*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.

Follow us on our fun ride through ICFF 2012 NYC on Twitter and Pinterest

(and maybe Facebook and Tumblr too).

RISD student I met having fun on one of the items exhibited at the fair.

-Chauncey Zalkin

The “Trifid” (divided into three parts) lamp (above) and her “Cinderella’s Revenge” chandelier (below)

Emerald Faerie will be at ICFF at the end of the week and you do want to make sure you get a chance to check out her booth: Stand 2417

Jacob Javitz
11th Ave at 38th St

Designer Fiona Gall works out of her studio in East London

Image credit: Julian Abrams

.

price : 160 £

See more of her textiles, illustration and styling at www.melab.co.uk

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?

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.”

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.

This is why I find Pinterest such a revelation:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.