From the book (link to publisher’s Flickr set), Storytelling for User Experience, comes this neat chart of activities and skills for active listening. While it isn’t my own work, it’s a lot easier to just embed the table. Enjoy!

Why do they sometimes fail to produce expected results? Well, we could examine if what’s expected is realistic, strategically aligned with business goals, well funded, well staffed, planned right, integrated with other communications activities, is…there’s a bunch of different ways we Digital PR people can imagine. Check out this slideshow from the Brand Science Institute.

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David Mallen who works in the National Advertising Division of the U.S. Better Business Bureau, speaks with me at Sustainable Brands 10 about trends in the marketplace and what the future should hold for businesses and marketers making communications and associated claims about their products and services.

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Why are faces so special? Because while some may be lovely and others unsightly, we do recognize them instantly. Like seeing faces in abstract art, nature, and space photographs of the moon. They’re an apt metaphor for the near instantly perceived elements of a design that we can interact, perhaps delightfully notice and want to play with (well, isn’t that every designer’s hope?!)

Gretchen Anderson takes us on journey through this topic, because it’s an important one that deserves attention. Not for usability sake, while that is a noble goal in itself, but for attraction sake. That which naturally invites people into the experience you’ve designed. While perhaps physical form design may be the easiest to conjure up, it also extends to graphic and information design.

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Timberland’s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Harrison, speaks in an interview with me on topics including: social media, brand stories and content that resonates with customers, what works and what doesn’t. Additionally, Mike explains how Earthkeepers isn’t just a shoe, but also a brand platform for authentic and credible communications with stakeholders and the public on Timberland’s corporate responsibility commitment and environmental stewardship efforts, and what they care about as a company. A human relationship with the great outdoors based on respect, love, and adventure.

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While it may be easy to attract the attention of a growing cross section of consumers with your social or environmental brand messaging – if you know the right language, not all consumers are so easy. Drawing from his book “Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries”, John Marshall Roberts outlines core principles of transformational communication, as illustrated through the groundbreaking marketing and messaging for President Obama’s historic presidential run. He illustrates how the audience can shift their thinking and apply this same framework to create breakthrough results for their own social and environmentally conscious business ventures through strategic, authentic values-based marketing and communications.

Crazy, energetic speaker with great ideas. His latest presentation from Sustainable Brands 10 (which I hope to show sometime this Fall), dives further into what I think of as radical emotional intelligence for communication design, for good

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An interesting new video to say the least. However, while the production is great and humorous, there are some important points to be made.

This is a campaign video, meant to dramatically simplify a complex subject, make it easy to understand, and influence people toward some type of action or line of thinking. That said, it is biased, and doesn’t meet the needs of fair and balanced reporting as would a journalistic segment. It goes beyond the max 10-30 seconds that television campaigns would run, and probably costs less to produce and distribute.

What Annie and the animators do well is employ both humor and scare tactics through colloquial narration and imagery. It is amusing! And it can also be quite influential.

As with every such campaign with a protagonist, there is a corresponding set of antagonists. This gentleman went to the work of dissecting Annie’s video with a detailed critique highlighting the campaign’s bias and simplification of facts. Briefly watch the rebuttal video here. Unfortunately, although this detractor expounding on the importance of objectivity, he gets personal and overly critical, thus missing the point of an effective rebuttal

What does all this say for communications? While producing media for marketing purposes is becoming increasingly common, there is a responsibility toward being objective and providing facts. While some people may be easily swayed through vivid imagery, reminders of personal values, and scare tactics, there are others who will watch closely and will proudly cry foul. Maybe there’s a strong counterargument in the works then. The good thing is that this all fosters further dialogue. However, certain subjects like this that are complex like climate change, people will only have so much mental space or time for. For this reason, objectivity is really damn important. Make any potential “holes” tight and open to interpretation.

Whether a campaign or promotional media piece is for ethically good or bad causes, left or right, good communicators will step outside themselves and create media that is credible and doesn’t overly rely on emotional appeal. Think in terms of the enemy or antagonists. Sometimes using manufactured doubt can be extremely helpful, akin to using an enemy’s weight to your advantage like in Judo. Just be ethical about it, and don’t lose sight of the message to drill home.

Just finished up a new graphic to shed some light on a perpetual 4 step process of meaningful marketing:

A macro perspective map of four activity sets that should be run concurrently for meaningful social media to gain traction and move forward, for both single and multiple projects. Given that the upperleft quadrant first highlights content production, one can assume this is a content production and interaction model (for which it would be great), but you can perceive it any way you want

Sometimes it’s only necessary to participate in one activity set, based on a project’s short scope. However, most of these four activities need to be undertaken at some point.

I recently stumbled upon this video produced by BusinessLink.gov.uk as a story about the CSR efforts of an English architecture firm, primarily as it relates to the benefits of having established volunteerism and employee happiness programs (among other areas). So while this wasn’t produced by Bailey Partnership, it serves as an amazing 5min introduction to a humanistic aspect of the company and its employees. Now, if I were in charge of brand identity of a company I’d do a couple things: 1) Keep any brochures very straightforward and concise with a maximum of 5 subjects; 2) Produce videos on the identified subjects along with sustainability/csr, but create each as a collection of clips, from which older clips can reused or discarded, and newer clips can be added. The entire production would be inline with an integrated brand communications platform for identity purposes, which could especially be useful for existing and potential stakeholders (equity holders, partners, and employees).

Okay, on with the show! Could such a 5min video be helpful for your firm?
Another example I provided a while back, has more of a reporting than a journalistic feel.

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A few months ago, I was sitting in a BJ’s restaurant with my big spiral notebook, a good Hefeweizen, and a swarm of thoughts on branding for good. In the last 3 years, I’d realized through observation, experience, and enough books and articles on the subject, that branding really is what people experience in their interactions with an organization, and their subsequent perceptions. Sometimes actively, sometimes passively, sometimes directly, sometimes by association. In every touchpoint, including media and word of mouth.

Given that reality, what does this entail for values branding? Without going into the specifics of values (as every business’s personality, objectives, value proposition, culture, and industry is different), I started to look at the big picture of which functions branding performs and came up with the following meta model. Since all actions also entail a degree of communication, I then categorized the tactics and tools available for development, interaction options, distribution, and measurement. Hope you enjoy it!