms (“Forsooth, the yonder sun doth awaken” or “omg!!!! i <3 the sunrise ”?), types of interaction (waltzing or grinding?), etc. Studying culture is taking these things that are already within our awareness and naming them.

In doing so, we uncover opportunity. We uncover a different way to think about a group. We discover clues to increase the effectiveness of our communication. We figure out how to attract community members who will stick around and contribute. Importantly, we can also discover gaps; we can see what’s missing, and where there are opportunities to add value.

Studying culture gives you and your team a way to talk about and understand a group and an environment. By explicitly naming a group’s cultural proclivities you gain a new kind of superpower. Try it. It’s easy. I bet you’ll be surprised at how simply naming what you’re observing changes how you think.

designguru.tv Episode 7 – Sequentia Environics from http://designguru.org on Vimeo.

I am not bound up by my history or by my story. This moment is unique – it will never come again. It’s mine to do with as I please.

In this moment, I can choose to be up or to be down. Even in a moment filled with pain, I can choose not to suffer.

Cut the binds to the past and the fear of the future. Just for this moment. Just for this second.

It’s hard, but totally worthwhile.

This breakthrough fundamentally changed the way we’re collaborating and developing strategies @sequentia.

Our intention is to flush this outline into a full bore presentation/road show. We’ll see how that goes.

• Why are we here?
  • Over the past few engagements, we’ve been experimenting with working with visual models, and have found them very effective
    • collaborating
    • explaining
    • informing strategy and tactics
  • We *think* this way of working is useful beyond strategy development. 
  • We DO NOT have all the info on this.
  • Purpose of this hour is to share our experiences, and see if there is any value in continuing to explore this as a group
• What is a mental model?
  • visual or tactile representation of an idea
    • a map
    • a sculpture
    • a flowchart
    • a diagram
• Why are models useful in strategy development
  • they are sources of both predictive and explanatory power
    • a well constructed model helps us explain and predict behaviours -> becomes the basis for strategy
  • framework for layering data and ideas
    • frees up your brain from having to hold stuff -> lets you move on to other stuff
    • lets you see connections between far flung ideas
  • allows teams to work together on complex concepts
    • breaks big concepts up into smaller chunks that can be layered on top of each other
    • the model offers a common language
    • get multiple perspectives and multiple A HA!s
  • allows you to communicate big ideas relatively simply
    • strategies are only effective if they are believable and understandable
• Simple example of a model used for strategy
  • Sales funnel
• Where do the ideas come from? AKA: What are we layering onto this framework?
  • research
    • Surveys
    • Interviews
    • Ethnography
    • Experience
• Types of model frameworks
  • venn
  • ladder
  • spectrum/continuum
  • pyramid
  • funnel
  • matrix
  • flowchart
  • list
  • mind map
  • affinity diagram
• Example of CLIENT X model
  • started with research
    • in this case, I had Ujwal walk me through the research. I prepared a bunch of thought starters and open ended questions to ask him about the work, to help uncover meaning. These may or may not be relative in all cases, but this should give you an idea
      • Why should someone follow these accounts? What would have to happen to thrill that follower/fan? 
      • what are the ways you can ignite their passion? 
      • Are the passions shared across brands? Which are common? Which are unique? Which can you build contests or campaigns around?
      • What would cause them to share? 
      • What should the tone be? Why? How personal? Is it first person or the royal we? 
      • Is it better to grow organically or to buy an audience? 
      • How can we integrate the social strategy back into the brand sites to create a virtuous circle? 
      • Are there any direct ROI opportunities? Can they drive towards specific promotions? Is there a twitter or facebook only coupon? 
      • How are we going to measure success? The strategy should steer towards those objectives
      • Are there existing targets for acquisition for the social program? 
      • are there any corporate culture changes that we need to recommend to allow these to succeed? Are they nimble enough to succeed? If not, should we recommend another approach? 
      • What about monitoring?
      • next came discussion
  • as we talked through these questions, relationships between ideas started to form, and we started to jot them down
    • 
  • this led to a number of A HA! moments and ultimately to the construct we presented (with great success) to the client
  • Take aways
    • using a framework (a spectrum in this case) allowed us to place a bunch of data onto a structure that we could see and manipulate
    • we were able to collaborate on the development of the model, since we were both looking at the same structure
    • we were able to push way beyond what we could have done if we were only holding the data in our heads
      • test concepts
      • move things around
      • take things out and add them back in
    • the model we ultimately developed allows us to convey HUGE meaning to the client in a way that minimizes individual distortion
• Ways of working
  • you have to start in research. do a deep dive, for as long as you can/budget allows. make observations, but try to avoid conclusions. make notes. then write. and write and write and write. or go for a walk with a voice recorder. let your mind wander. let the research organize itself. then start asking yourself questions