Herbert Lowe | Telling Stories One Tale At A Time
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Fish Where the Fish Are!

9/29/2010

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Just finished listening to a Philip Nowak, a guest speaker for three Marquette classes – including our Emerging Media class – in a large lecture hall at Marquette Hall. Nowak is a social media analyst at Delver.com, a new social shopping experience powered by Sears, and someone who is helping to discover how to monetize social media.

Nowak was quite impressive. Especially liked that he offered good pieces of advice – for example, focusing on finding out what you're good at and not worrying as much about not knowing what to do with your life – and that he shared how he had failed at four different business ventures and what he learned through those experiences. He found that he had a passion for the Internet and that he could earn a great living by monetizing social media.

His presentation focused on key questions, including what is social media, why do big brands use social media and what is social commerce? He explained how media and other companies are now using "open graphs" to allow Facebook "likes" on their websites, great for merchandising and research and spreading word-of-mouth. He also showed us how Delver.com is Sears' way of using Facebook integration to help customers and their friends discover and explore products together. In short, Sears is testing how to have customers engage more with its websites.

Finally, in what Nowak described as "fishing where the fish are," we heard how big brands are using social media to draw huge audiences, make and save money, increase customer interaction, solicit instant feedback and monitor online activity associated with their brands. Also, good emerging media-ists understand that social media is both good and bad for brands. Be very wary of "brand-jacking" and how it can create customer confusion – Nowak showed a great example of how some angry folks used Twitter to vent about BP's poor handling of the horrendous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this summer – and be ever ready to respond to viral explosions (YouTube!).

Control your reputation. Fish where the fish are!
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Nearly One Billion Views Later ...

9/22/2010

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Just think – an otherwise run-of-the-mill customer service complaint turns into a YouTube video that resonates with so much that it has been viewed nearly a billion times. I'll let Dave Carroll tell his own story about why and how the video come to be. For me, I wish the video didn't portray Mexicans the way it does. Poor taste, if you really want to know my opinion. But I still just cannot believe that it has nearly ONE BILLION views.

Shows once again the power of social media, particularly in this case, YouTube. We have heard of other instances where someone complains about something about about some company – so in just 140 characters on Twitter – and how in some cases, the situation is rectified seemingly right away. No more stomping your feet at the customer-service counter in some store in front of other dissatisfied or disinterested folks. Just tweet and all will be well.

In any case, we call cannot turn an unfortunate situation into a song and notoriety. But it's nice to know that if you do tweet a complaint, just maybe someone will listen and do something to make it right. Just maybe.
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My Second Mind Map

9/16/2010

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OK, so decided to try MindMeister once again for creating a mind map – this time for a Craft of Digital Storytelling course assignment, which was to sketch out what we heard from last week's guest speaker, Martty Berner, nurse manager of the Marquette Neighborhood Health Center. Expecting we will hear more about our next steps this week.
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My First Mind Map

9/15/2010

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This week's assignment in our Emerging Media class: create a mind map with – well, what else, emerging media as its center. This was a humbling experience. Figuring out this tool wasn't easy. But maybe it's not me. Maybe it's the tool! Seems at least a couple of my Emerging Media classmates didn't like MindMeister.com. For our Craft of Digital Storytelling class, the assignment is to create a mind map to promote the Marquette Neighborhood Health Center. Me and a classmate are going to try Mind42.com. I'll let you know if that turns out to be any easier or better.

For now, however, please click here to view my first mind map. Please let me know what you think.

And for those wanting to know more about mind maps, these four paragraphs are from Wikipedia:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and writing.

The elements of a given mind map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, and are classified into groupings, branches, or areas, with the goal of representing semantic or other connections between portions of information. Mind maps may also aid recall of existing memories.

By presenting ideas in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner, mind maps encourage a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks. Though the branches of a mindmap represent hierarchical tree structures, their radial arrangement disrupts the prioritizing of concepts typically associated with hierarchies presented with more linear visual cues. This orientation towards brainstorming encourages users to enumerate and connect concepts without a tendency to begin within a particular conceptual framework.

The mind map can be contrasted with the similar idea of concept mapping. The former is based on radial hierarchies and tree structures denoting relationships with a central governing concept, whereas concept maps are based on connections between concepts in more diverse patterns.
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Does the Home Page Still Matter?

9/8/2010

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So I have just spent my entire Labor Day weekend building this new Web site, complete with a welcoming home page and all the requisite others needed to demonstrate my having a digital portfolio – only to read a June 2008 article as I write this initial blog posting that poses this question: Does the home page matter anymore?

In his article in Razorfish and titled "A Look at Key Emerging Media Trends," Jeremy Lockhorn, an emerging media expert, focuses on four ideas concerning the tremendous impact of interactive media: The Web is Everywhere, Out of Home Has Gone Digital, The Return of Personalization and It's a Wide World of Widgets (After All).

"There seems to be a widget" – now we're talking apps, of course, because this is 2010 – "for just about everything under the sun, and more are on the way," Lockhorn writes. "There are many keys to building a successful widget but chief among them is to provide value to the audience. This isn't about cramming your entire site into a tiny space; it's about figuring out what unique and relevant piece of value you have to offer and crafting something around that."

Lockhorn adds: "To do this right, you need to understand your audience, what social environments they participate in online and why exactly they're there. People sometimes maintain multiple profiles on a single network for different personas, a professional profile and a party profile, for example. Sometimes they use different sites for different reasons. This proliferation of different personalities means you must understand the audience and how they're using a specific environment. Further, it's not enough to just insert a brand message; you must bring more value, ask the audience to participate and give them the tools to share."

I'm headed soon to a meeting with my colleagues in which we will discuss how we might better communicate among ourselves (faculty and staff), our primary customers (current and future students), our valued consultants (alumni and parents) and other partners and supporters (the rest of the university). It remains to be seen how far we are behind and or how quickly we can move to be not just current, but truly distinctive, digital and diverse.

I know this much: many of my colleagues see the need to grab hold of the latest media to emerge. I look forward to working with them and to learning a lot from my two graduate courses, Craft of Digital Storytelling and Emerging Media. It is the latter for which I will posting to this blog at least once weekly as a course assignment.

Here's hoping that as the semester progresses and Apple releases its latest version of iLife – someone told me today it will enable us mere mortals all to develop iPad apps – that my Web site, whether this one or yet another one that I create over some weekend, demonstrates that I am keeping abreast of emerging media.

Oh yes, to answer Lockhorn's question above, I contend that just as a book will always need a great cover – either on a bookstore bookshelf or in iBooks in iTunes – the home page will still matter for any Web-based presentation.
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    Welcome

    My journalism DNA remains strong as I learn and teach new ways to tell and present stories, especially via digital and social media. This blog is where I share what happens in my classroom and my life and, from time to time, offer my views on current events. I appreciate your feedback – either as comments herein or in an email to herbert.lowe [at] marquette [dot] edu.

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