On our best game, we plan for business and get to market; we move with clarity from strategy to plan to brass tacks. It all ties together. But, given the potential to miss the mark and disconnect horribly, there is an open, perpetual conversation about strategy vs. tactics. In almost any business circle, it buzzes. You can jump in on this confab almost any given day of the week. What is the talk?
Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed that some people truly cannot distinguish between strategy and tactics; it’s all a blur, or they just flat-out jump right into the weeds and operate more as tacticians than critical thinkers. Many of those either lazy or clueless go as far as to say, “Strategy and tactics, one and the same.” So, we talk about them. There’s a collective guffaw among the righteous — and the conversation that extols the difference goes from there. Seriously — just think how many opinion pieces you have seen on whether people — marketers, agencies, media companies — get it or not. It even extends to the world at large –other sectors and even presidential debates. Strategy vs. tactics — what’s the difference? We love this topic.
Are you looking for great wordpress themes? Me too!
I’ve compiled the following places, where you can start your search for new wordpress themes. After you’ve found a theme you like, you’ll need to install onto your server. For help, follow these instructions.
Graph Paper Press : Original wordpress themes, available for sale. Beautiful, elegant, customizable, flexible. In addition to the premium themes ($), there are free themes available as well.
Upstart Blogger : Free wordpress themes, for a solid wordpress themer.
With a growing number of sites and social networks, how do you decide what networks to join? What strategy should you use? What kind of time will it take? While all these questions are valid, the most useful question is: what will be most useful for me? What will keep me connected to others and others connected with me?
I think the best way to look at social media is to view it as a way to open up access points. These points can then be leveraged to create content, connection, and community. Do that well, and they can also add to lead generation, nurturing and conversion.
I’ll talk more about this in a free webinar this Wednesday put on by the good folks at Jigsaw, but here are couple point to ponder.
Choose your social media tools with an ideal interaction in mind
– Is a blog a starting point or an ending point?
Choose your social media objectives with connection in mind
– Are you after traffic, primary and secondary links or access to communities that think and act alike?
Jeff Pulver writes about the role of an online “Community Developer”:
A company’s Facebook strategy is just a piece of the answer. It is not the complete answer. At best it is a tactic. And a company’s social media strategy isn’t something which can be entirely outsourced either. When implemented it requires a commitment from the company to support the efforts, not to just press play and walk away and hope for the best.
While I have actively used the term “community†since 1994, and hired a friend in 1999 and gave him a title of “Community Developer†it has taken a number of years for the world to catch on to some concepts I have been taking for granted for years.
It turns out when you decided to put your company “on the Internetâ€, like it or not, it would be a lifetime commitment to being subject to ongoing change and innovation. What at first was creating a gateway for company email and a website to establish an Internet presence has evolved into being able to leverage the best tools whenever possible when playing in an always-on world of pervasive broadband.
Chris Brogan writes a series of articles on social media. A few of his tips:
1. Social media isn’t that scary, but it is different than what you’ve been doing. For one thing, it’s far more messy, and requires a lot more hand-holding.
2. You have SO MUCH to gain from figuring out some of these tools and the way we’re using them.
3. Blogging isn’t the same as releasing marketing materials.
4. Putting up commercials on YouTube isn’t videoblogging.
I read this article by Britt Parrot some time ago and thought it good enough to repost here:
Social media is not about technology, nor about keeping up with the latest trend. The primary goal of using social media has to be communication, not technology and not viral marketing. A company has phones because it wants employees to be able to talk to other people, not because it wants to be at the “cutting edge of voice-activated, enterprise digital communication systemsâ€â€”and not because it wants to call everyone in the phone book with a sales pitch! If the main goal for using social media is to be at the cutting edge of technology, or if your client’s eyes light up when they realize they can use social media to send a mass message to followers, it will fail. Social media is part of a long-term communication strategy to build relationships.
Ignite Social Media writes about the difference between a social media campaign and social media strategy:
Social media strategy: A social media strategy should always come before a social media campaign. Ideally, it should come at least six months before the social media campaign. In it, you re-evaluate your internal assets and begin to (a) analyze and (b) engage with the community, but you don’t “ask†for anything in return yet. We did this first for Ignite, and it pays huge dividends.
