I’ve always loved retro illustrations, but have never really put my finger on the exact artists or style. Thanks to Dyna Moe and her fantastic Mad Men Illustrated series, I’ve been able to figure that out.
Aurelius Battaglia’s work captures the essence of what I love about this style. Wacky colour combinations, geometric shapes, and exaggerated features:
I also love the textures in Art Seiden’s work. Reminds me of the artwork in some of the French storybooks I had when I was a kid.
To make my site more accessible (and iPad/iPhone friendly), I’ve finally abandoned my old Flash-based website in favour of a Wordpress-based one. I will be working on customization over the next few weeks. I’m currently working through some jQuery tutorials, so hopefully I’ll be able to work up to a fancier look soon.
It’s hard to believe, but my time in Banff is almost up. It seems like almost yesterday when I landed in Calgary and laid eyes upon the Rocky Mountains for the first time. August 7th, I’m driving to Jasper, hopping on a train, and moving back home (to Toronto).
The past 15 months have been incredible. Looking back, there have been some great times. I’ve been so fortunate to spend my first year out of school working in such an inspiring and challenging environment.
This week, we had a meeting about our social media efforts to plan forward into the fall. When I first started as a work-study last year, we had profiles set up, but no one dedicated to them. There was a sense that social media was something that may require some more attention, but there wasn’t much going on on that front. As one of my first projects, I started to do some research into best practices, and eventually took on updating/managing the Centre’s social media presence with the head of our webteam.
We’ve seen an amazing amount of growth since then, and it has been a great learning experience. I came into this position knowing I had a bit of interest in social media, but this past year has opened up a new field within marketing/communications that seems to be getting increasingly fascinating. I love that it’s constantly changing, that we’re all still figuring out how to use it best, and that it has so much potential. I especially love seeing the results of my work when followers and fans begin to interact with the brand and the first signs of a community begin to appear.
Our meeting included a rag-tag assortment of staff within our department who are interested (many more than last year), representing communications, events marketing, recruitment marketing, and the webteam. Having input on all sides was very helpful, and we’ve decided on a direction for the fall that includes managing one main profile for the organization and beginning the process of eliminating any rogue accounts (or, in the case of active profiles, transitioning ownership/management into the communications department). While there’s a sense among some departments that social media is something anyone can do and that only takes a few minutes a day, I think it’s important for brand monitoring/management and social media to live with a specific person/team who are knowledgeable and trained to deal with any situations, should they arise.
Here’s a poem I wrote a few years back for a French class. Stumbled upon it while going through some old writing, so figured I’d post it here.
Hiver arrivé, des flocons de neige tombent du ciel.
Elle lève les yeux et sort sa langue,
Habitude d’une jeune fillette, encore innocente.
Elle rêve d’attraper l’hiver et de l’emmener à la maison.
De danser avec lui pour le reste de la saison.
Marchant un pas devant l’autre,
La froideur de la saison pénètre son corps.
Perte de chaleur, d’émotions, de sensation.
Elle rêve d’attraper l’hiver et de l’emmener à la maison.
De parler avec lui, de sortir de sa dépression.
Jeune femme ambivalente,
Perdue dans une blancheur impénétrable.
Flocons et glace partout, elle est presque invisible.
Elle rêve d’attraper l’hiver et de l’emmener à la maison.
De le garder avec elle, sans peur d’abandon.
Arrivée au coin de la rue, notre héroïne s’arrête.
Elle se retourne, courant, elle s’enfuit dans la nuit.
Disparu en quelques secondes, la noirceur avale ses pas.
Elle rêve d’attraper l’hiver et de l’emmener à la maison.
Mais sa peur la bouleverse, elle se sauve sans raison.
Last year, I was taking a class on social uses of new media. At the end of the first lecture of the semester, our professor turned off the lights, closed his PowerPoint presentation, and proceeded to press play on my first TedTalk: Kevin Kelly on the future of the web.
