by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 11, 2016 |
By Jacqueline Koch
For those who believe in the power of ideas, 2006 marked an inspiring moment in the digital space. It was the online debut of a rapidly growing collection of brief, well-choreographed, expertly lit and precisely paced lectures, or ‘talks’. They were focused at the intersection of technology, entertainment and design and are now well-known worldwide as TED. What has happened in the 10 years to follow, from 2006 to 2016? A lot.
When describing TED as a human network that ‘connects the idea-hungry elite’, Fast Company hit a nerve. But it’s not just about the elite anymore. The TED slogan, ‘ideas worth spreading’, has fueled a ravenous fascination and TED’s expanding footprint over the last decade has much to teach us. It is a unique case study: a non-profit that successfully transformed the generic keynote speech into a worldwide movement.
Consider a few figures for background. Six years after unleashing TED talks online, TED.com hit one billion views. This was just a preview of the spectacular surge to come. From 2012 to 2015, TED.com tripled the number of views to reach three billion. With 2,400 videos online today, the global appetite for TED is nothing short of insatiable.
Highly nutritional food for thought
‘What sets TED Talks apart is that the big ideas are wrapped up in personal stories and they’re mostly from people you have never heard of before,’ said Charlie Rose in a 60 Minutes episode exploring TED’s unusual value proposition. ‘And it is those stories that have captured the imaginations of tens of millions of viewers around the world.’
Taking a closer look, TED is both non-profit and big business with a hearty following in both the digital and physical world. The original one-off conference, launched in 1984, continues to influence TEDGlobal. International luminaries, innovative thinkers and thought leaders convene to make a case, take a stand, or deliver an ingenious, credible and forward-looking talk—in 18 minutes or less.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 7, 2016 |
By Christopher Ross
Content marketing has become a huge industry with many players including a vast number of service providers, proclaimed experts, trade journals and conferences. It really is the next big frontier in marketing.
Today there is not a marketer, brand or business who is not trying to advance some form of content marketing strategy. What they have all figured out is that content marketing is not merely about selling, but about telling a story, starting an actual dialogue and trying to develop a relationship that makes the consumer want to stay engaged, and better yet, want to come back.
While telling a story to engage the customer might be new to marketers, it is the cornerstone of what publishers have been doing for centuries. Greg Satell of the Harvard Business Review said “marketers do need to think more like publishers, but they also need to act more like publishers if they are ever going to be able to hold an audience’s attention”.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for publishers to wrap their heads around how they could sell their storytelling strength to businesses as a way to generate a new revenue stream? The argument can easily be made that the publishing industry has more legitimacy and qualification to participate in the delivery of content marketing and receive its share of the pie.
Currently many businesses are creating their own in-house capacity for content marketing while others are hiring outside agencies or even leveraging a burgeoning labor pool of virtual writers. However, in this mad dash to find the skills and resources to plan, create and sustain all the content needed, why wouldn’t these businesses consider turning to publishers? This is an industry with the proven strengths and successes in this area.
Publishers may see this trend as a logical next step to generate more revenue from an infrastructure already in place. From an opportunistic point of view, the publishing industry is extraordinarily well-suited to deliver content marketing services for three reasons:
by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 7, 2016 |
Boost! writer, Estelle Pin, recently visited our client, EcoBalanza’s Seattle-based workshop and captured her experience in this beautifully written piece that illustrates the power of words to connect more deeply to an audience.
It’s not a factory—that’s the first thing you need to understand about EcoBalanza. There are no machines, none of those loud repetitive industrial noises, there’s no chemical or metallic smell. When you walk into the space at EcoBalanza, there are five craftsmen and women, working together, laughing and smiling together, and creating beautiful works of art, quietly, by hand.
Some pieces are quite large: a bedframe for a king sized bed, fully upholstered, is one of the recently completed works, waiting for some finishing touches. It takes up a large corner of its own, and when it finally passes all of Aimee’s meticulous inspections, it will go to its new home, for some glamorous person in Europe, who likes their headboards 8 feet tall. The piece I fall for during my visit is also a headboard, more curved and romantic, also upholstered, but drastically different in style, and probably half the size. I imagine this client and I have a lot more in common.