Social media campaign: A social media campaign derives from a social media strategy. The major difference here is that now you (a) understand the audience that cares about your subject and where they gather, (b) you’ve given quality information away and developed followers, and (c) you now have measurable goals. Now you’re activating people and trying to “get†something.
• Email Sherpa – Great email marketing case studies and research.
Be sure to sign up for their email newsletters.
• ClickZ – Lots and lots of online marketing and email marketing news.
• Marketing Profs– Nice case studies and articles here. Premium membership is actually worth it. They also issue a Buyers Guide to email vendors.
• BtoB Online– Email and direct mail news. Check their “email marketer insight†section.
• Future Now Inc– Look for their little alien mascot, and sign up for their Grokdotcom newsletter. These guys specialize in conversion, and they know their stuff.
Marketing Blog is full of quick, simple, affordable marketing ideas for business.
His book is a great read for new businesses who are just getting started.
• Seth Godin– That familiar bald head chock full of handy marketing ideas
• Tom Peters– As Tom would say, “Wow! Nice blog.â€
• Tamara Gielen– Tamara Gielen’s blog on email marketing.
She posts links to news all over the email marketing world.
• MailChimp– Gotta plug the source of this good stuff: “MonkeyBrains†has email design tips and tricks, hacks, troubleshooting tips, news, and more.
• Mark Brownlow– Mark Brownlow has posted hundreds of useful email marketing articles and links here.
This Monday, John Perry Barlow will be speaking at NYU.
I remember during the RNC of 2004, John Perry Barlow organized a protest. The idea was simple enough: dance around the city and express our political opinions in a creative way.
For those who can remember back, there was a larger police presence in New York City during the RNC in 2004 (19,000+) than there were soldiers in Afghanistan (10,000+).
I heard about this particular protest while working on another segment at the RNC and just couldn’t resist the opportunity to join up.
Watch the video for John Perry Barlow’s explanation (be patient while loading):
For those who haven’t heard, I’m a big fan of WordPress. It’s a great content management system! It’ll help you keep your site updated, and help you get blogging. If you’ve already got hosting, great! You can now setup WordPress on your own host. In fact, many of the sites I setup run on WordPress
If you do not have your own domain or hosting yet, I personally recommend getting hosting on:
Many hosts, like Bluehost, have Fantastico, which help you setup great utilities on your own host. If you have Fantastico on your host, check these great tutorials on setting up WordPress on your domain.
If you don’t have Bluehost or other similar domains, there is also service that will install your WordPress blog FOR FREE – no strings attached. This is great! You must have your own domain and host already in order to use this service. http://install4free.wordpress.net/
For those do-it-yourselfers, follow these instructions on how to install a wordpress blog on your own domain:
First, check to see if your host has a 1-click install. Bluehost and Dreamhost both have one-click installs. Check here for a list of other hosts with 1-click installs.
2. Connect to your domain via FTP. If you don’t have an FTP program, download Filezilla. If you have trouble connecting to your site, you can contact your host for help setting up your FTP environment.
3. Create a database for WordPress on your web server. You will need to login to your host in order to do this. Make sure you keep ALL your database information in a safe place. If you do not know how to setup a database, contact your host directly.
4. Place the WordPress files in the desired location on your web server. For example, if you want to integrate WordPress into the root of your domain (e.g. http://example.com/), move or upload all contents of the unzipped WordPress directory (but excluding the directory itself) into the root directory of your web server.
If you want to have your WordPress installation in its own subdirectory on your web site (e.g. http://example.com/blog/), rename the folder you downloaded to “blog” and upload it to your web server.Â
If you have no idea what the above means, you have a few options:
1. contact your hosting company
2. hire someone
3. have someone do it for free : http://install4free.wordpress.net/
This coming Thursday, the Queens Council for the Arts will be hosting a panel for artists. As one of the panelists, I’ve been asked to address the question, “How to effectively get your message out.”
