Workshops! – Content Strategy & More
*image from In Good Company website announcing the workshop this week.
I just gave my first workshop since returning to NY in October of last year and I’m revved up now to give more.
What is it?
What’s Your Story? Content Strategy for Brands and People
Course Description:
Brands are like people – with personalities, values, interests, and a unique manner of communicating. In this workshop we will start to identify who you are as a brand (whether an individual or company) and chart a course of communicating those values to the world through content. You will come away with a better handle on how to best use powerful socialnetworking tools from Facebook to Twitter to Flickr to Linkedin to blogging software. Start making your audience pay attention to what you have to say. Build dialogue, build trust, build business.
A Few Testimonials:
“Our meeting left me walking away with a totally new perspective of what I do and how I do…the story aspect is a very enriching take, which I really had not taken the time to fully realize and explore its value. The bike story and execution is a great example.”
-Sharon Gray, Fashikon
“The attendees got a lot out of the experience – they can’t wait to have you back!”
- Victoria Clark, Event Manager, IGC
“The only consistent comment we got was MORE PLEASE!”
-Adelaide Lancaster, Partner, IGC
The feeling is mutual.
It’s been a fantastic year getting Show Love up and off the ground. My partner and I produce social content for lovable companies that consists of documentary-style visually arresting video stories, text and creative direction. In full-scale projects, we work with illustrators, graphic designers, and web designers to create an optimal setting and tone for a brand’s continued narrative throughout the social universe. We’re like a creative team in an ad agency but for a specific kind of progressive, ethical business.
But I absolutely love to teach and give workshops. Workshops range from large to small, from lecture to facilitating brain storming sessions and mind mapping exercises that solve challenges of communication and narrative intent.
I taught Brand Strategy to 2nd year advertising students and a course on Trend Research and Insights to 2nd year Fashion Marketing Students at the Istituto Europeo de Design in Barcelona, Ethnography to corporate clients in Barcelona, Social Content in Paris, and so on. That was Europe. Now back in the states, and invigorated by the reception from this week’s workshop, I would like to do more.
If you’re interested and think I can help you, please get in touch. I will be posting updates on making this available to more people but I am available for one-on-ones which are the most effective way to dive deep. To make it cost effective, I can do small groups where we can focus on everyone and have everyone learn from each others input.
Here’s my bio.
Check out Show Love LLC including our biggest victory yet, a short story about a unique bike shop that has surpassed 280k views.
Check out In Good Company for co-working space and more. I couldn’t recommend them more.
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Stacie Go Eun Baek: Knitting Her Heart Out
From her artist statement: “Using the labor intensive technique of double-cloth weaving.. (Stacie) commemorates (her) disappearing (‘hastily typed’) thoughts and feelings” of the digital age.
Warning: The words in these pieces pack a wallop. Her pain is palpable but so is her discipline, artistry, skill, and most of all, courage.
This is an exhibit I attended back in January but it sat in my iphoto until I finally dredged it out to post this.
“Going to therapy in New York is about as expensive as dinner at Cipriani. I think I’ll start wearing a cocktail dress to my sessions.”
“Time went on I started noticing the weight loss then I had to ask him was he riding th white horse at first he said no then he said yes.”
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Top Picks: Women in Design at the Milan Furniture Fair 2012
Even in a crisis that is only getting worse in Europe, the Salone del Mobile (Milan Furniture Fair), the mother of all international design shows, attracted 331,649, visitors this year (just to the actual venue, trend seekers sometimes skip much of it and focus on offsite shows).
Kokeshi by A+A Cooren for Vertigo Bird
Inspired by the Japanese traditional wooden toy. I met Aki Cooren last year in Milan and loved the simple glowing pieces, understated but delightful, and have been following her and her husband’s work ever since.
This is them:
See more on my Pinterest including Marni, Mermelada (Barcelona), Emma Elizabeth, Anieke Branderhorst, Ella Doran, Carole Baijings, Mieke Meijer, and more.
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I Think Pinterest Is the Best Social Media Platform Ever Invented: Here’s Why
Pinterest has become my favorite way to curate, communicate, consume, and categorize. Along with Instagram which satisfies my mobile documenting impulses, it replaces traditional blogging software for me. When I’m sitting at my desk and not doing project-specific research or writing, but still being productive, (i.e. not looking up haircuts, why my ankles hurt so much after yoga, how to do a ‘burpee’, if Army Wives is right wing propaganda, the acting career of Zosia Mamet, etc.) my preference is to be on Pinterest.
