Archives for April 2012

I read about the thing you guys are doing here.

The “Strip for Likes” campaign debuted on April 10 for the re-launch of their Amsterdam Facebook Page. The model wears all of the clothing pieces from the mens Spring/Summer 2012 lookbook. Her outfit includes numerous pairs of pants, shirts, outerwear and hats.

Black-and-white photos of a model wearing a gargantuan stack of clothes slides by on the campaign’s homepage. After liking the “Strip for Likes” Facebook page, users are urged to Facebook share or Facebook Like the separate “Strip for Likes” page, to “undress” the model.

You may not know it yet, but you’re team is heading down a dark and lonely road. I’m going to venture a guess that your client/boss wants to do this because they want to get 1 million Facebook likes. I’ve been there before, my friend. Now, despite the fact that this is probably going to be killed by Facebook, there may be a chance for you to save the day. But there’s not much time.

1. You need to make sure that you’re measuring real business things, not likes. Likes aren’t real. Marketing measurements usually aren’t real either but they are more real than a Facebook like.

2. You’re likely going to lure a bunch of dudes who aren’t going to be impressed when the stripping is over and you start giving them coupons or status updates like “How much do you love Stussy?” You’ll need to prepare a deck in advance explaining why the numbers got really disappointing after being really good.

3. Now that you have your actual business/marketing goals in place, you’ll need a content strategy that continues to engage those that are left behind after this is over. Reaching 1-million likers does not mean that you’ve won marketing, or even the internet, it means that you worked hard to build a database that you don’t actually own or having any control over.  And your client/boss is going to have a moment of panic when they realize that they’ve done this and don’t know what to do with these people now. Also, speaking of which, you should also get ready to calm them the next time Facebook makes a cataclysmic change in the ability of brands to communicate with the collection of 1-million people they spent so much money and mental energy collecting. They generally do that about once a year.

You can do it. Good luck and Godspeed.

(Via Mashable!)

It’s not often that I wish I lived in New York, but when I read about the NYU Game Center Summer Courses, I felt a powerful draw:

Interested in improving your game development skills over the summer? Then take a look at our exciting summer opportunities for students to get hands on experience creating and thinking about games!

If you have any general questions about summer courses, please check this website or email the Game Center at gamecenter@nyu.edu

OART-UT 1604 Game Development Workshop
Summer Session I: 05/21/2012 – 06/29/2012
When: Mon, Wed 12.30 PM – 3.15PM

This course reflects the various skills and disciplines that are brought together in modern game development: game design, programming, visual art, animation, sound design, and writing. The workshop will situate these disciplines within a larger context of game literacy and a historical and critical understanding of games as cultural objects. Classroom lectures and lab time will all be used to bring these different educational vectors together into a coherent whole; the workshop will be organized around a single, long-term, hands-on, game creation project. Working in small groups under the close supervision of instructors, students will collaborate on the creation of a playable game. As a creative constraint to help inspire them and guide their designs, the students will be given a theme to express in their game projects.

OART-UT 1606 Thinking About Games
Summer Session II: 07/02/2012 – 08/10/2012
When: Tue, Thu 12.30 PM – 3.15PM

This class is an overview of the field of video games that approaches them from several theoretical and critical perspectives. No special theoretical background or prior training is needed to take the course, but to have had a broad practical experience with and basic knowledge of games is a distinct advantage. Also, an interest in theoretical and analytical issues will help. You are expected to actively participate in the lectures, which are dialogic in form, with ample room for discussion.

The course will prepare the student to:
– Understand and discuss games from a theoretical perspective
– Apply new theories and evaluate them critically.
– Assess and discuss game concepts and the use of games in various contexts.
– Analyze games, and understand and apply a range of analytical methods

 

(Via The Ludologist)

From an excellent series of posts on Gamasutra about gamification dynamics:

 

Three Aspects of Flow

• a stream of learned automatic choices
• a stream of subjective, creative choices
• a source of growth

Applying Flow

Looking at the three aspects above, it should be clear that not any experience can be “gamified” to include flow. In fact, the requirements are rather limiting, particularly the two endless streams of interaction. Most activities seeking game mechanics are not as interactive as games. A few websites that seem to have flow include Facebook and YouTube. What makes these sites special?

 

Not that the world needs another blog post about gamification, but I think that there’s been a lot of misunderstanding about the word and what it actually means. I don’t think giving people points or a badge for completeness of a profile or watching glee is necessarily any sort of game. And by the definition above, it definitely is not a game.