Nearby, layers of wool are being stitched together with one long big needle, to make the cushion of a chaise. The fabric for this one is a rich cherry red. I run my hands over seams of finished pieces, awestruck knowing the hours of labor that go into each stage of construction—more so, when I feel the tension inside each frame. These pieces feel sturdy, solid, but soft, welcoming. I sit down in a completed loveseat that waits by the door for packaging, and Aimee raises an eyebrow at me, giving me a moment to soak it all in before asking for my opinion. My positive review leaves her glowing.
EcoBalanza is a labor of love
It’s clear that for her, it’s a labor of love. Aimee moves through the workshop with an excited hop in her step that keeps her more airborne than grounded, pulling me towards this piece of wool, or that piece of leather, or this fully finished couch. She has me touch everything, feeling the materials that never see the light of day once sandwiched into layers inside fabric. Her eyes catch every detail, and when I reach for a round of wool, she quickly redirects me to another, of higher quality—the one I originally saw has to be returned, it doesn’t meet her standards.
She explains every step of the process to me, showing various stages of construction, and answers every question I can think to ask. The whole time, she’s also switching back and forth to Spanish, as she watches over her crew, and makes minute adjustments to their work.
I excuse myself to explore a bit, though the space isn’t so huge that exploring takes me very far. There are shelves piled high with materials all the way to the ceiling, some 20 feet above us, and every inch of usable space is being put to work in some way or another. I find a pile of vegetable-treated leather in every color you can imagine. It’s softer than I can describe, like passing your hand through ethereal space, and the green is especially brilliant. I notice some frames for pullout couches, Aimee explains later that those come to her pre-made—metalwork is probably the only thing they don’t do here.
Before I leave, Aimee shows me one last thing. She brings it over cradled in two hands; the foot of a couch. It’s only about 4 inches long, hand tooled on a lathe and stained. She hands it to me, like a sacred artifact, and she’s beaming with pride. “Look at this, look at these colors, look how this stain has come out”. And she’s right, it’s beautiful. There are warm tones, cold tones, streaks of lights and darks, more complexities in this one tiny detail than in half of my apartment.
And it’s all like that. Every piece, every component, more varied and beautiful than you can ever really appreciate. What Aimee Robinson does, every day. In a small workshop in the heart of south Seattle, is create art in the form of furniture. At EcoBalanza, every choice is intentional, every detail attended to, and every need is considered.
Learn more about EcoBalanza
by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 7, 2016 |
Now that 2016 is off to a running start, it’s a good time to take a step back and look at some of the social media trends that are expected to make an impact this year. From livestreaming on social media platforms to enhanced image search on Pinterest, there are some exciting developments that are transforming how users interact with social media.
Livestreaming on social media
Real-time streaming is one of the biggest trends hitting social media this year. Companies as diverse as VISA and Spotify are using livestreaming applications like Meerkat and Periscope to drive deeper engagement with their customers who continue to crave intimacy and immediacy.
And the cost of entry remains low because livestreaming apps turn a phone’s camera into a live-streaming device, broadcasting everything it sees to a user’s Twitter followers with the tap of a button. In January, Twitter-owned Periscope took livestreaming one step further by integrating with GoPro to let its 10 million users broadcast to their followers from an action camera connected to an iPhone.
Paul Ronzheimer, a journalist from German publication Bild, used Periscope to help Syrian refugees tell their stories to the publication’s readers. ‘Periscope’s features include the ability for viewers to comment during the broadcasts, which in this case often included questions that the refugees could answer live and unmediated,’ he said.
On a lighter note, BuzzFeed recently used Meerkat to live-stream the ‘vigil’ for Zayn Malik—a teen-driven, reaction to the pop singer leaving the group One Direction.
Facebook has also joined the livestream party with Facebook Live. According to Facebook Live team members Vadim Lavrusik and Dave Capra, on average people watch a video more than three times longer when it is live compared to when it is not. To share a live video, users simply tap ‘What’s on your mind?’ at the top of their News Feed and select the Live Video icon. With 1.5 billion users, Facebook is sure to be a driving force behind the adoption of livestreaming on social platforms this year.
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