This is why I find Pinterest such a revelation:
- A picture’s worth a thousand words. The trend sites will have you believe that everyone’s wearing mint green and buying tufted chairs but people’s tastes are really, really different. People just ‘have to have’ all kinds of things. They build a world of what interests them, what compels them, in a visceral intuitive way and it is so much easier to decipher when it’s visually laid out in a grid with just short notes if any, attached to them.
- Even though I’m a writer, I’m definitely a visual person. I make mind maps with clients and for myself. I pin up images of projects I’m working on in my office so I can see what I’m dealing with. Pinterest helps me to see what I like, see what I’m doing, and visually organize current projects as well as the future I want to have. It’s a digital visualization tool - another reason why I find Pinterest so effective.
- Blogging sucks up hours of my time. In the past, when I used to have girlonthestreet.com, I would be at my computer for 8 hours writing, rewriting, finding accompanying images, coding in html, formatting, reformatting, etc. I don’t have time or the desire to do that anymore because there is so much more I want to accomplish in my life (and so much more real world adventure and learning to be had!) When I started blogging again with What Women Make, it’s the thing I dreaded the most and it did eat away a lot of time for, to be honest, not the kind of pay-off I would really want.
- Pinterest is meditative. It doesn’t stop and start. It is not process heavy. Sometimes blogging began to feel like a smoking habit. you had to stop to smoke and it would weigh you down and zap your energy and your time. But I still like to share, curate, illustrate for myself and for others and I like to leave my writing for bigger ideas I’m developing both in fiction and in my work as half of Show Love. I find Pinterest the least taxing tool to use and the one with the most immediate gratification.
I’m on WordPress right now and know it’s the most robust, best blogging software but this post has taken me a lot longer than I want it to take and I’m busy running a company and can’t blog my day away anymore. I now have a What Women Make board on Pinterest which is so much more efficient and visually compelling than laboriously adding images to a post that take 30 seconds to load. Visit me on Pinterest and visit the (fledgling) Show Love Pinterest board.
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How Far Is Too Far?
How far is too far? Policy can not be about what looks good on your voting card but the issues and how to solve them. Even if you’re an anti-gay-marriage anti-immigrant Republican but somehow you’re for protecting the rights of women against violence, (first, you have to establish for yourself that it’s okay for rape victims to be forced to keep a baby, but once you get over that hump…), you don’t want new people coming into this country because it’s ‘your’ country. (You, presumably white, because your Republican, and in this case, most likely male). We are too lax on immigration, goes the reasoning, and therefore spread too thin financially and not able to control crime. Immigration means losing control of an American idealogue illusion. Internal logic understood. Fear driven, false, but understood as a rationale.
With your anti-immigration stance, you can consider yourself not hateful, not evil, merely protecting the space around you as you don’t think there is enough land to go around. You’re afraid. You’re losing job security, maybe your home, and definitely your sense of security in the American dream of middle class prosperity. You’re holding tight to your values which are based on a 20th century construct heavily rooted in materialism and defined by unabated growth. It’s not working out for you. (Hell, it’s not working out for anyone else either other than the 1% but you can’t, you won’t, move on to the 21st century.)
Now onto gay marriage. For you, marriage is the plastic black and white toy on the top of a wedding cake. A man in a tux. A woman in a long white gown. Both with stony eyes and red ink smeared lips. You don’t want to recognize love of any other kind. Especially as gender identity changes so drastically with both men and women ripped free of last century’s clear cut moulds. It’s scary. Who are you now? Are you supposed to wax your eyebrows and fight for your country? What role do you play as a man? Isn’t being a man about playing a role? What happened to roles?
So now we’re onto women’s rights, specifically domestic violence. You are against violence. You’re a man of god after all. Violence is bad. You like to think of yourself as someone who would protect your fellow human being against harm and that’s the kind of legislation you check yes to. But only if your fellow human being approximates the wedding topper on that cake. They can not be foreign born or in love with someone of the same sex. It’s murky, but the voter scorecard is right there in black and white. Like that wedding topper. And that’s how you vote. You can’t see. You can’t think. And the stalemate that black hole of ignorance imposes on the rest of us makes us really really really scared. How far is too far? This antiquated sect of people just has to enter the modern era for us to survive.
