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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Girls to Leaders
I think exposure to different ideas of success and how to get there can cure this.
is by the makers of this film
(which I saw screened in NY and really loved)
Are videos with stats and messages of female empowerment like this helpful? What effect does it have on girls? Any thoughts?
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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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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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What Women Make Sustainable Gift Guide 2011
For all price ranges and passions (the full post on Tythe.com)
1. COOKING
Epicurean Designer Cutting Boards Though this Duluth, Minnesota run company …
2. HELPING
Nomi Bags Nomi network produces recycled bags that fight human trafficking.
3. INDEPENDENT DESIGNERS
I’ve always loved the spunk of Junk Prints owner / designer Chanel Kennebrew.
4. GLOBAL DESIGN CULTURE
Yoshii Shirt Stripe Towels – Towels have a strong significance in Japan.
5. CRAFTSMANSHIP
Stacking Vessels by Pia Wustenberg – As I see it, design is art and worth the price to celebrate the human ability to transform materials for use in our everyday lives.
-Chauncey Zalkin
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New York Now: From Didion to Start Up Successes
What Women Make went from being European-based to New York-based in October. Since then, the posts are slow coming as we develop our first core business, Show Love, and develop ways to bring WWM to life on my home turf. In this discovery phase, I’ve met tons of likeminded energized women playing vital parts in the social and business paradigm shifts taking place.
Here are 4 women in 4 key arenas:
Design
Annie Coggan – In a city lacking in design activity, Annie’s a breath of fresh air. Outside the world of decor and decoration, there doesn’t seem to be much of the rich critical design discussion you get in other world class cities save for This Is Product Placement co-run by Julie Taraska who I have met but that was in Italy so she doesn’t count for this post. Annie runs a design blog called Chairs and Buildings, is an architect, is a teacher, and is a resident at the women-run Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn working on a very innovative upholstery project. She’s been in the decoration blogs like Design Sponge and design blogs like Yatzer. She’s on this list for being a woman who keeps evolving and is a true artist. She also happens to have gone to Bennington College, where I went as well, and during one of the best times in its history. More on her later. More on the women at the Textile Arts Center later too – they are also entrepreneurs and supporters of community arts definitely fitting the bill as paradigm shifters. You can follow them at @textileartscent
Tech Start Ups
Kathryn Minshew – at 25, she’s the co-founder of the online magazine start-up The Daily Muse; has been awarded with Y Combinator financing and counsel; led a strategy to provide HPV vaccines in Rwanda with the Clinton Health Access Initiative in her even earlier career; she’s also incredibly unpretentious and nice, and though it shouldn’t matter she’s super pretty which doesn’t hurt in this world. (Of course if she wasn’t beautiful inside it really wouldn’t mean diddly.) She’s been supportive and warm and receptive to me and about What Women Make and she’s just the kind of person that WWM is always seeking to show to the world.
Co-working Spaces
Adelaide Lancaster – As soon as she sat down with my partner and I at the end of a long day for all three of us, she exuded an incredible sense of calm and wisdom that was truly infectious. It was a bit like having a cup of tea – if tea had any practical takeaway to offer. She gave us great advice and encouragement about our business Show Love and put us in touch with resources and lovable companies she thought would appreciate our approach to social content via storytelling. I’ll be teaching one of their workshops in the Spring. More on that later too. She and her partner Amy Abrams have a shared work space called In Good Company whose name could not be more appropriate. They also just published a book called the Big Enough Company.
One of my Heroes
Joan Didion – Okay, ‘meeting her’ is a bit of a stretch. She signed my book and spelled my name correctly after I saw her on stage discussing her magnificent career with her nephew the actor Griffin Dunne. She also said ‘thank you for coming’ and looked me in the eye. Though I wouldn’t be able to exactly call her my best friend, I felt a little bit of Didion magic dust rub off on me as I left Symphony Space and had a slice at the Upper West Side Two Boots before heading back to Brooklyn.
Stay tuned next week for my Christmas post on the Tythe Design blog.
-Chauncey Zalkin
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