Not to be a killjoy, but words mean things. Especially when chasing shiny buzzwords for the sake of marketing.

(Via www.gamasutra.com)

The Simple Stick symbolizes a core value within Apple. Sometimes it’s held up as inspiration; other times it’s wielded like a caveman’s club. In all cases, it’s a reminder of what sets Apple apart from other technology companies and what makes Apple stand out in a complicated world: a deep, almost religious belief in the power of Simplicity.

When you walk into Apple’s Marcom building, just after the security doors, there’s a giant white wall with one inch typeface that reads:

Simplify Simplify Simplify

It’s a stark contrast to the standard marketing habit of jamming as much messaging into an execution as possible.

(Via The Next Web)

I’ve always been bothered by idea that account planners are unorganized, flaky people. The irony being that I’ve spent the past few years pushing the idea of the unorganized planner to bold new frontiers. It was manageable in school and over the first few years of my career, but I’ve finally hit a point in my life where flying by the seat of my pants is no longer an option if I want to continue eating food and living in houses. And I do.

So a few months ago I gave in to a few years worth of curiosity and picked up a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. I’ve since combined the thinking from GTD with a few other ideas that I’ve come across at places like 43 Folders, and I can honestly say that I’ve never had my proverbial shit together like this before.

Here’s how I’ve been working:

(WARNING: this stuff isn’t for everyone. If you feel your eyes about to roll, feel free to move along)

Hitting Reset: The first thing to do was to cleanse the mess. The piles of paper on my desk, the Post-Its, the vender business cards, the random papers in my bag, random to-do lists and finally the gigantic amount of email sitting in the inboxes of my gmail, VCU and work email accounts, it all had to be dealt with. But I needed some tools to work with. A friend had told me about http://www.filecenterdms.com, and for this situation it would have been really useful, but sadly I had forgotten about it until after I was done with sorting through my documents. So, in the interest of fairness, here’s what I used:

Task Management: Things by Cultured Code-GTD lives and dies by everything being written down and purged from your mind. So naturally it helps if you have a safe house for all of those nagging to-dos and constantly flutter in and out of your brain throughout the day. I had already been using Things by Cultured Code for about a year (sloppily), but as the only software that has ever been able to take the place of pen and paper for me, I figured I’d stick with it. After reading the GTD book I learned how to take full advantage of the software, and once I was able to get into their closed beta for their cloud sync, I’d be willing to put it up against any other task management software out there. Including pen and paper.

Paperless Organization: Evernote-I’ve toyed around with Evernote as a way to collect bits of information from the web for work projects, but then forgot about it. But when I was looking around at GTD methodologies I ran across a lot people who are using Evernote for task management, and then somehow or another I wound up reading this ebook about how to effectively use Evernote to go paperless. I’ve started storing everything in Evernote, from workouts to scanned meeting notes to really important emails to online clippings from the Web for research projects. It’s also easy to pull highlights and notes out of Kindle books and put them into Evernote where you can keep your notes, forever.

Paper Filing System: A-Z Filing System-I’ve streamlined my filing cabinet to get rid of the specific file folders that I didn’t use in favor of an A-Z filing system. The idea is that filing things happens a lot more than looking for things (for me anyways), so the effort and time should be shifted to finding things. I’ve changed my folder structure so it’s just 25 folders from A-Z, and I file things wherever I feel like they should go at the time. It gets things filed quickly, and when I do need to go back and find things, they’ll be in one of 3 or 4 places. Since making this change (and scanning things into Evernote and tossing them) my desk has been totally free of clutter.

Internet Addiction Tamer: Concentrate for Chrome-A simple Chrome extension that allows you to block distracting websites for any amount of time that you choose. It’s great for that hand tick that opens Facebook automatically every time I get distracted or stop working for half a second. Instead of whatever site you tried to go to, you get a Concentrate logo and that’s it. It’s brilliant and effective. I would love to see a version that set off an alarm every time you were supposed to be working and you’d try to open a site that was temporarily blocked. Maybe one day when I run a boiler room motivated by shame.

Also helpful: Downcast for iPhone podcasts, Reeder for RSS, MarsEdit for blog posts, and KeyCue to learn the keyboard shortcuts for any software that runs in OSX.

Couple all of this with frequent reviews of tasks and projects, as well as staying on top of processing inboxes, and I’ve never been more productive. Ever. Seriously.

Read the book if you’re into it.