-Chauncey Zalkin
Reaction to article Women Figure Anew in Senate’s Latest Battle in the New York Times 3/14/12: ” Some conservatives are feeling trapped.’I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,’ said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama”
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Detroit Optimists Get To Work
“try it”
Good Girls Go to Paris Crepes owner Torya Blanchard says ”it just gets better and better for those who believe in Detroit”
Signal-Return Letterpress director, Megan O’Connell. The shop ”seeks to connect the community to traditional + emergent forms of printing”. It’s a gallery. It’s a resource for design entrepreneurs. It’s a meeting space with all the signature displays of process and craft that we love so much.
Jessica Hicks (also a designer mentioned on Design Sponge) and her husband opened Astro Coffee in Detroit after living as expats for several years.
What her husband says about their choice to move to Detroit to do this:
“You can do something here that means something. Open a coffee shop in another city and you’d drown. Here there is cooperation.”
26-year-old Hostel Detroit owner, Emily Doerr cutting the ribbon in 2010 on her non-profit accomodations aimed at educating visitors about Detroit.
The Empowerment Plan: Veronika Scott invented a Sleeping Bag Coat to do something about the gargantuan homeless problem in Detroit (1 in 47 are homeless). It is “self-heated, waterproof, and transforms into a sleeping bag at night.” She employs homeless women to manufacture the coat.
The video by 4exit4 inspired this post. See them all here!
Links:
Good Girls Go to Paris Crepes!
Hostel Detroit
The Empowerment Plan
Signal-Return Letterpress
Astro Coffee
*lead image credit: Michael Goettner 0 Comments
If I Had Ten Million Dollars
Here’s what I’d invest in:
Digital Publishing - New platforms that offer immersive media experiences for literary fiction lovers
The literary fiction part is due to my own personal interests (and my fear of the death of imaginative work in a dumbed down world) – but this model could be applied to all fiction and non-fiction. The innovation and technology put into gaming could be applied to merging documentary, non-fiction writing, photojournalism as well as literature, independent cinema, the best in illustration, cinematography, music composition to create rich multi-lateral access to imagination, knowledge and story. Hell it could work for low culture too, that’s the low hanging fruit after all.
Pinterest Retail
I read on Fast Company that this already exists as The Fancy so I signed up – but Pinterest still gets my vote because it builds context with such fluidity as a visualization board for all kinds of planning and creativity. By placing objects or experiences that would lead to acquisition next to the the stuff of life that thankfully does not – plants, a cityscape, a curled up cat – buying becomes more of an act of careful consideration than blind consumption. Organic self-directed retail. Facilitated by a platform that takes the whole spectrum of your life and imagination into account.
Farm-to-Table Fast Food
A farm fresh menu with crops chosen by ease and season. The company would work in cooperation with various local producers. It would mimic the fast food experience in some useful and familiar ways but act as a teaching tool for change in the food system. Done right, it could be replicated anywhere (along the sidelines of the football field? On a corporate campus or at a university? In lower income or subsidized housing estates?) I haven’t worked out the kinks, but I’d invest in this. Jamie? Where are you?
Open Education and Other New Education Business Models
Browsing articles on the rise of homeschooling, statistics in online learning, and the movement against traditional degree programs, nothing on the horizon is due for such a complete overhaul as education. I’m appalled by the idea of the 40,000 dollar Manhattan preschool. (Nobody wins.) Nonetheless, I think progressive dynamic and creative education is invaluable. I look back to my fondness for Montessori and Bennington (no grades) and the New School (essays instead of tests) and know this approach, and ones that incorporate working in a natural environment, is applicable to the future. I’d love to sign on to a new model of education which balances real world social interaction and problem solving with democratic access to the best possible learning tools from top educators.
Micro-Manufacturing
Skip the middleman. Think. Plan. Make. Sell. I love the 3D printer and I can’t wait until prototypes can be passed onto small factories that can afford to make small batches putting the designer / maker / entrepreneur in the drivers seat. A mini version of this idea exists in Spoonflower.