Essentially – you’ve got a website, a social networking profile, or other online identities – now what?
This past May, I gave a presentation on this very issue.
And I know – the very challenge we all face is “Not enough time, money, or space.” (Hint: This challenge is not unique to artists). And we also have the inevitable question – do we have to do everything like setup a facebook, myspace account, and linkedIn account?
Simply said, if you’re going to actually use these tools to communicate, then of course – use them. They are popular sites because they are useful tools. But if you’re not going to use it, don’t set it up. It’s like having an email account you never check. Why bother?
My question for you then, the reader, revolves around content production :
TOOLS: How do you envision producing content for the web?
RESOURCES: What kind of resources do you already have that will enable you to produce this content?
MESSAGE: What will this content communicate?
ACTION: What response would you like to elicit from your online audiences?
PURPOSE: How will this serve your mission and connect to your work offline?
Answering these questions will benefit you much better than answering, what do I do with my MySpace account? If you can answer these questions, you’ll be well on your way to developing your online presence and growing your audience – online and off.
Some Places to start:
1. Start working with a CMS (Content Management System)
If you want to be able to manage and update your website without a web programmer, invest in a content management systems.
I suggest you use one of the following:
WordPress (typically a blogging platform, but scalable for large sites) – easy, cheap setup
Drupal (open-source) – higher learning curve, large set of functionality
Joomla – most popular, though typically more expensive to develop
2. Create a production calendar, just like you would create for any other work you may have.
3. Start documenting your work online. We’re living in a green-conscious world. We should resuse all we can. Documenting your work online offers you a chance to reuse materials from your process.
This can mean:
posting your photos online (I recommend flickr)
writing about your process on a blog
posting a series of videos online
offering tutorials
revealing your process as its own art form
4. Offer your audience members a chance for feedback. Be prepared to listen and respond. By offering users + audiences a chance to submit their own content (user-generated content), you relieve yourself the responsibility of producing and uploading content. However, you still have the responsibility of making sure you respond, and participate in the community you are creating.
5. Create a place for experimentation. Your mission will not change from month-to-month. So your basic website should not change drastically from month-to-month, either. However, you do need places to try new things out. Setup a test blog on wordpress, or a personal account on flickr. Begin testing things out for yourself. See what works for you.
The most important thing in building your online presence is to remain open and responsive. With a positive and open attitude, you’ll create possibilities you haven’t even thought of yet!
Tonight, the Martha Graham Dance Company previewed their work Clytemnestra at NYU’s Skirball Center. The show featured Fang-Yi Sheu in the title role, along with a phenomenal cast. I had the personal honor of creating the supertitles for the production.
Most helpful to the audience is the addition of a few discreet surtitles to describe the action. At one point they offered a bit of unintentional comic relief, when the text read, “The women of Mycenae celebrate the victory over Troy,” and the women onstage grimaced, clawed the air and appeared to be in the grip of abdominal distress. But they know what we’ve forgotten: There is no conquering death. Tragedies don’t disappear; their ghosts catch up to you, sooner or later.
Janet Eilber, artistic director for the Martha Graham Dance Company, had the task of devising the text. Once she delivered the full text, I created the system to project them above the stage.
Typically, operas feature supertitles to help audiences understand what the performers are saying. The supertitles, in this instance, offered the audiences a chance to catch up with the narrative of the piece.
The video below was made for JDub, an NYC record label, to help them pitch their artists at a sales conference. JDub represents artists such as Matisyahu, Golem, and Sway Machinery.
The purpose of the video was clear: showcase the label’s artists and their energy.
Deliverables:
In addition to editing the final video and delivering a DVD for the sales conference . . .
We also optimized images, logos, and videos for JDub. Additionally, we converted multiple video files from DVD’s from performances, archives, and promos. All these graphic and video files were delivered to JDub for future use.
Finally, we produced this media player for all the video files. The media player can be managed by JDub without knowing any code.