In the presentation, Kelly speaks about stages of the Internet. We’re going into the third stage, where data is becoming linked into “one machine.” Near the end of the talk, he discusses social networks, and how we currently have to create a new log-in, identify our friends, and build profiles for each site we join. In the next stage of the Internet, our information will be able to follow us across these sites.
At the time, this idea seemed logical, but far-off. Facebook Connect had just launched, but could companies really all work together and share information? Could Facebook really become our main log-in into this “one machine”?
Judging by Facebook’s announcement yesterday, it looks like it might.
The building blocks to this super-social Web are Facebook’s new Open Graph and Social Plugins, which include new “like” buttons everywhere on sites outside Facebook.com, auto-login capabilities for those sites without clicking on Facebook Connect, and even a Facebook social bar which includes several of these plugins plus Facebook chat.
Since I’ve been trying to keep up with my new year’s resolution, I’ve been trying out a few different ways to track my progress. When I started back up swimming on a regular basis last September, I was tracking my workout distance in my day planner. Easy enough, but I’m very forgetful with these things and always end up forgetting my planner somewhere (it tends to blend in with my growing stack of Moleskine notebooks). I started looking for a free, online tool that I could use. I’ve found that there are a lot of tracking tools for runners, like Map My Run and the Nike + iPod system. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many of these tools for swimmers.
Back in December, I came across Swim Manager. A pretty basic site, but it lets you add your pool or swimming club to their index, and then track your workouts (distance, time of swim, notes on your strokes). One of the cool features with this site is that you don’t need to create an account – you can simply use Facebook Connect to log in. When you post new workouts, you can publish them to Facebook or Twitter – good for me, since I find that posting my workouts publicly makes me more motivated to keep going. Unfortunately, there were a lot of typos and errors on the site. Twitter updates were a jumbled mess, so I had to turn them off. I ended up getting fed up with the site because it was very buggy, and while there seemed to be a few tools to connect with other swimmers, they weren’t fully developed.
Next up: Foursquare. This was only available in major cities until fairly recently, but over the past few months, a group of people in Banff have started to add various venues on the app. Obviously, this doesn’t really track anything except “check-ins” at venues, so I’ve ended up with about 20 check-ins at my gym in the last few months, and no actual information about what I did there. Foursquare: good for checking in and getting tips, bad for actually tracking anything.
Finally, I stumbled upon one of my friends’ tweets where they mentioned a service called Strands (which I keep confusing with Thread). It’s basically a social network built into a workout-tracking site. When you sign up, the site recommends followers and encourages you to join groups, post photos, and, of course, track your exercise. It can be easily integrated with Facebook/Twitter and you can log running, hiking, skiing, cycling, and gym workouts on top of swimming. One of the nifty features is that it lists events in your area and predicts your race times based on the info from your workouts. They also have a handy iPhone app that I’m trying out. If you’re a runner, it uses the GPS on your phone to map your route and can integrate with your music/playlist during your run. I haven’t had much of a chance to explore the app yet, but so far so good.
We wrapped up the workshop on Sunday morning by presenting the results from our homework assignment for the weekend. We had been split into groups on Friday and told to shoot a video related to “Aussies in Banff,” given the ridiculously high number of Australians that live and work here. We weren’t allowed to use any post-production, and the video had to be less than a minute in length. The challenge: get as many views as possible by noon today.
Our team started off on Friday afternoon by discussing what videos we tend to watch – things that are witty, funny, or shocking. We also decided to maximize on views by going with a shorter video length (so that people would have finished watching the video before even realizing it). One of our team members, Dan from Sleeping Beagle, started telling us a story about the 2000 Sydney Olympics, when Roots was the official apparel/uniform supplier for Canada. The Canadian gear got fairly popular, because “roots” has a very different meaning in Australia.
We all loved the story, and then thought we could use it as inspiration for our video. We decided to stage a fight in downtown Banff outside the Roots store, and film it as though a tourist happened to come across the altercation while shooting some footage of the sunset.
Here’s the video:
Admittedly, it looks pretty staged. But the great thing this about this video is that it clocks in at 30 seconds in length. The action starts pretty quickly, and it’s over before you get tired of watching. Because we managed to tie in girls, sex, swearing, and a fight on top of the “Banff” and “Australia” keywords, I think we increased the likelihood that YouTube users would stumble across the video. This also increased the size of our target audience and pool of relevant places to post to online.
