In the NYT, "‘Snow Fall’ at 10." I can clearly remember when this immersive multimedia piece came out — discussing it with my agency colleagues, trying to figure out how we could get clients on board.
content strategy
Everything is brand now, and everything is storytelling now…. People want to know more about these things [that a company is doing]… There’s more interest about the story behind things than ever. And brands have the means to be able to connect that to audiences directly, both in their consumer business and with their storytelling.
— Sam Grawe, speaking to Jarrett Fuller on Fuller’s Scratching the Surface podcast about the convergence of editorial and brand work. Grawe, the former EIC of Dwell and Global Brand and Editorial Director at Herman Miller, is the Chief Brand & Marketing Officer at The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. Cool gigs. Good conversation.
Mandy Brown:
2/27/12
Really like this post:
Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.
Writing has (so far) not generally benefited from this kind of process; but now that the text has been fully liberated from the tyranny of the printing press, we are presented with an opportunity: to deploy texts, instead of merely publishing them.
David Carr: "At BuzzFeed, the Significant and the Silly"
2/6/12
From this NYT look at the evolving Buzzfeed:
As the consumer Web has matured, readers have become minipublishers, using social media platforms to share information they think will entertain and enlighten their friends. No longer is it just about so-called sticky content that keeps readers around, or even clicky content that causes them to hit a link; it’s also about serving up content that is spreadable.
Hit the right note, and your readers become like bees, stopping by your site to grab links and heading back out on the Web to pollinate other platforms. That behavior has tapped into something visceral, a kind of game in which the person finding something delicious gains social capital for sharing it.