Data-Mining For Good: Customer Service 3.0
Ignoring the spook factor of privacy concerns, I’d defer to someone else on that one – if you could know enough about your customer to serve them as well as they expect to be served, remembered, listened to, customized for, well I find that very exciting. Innovations in customer experience that really put the customer first could extend to healthcare and safety, travel, home buying, and finance. It could be a good thing put in the right hands. -Chauncey Zalkin
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Prescription: Design Therapy
Apartment Therapy Design Evenings at ABC Carpet are a bright spot in the design scene here – the incandescent lighting flowing through the oversized glasses of wine, the luxurious mishmash of couches and chairs, and a packed room of enthusiastic design and decor citizens smiling in their camaraderie.
It couldn’t be more fun, more lively. But as I looked around, I wondered, what exactly is this scene?
Coming from Europe where there’s a massive design presence to here where there are so many lovers of beauty and talented creative minds of every ilk, I’ve starting to see a distinction between Europe and Asia’s definition of design – the beautiful and functional and functionally beautiful object - and what design is in the U.S.
First, just to get it out of the way, yes there is the design awareness made possible by Steve Jobs and Apple Computers. There’s Fast Company’s championing of design thinking and design in business. But for the lovers of design festivals and design schools, furniture design, and manufacturing, the individual maker and craftsman, there is a big empty silence filled only by ICFF and it’s satellite shows.
New York is largely about Decor and Shelter. It’s Design Sponge and Etsy. Pinterest mood boards and Decor 8. It’s decorating tips and DIY. It’s interior design and real estate lust.
I love decor. I do. I mean where else are you going to put your design but within some sort of decor? Decor can be very practical and personal at the same time. Hey, even I found myself doing a DIY project for the first time and I’m pretty proud of it.
See? Here it is.
From this
To This
I found an old ugly beat up nightstand on the street and went out and bought some white high gloss paint, a bottle of Mod Podge, some paper from Paper Presentation and found endless how-to sites to make sure I didn’t screw the whole thing up.
Pretty cool, right?
But I’m not a designer. I would never call myself that. So there you go. You’ve got design and you have decor. America is about decor.
I really enjoyed what Maxwell, the founder of Apartment Therapy had to say when I asked about the state of American design (which meant where the hell is American design?) because it was clear that he cares about design as much as I do. He told me that it’s hard to nurture design here because manufacturing has left America. I told him about my experience in Europe and he said “yeah, Europe’s ahead of us.” So in our haste to automate and simplify everything, to sell everything and consume everything, to consolidate everything and to watch the bottom line on everything, we forgot about design. Not good. And honestly, not very modern. I think all of this DIY activity is just another sign of how desperately we need design leadership. It’s not just about dressing things up but making things that are truly beautiful, thoughtful and reflective. Right now, the design landscape is practical and commercial, not gutsy. It doesn’t marry inventiveness and innovation with reality. Design can be the perfect summation of right and left brain and, at the risk of sounding lofty, hope for the future. It’s a visual manifestation of spirit, intelligence, and hope. In other words, design is more than a gorgeous bedspread with eclectic throw pillows.
The last Apartment Therapy talk I attended was a few weeks back. It was with the very popular and very personable Deborah Needleman, the founding editor of Domino magazine who has gone on to start a beautiful style magazine at the Wall Street Journal. I was a subscriber of Domino. In fact, it was the very last magazine I subscribed to before moving to Paris at the end of 2006. Domino was so pretty and useful and collectible where nothing else really was. I was tired of the stuffy celebraphotog-generated nonsense, the Vogues and Visionnaires. I was tired of being talked down to and dictated to. Domino was different. It wasn’t ‘design’ but it was great. She herself admitted that while she loves the practical application of decor – she’s coming out with a book about making your home ‘cozy’ – she ‘doesn’t know anything about design’. It’s hard to wrap my head around but I think ultimately I know what she means. I just hope the dialogue will open up and decor-lovers will also start to see just what design is and how much value it has.
Just imagine, a New York with a design scene as robust as London.. Heaven!
(It looks like our company Show Love may be doing some yet-to-be-announced work with the American Design Club led by the effervescent designer and design advocate Kiel Mead so more excitement to come!)
-Chauncey Zalkin
links:
Apartment Therapy
Decor 8
Etsy
Design Sponge
Pinterest
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