36 hours after posting the video, we had 500 views and were listed as 13th “Top Discussed Video” in the Travel & Events section on YouTube.
How did we do it? We started off with the basics, and posted the video to our personal Facebook and Twitter profiles. We used keywords like “knock out,” “hot chick”, and “fail” in the Youtube video tags so that the video would show up easily in the “Related Videos” section. We brainstormed Facebook pages, such as “Cheesy Pickup Lines”, “I Wish I Could Knock Someone Out”, and “Girls Kick Ass,” where we posted links/descriptions enticing fans to view our video. We also posted to the obvious groups, like “Roots Canada” and “Australians in Canada.” At Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion, we posted to Thwapr as well (though this didn’t generate many views). We submitted the link to Digg, FailBlog, and Reddit.
We got many, many negative reviews about the quality of our video. Funnily enough, though, the anonymous/public comments were the most negative. Comments on our personal Facebook accounts tended to be more positive. The lesson here: don’t just show your videos to your friends. Get real feedback from a multitude of sources. For this project, more comments meant more views, so we were happy with anything. Obviously, if you were making a video for your company, you would take a very different approach.
Here’s what I took away from this:
Don’t try and squeeze a lot into one video. Keep it short and simple.
Think of what other, less obvious, audiences you can reach with your video.
Brainstorm about what you like to see in the videos you watch before you start creating your own.
Spend the majority of your time planning the video. Spend less shooting.
Keywords are your friends.
Use your networks. Use their strengths. Adopt your message for each.
Keep the video relevant.
Go a step beyond what you think is “enough” marketing.
Don’t just show your content to your friends. This won’t give you real feedback.
The other teams did some pretty creative things with their videos. You can take a look at Aussie on the Spot and Banff Beaver Hunter on YouTube. I’m having a hard time finding the last team’s video, but will update when I locate it.
I’m spending the weekend at another Banff New Media Institute/Digital Alberta workshop – this one is called Video 2.0, and we’re covering some tools and methods for making short videos for marketing and how use social media to distribute your content. You can follow the action over on Twitter.
A lot of the participants are coming from small and medium-sized businesses that are starting to recognize that it’s high time to develop an online presence aside from the typical company website. Some have experience shooting/editing video, but most do not. Aaaand lots of us are pretty tech-savvy (you should see how many iPhones there are in the room…).
So here are some of my thoughts on what’s been going on so far.
Many of the presenters are coming from a media distribution background, where they (most likely) have a larger budget/pool of resources than most of the participants will have access to. Still, they’ve put forth some good things to think about when you’re getting started with video.
One thing that keeps coming up, though, is how to get your content to go “viral”. Everyone is asking how to get more views, more followers, more Facebook fans. I think that misses the point. As Ashkan Karbasfroosha said yesterday, you can’t plan for hits on the internet. My thought: if you want to get into social media and distribute videos for your company, you have to ask yourself why you want to be using these tools in the first place. That’s right, tools. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, and all of these other sites are really just tools to get your message across. You can’t use them just for the sake of using them.
A step that I see a lot of people forget about is research. We all get so excited about these new tools that we have a tendency to jump in and go. You need to look at what other people in your field are doing first. Make a note of what tactics you like, and what rubs you the wrong way. Think of how you use your social networks, how you search for information, how you like to get your updates, and then go from there.
Forget about trying to get X number of followers; that can come later. Don’t set yourself a deadline for success. When it comes down to it, social media is an ongoing conversation. Slowly start to amass a following of dedicated fans who appreciate your content. These are the people who will be most likely to forward your videos/tweets/links on to their friends.
Remember – you can’t just push your content at people. It might be okay to blast your friends and contacts with your “ZOMG NEW VIDEO” a couple times, but if you keep it up, people will stop watching your content (and may even start to resent you for it). I can’t count the number of times I’ve unfollowed people or left fan pages because I’m tired of getting irrelevant messages/updates. Just focus on making your content available, searchable, and relevant to your desired audience.