With the help of many, many people and some great teamwork, we officially launched this site for Jody Sperling : Time Lapse Dance
The original redesign was put together by Paris Marashi, while the site design and content management system was executed by Sam Marx
Jody’s upcoming work, Ghosts, will feature a wearable costume assembled by ITP folk (Jenny Chowdhury & Alex Kowal)
The site features a full content management system (run on Drupal), a full media player managed through brightcove, and some nice graphic work provided by her colleagues.
During the process, we spent great care taking a look at the works page.
We wanted to make sure we could feature individual photos, videos, and text – all in one area – so the content management system had to be flexible enough to handle all those elements.
During the process, we also setup a facebook page, a blip.tv page, as well as a pro flickr account. The goal of setting up all these sites were simply to allow Jody to extend her reach beyond her site, while still providing a homebase for her work, and image.
In addition to visiting the new site, make sure you check out Ghosts, premiering in October!
The internationally acclaimed Martha Graham Dance Company conducted a highly ambitious summer dance residency at Skidmore May 26–June 21. For starters, the Graham Company, recognized as the world’s oldest modern-dance troupe, used the residency to reconstruct sections of its founder’s classic 1958 dance work, Clytemnestra, which will debut this October in Greece and at the Kennedy Center in December.
Working under the direction of Graham artistic director Janet Eilber and drawing on veteran dancers’ memories and archival performance footage, the company reset the complex, three-act dance work on its current dancers.
Dance students participating in the residency’s three-week intensive workshop had the unusual opportunity of joining the professional dancers in two public performances, starting with an open rehearsal in the college’s airy, bright dance studios. They also performed an early Graham group work, Panorama, in the company’s June 13 dance concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The SPAC performance, a headline event of the second annual SaratogaArtsFest, drew an enthusiastic audience and won whoops and ovations for the dancers.
The 37 student dancers also pioneered a dance-world first—a specially designed dance media workshop, in which student documentary teams captured highlights of the choreographic reconstruction process for use on the dance company’s new Web site, clytemnestraproject.com. As the students learned Graham technique, composition, and repertory, they also documented their own and the company’s work using video, photography, and blogs, working under the guidance of New York-based new-media consultant Jaki Levy and former Graham principal dancer Peter Sparling, a video and installation artist and maker of award-winning dance videos.
The video above is Lamentation by Martha Graham, shot at Saratoga Performing Arts Center during a live performance.
It was a 2 camera shoot, taped and edited entirely for the web.
NOTE : This is a ROUGH VERSION, not the final version.
This is intended as a preview.
Choreographer: Martha Graham Dancer: Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch Music by: Zoltan Kodaly
For those who need some help importing your mp3’s into your movie projects, here is a quick tutorial on how to do just that. Follow along on your own computer, and your movies will be singing in no time.
First, you’ll have to convert your mp3 file into an AIFF file using iTunes. Otherwise, you’ll get a skipping sound when you import those mp3’s. After you import the AIFF into iTunes, we’ll import that AIFF file into Final Cut Pro.
To begin, first open up iTunes.
1. Click on iTunes -> Preferences
2. Now, click on the Advanced icon. Select AIFF Encoder from the drop-down menu on Importing Options.
You’ll need to make sure your file is Imported into iTunes (you can just drag the file onto the iTunes playlist). Once your file is imported into iTunes, select your file and convert it to an AIFF file.
Now that you’ve prepped your file, import the file into Final Cut Pro
Make sure you select your AIFF file to import into Final Cut.
Once the file is imported, you can just drag the file into the timeline and treat it like any other clip, or movie file. Fade in, fade out, or even cross-fade.
I created this video in order to generate interest around The Clytemnestra Project. It features choreography from Panorama by Martha Graham. The students in the piece learned the choreography in 1 week!
I’ve been spending the first part of my Summer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. We’re on a residency at Skidmore. I’ve had the privilege of working with phenomenal dancers from the company, and am also working with a team of over 30 students to produce a group blog.
For those who haven’t heard, I’m a big fan of WordPress. It’s a great content management system! It’ll help you keep your site updated, and help you get blogging. If you’ve already got hosting, great! You can now setup WordPress on your own host. In fact, many of the 