Learn about the platforms you want to use. How does your content have to change to suit them? Should you be updating all of your profiles with the same frequency? Longer, less frequent posts may be appropriate for Facebook while short news updates may work better for Twitter. Again, this probably has to do with who you want to reach.
We’ve also been working on an exciting homework assignment – I’ll post a breakdown of what it involves and talk about the tactics our group has been using tomorrow.
Last weekend, I had the chance to participate in a workshop hosted by the BNMI and Digital Alberta. A three-day workshop, it was focused on animation and design.
There were presenters from all over, ranging from Club Penguin to Pixar to Industrial Light and Magic. I figured this would be a good workshop to partake in, since I’ve been dabbling in design for a few years now. I’ve gotten to the point where I think I need some actual instruction in these things, and I’m planning on going back to college in the fall to do just that.
The workshop started on Thursday night with a ‘meet and greet’, which started off quite awkwardly. Stick a bunch of art kids in a room, and see what happens. After a while, people started mingling a bit more. Networking has never been my forte. This is something I need to work on.
The weekend was quite intensive, with a design fundamentals workshop, photoshop project, introduction to Maya, overview of animation history, as well as presentations from people working in the field about what their jobs are like. The last two hours of each day were dedicated to portfolio review sessions, in which you could meet with a presenter for ten minutes to chat about your work.
I met with two of the presenters, and I brought up the fact that I’ve never really been a strong illustrator. I’ve tried to get myself to start sketching, but I always find that I get frustrated with my lack of skill and then end up with a big mental block. They gave me some good advice about how to get started, so I’m going to start keeping a sketchbook (secret!) where I can dabble and draw and hopefully get a bit better.
Maya was a lot of fun, but difficult to get a hold on. We were given character rigs to play around with and animate realistically, but I only got as far as making an arm bend! It definitely got me interested in trying out some 3D animation, though. Maya seems like it could be a good challenge to learn.
This year, for the first time, I made a New Year’s resolution and have stuck to it.
The resolution: work up to swimming 10km a week.
Now, the reason it’s “work up to” is that I’ve tried doing the New Year’s getting into shape thing. It never works. You always go gung-ho for a few weeks, then burn out, then stop exercising until summer starts creeping closer and closer. At this point, you attempt to start working out again, and make exactly the same mistakes.
I’ve been swimming since I was a kid. Never very seriously, except for a short period of time when I was on the Earl Beatty swim team – our mascot was the tasmanian devil. So very 90s. I lifeguarded for a few years to get through university, but that mostly involved watching people swim and there wasn’t much swimming on my part.
Let’s fast forward to last September – I was living in Banff, probably one of the healthiest cities in the country, not doing any excercise. And I thought, man, if I don’t get my act together here, I won’t be able to do it anywhere. So, I decided to sign up for a master’s swim class. On Wednesday mornings. At 7am.
Ugh.
So I started dragging myself out of bed at 6am every Wednesday to get to this class, simply because I had paid to register, so I might as well show up to justify spending the money. After a few weeks of the class, I realized I was a much stronger swimmer than I had originally thought I was. I started swimming one or two more days a week, and pretty soon I was averaging about 6km a week.
Christmas rolled around, and then New Year’s. I figured, okay, I’m already doing pretty well here. Let’s take it up a notch. I’m going to take it slow, and build up to that 10km/week goal.
I’ve been tracking my swims on Swim Manager, which has been a great, simple tool to record my workouts and make notes about each swim. It’s not the best site – it’s full of typos and is badly maintained, but I like that you can connect it to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It’s also got a nifty chart that graphs your monthly or weekly swims.
I’ll be posting some updates as I go along – I’m holding steady between 6-8km/week right now. I need fit in an extra swim somewhere.
Thanks for taking the time to visit my website.
While I've kept a personal blog for the better part of the past ten years, I'm attempting to venture into the public realm with my writing. Here, I will be posting my thoughts on social media, marketing, the arts, and other matters of interest.
