When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World decades before the advent of the Internet, he portrayed future society as an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of understanding the future. His work was a study of the possible, probable and even preferable in terms of this future.

I feel like that same description applies to the two and a half years I’ve spent here at Brave New Media. Now, as I prepare to embark on the adventure of my own future, I wanted to reflect on what it’s meant to me to be here, and to have been Brave.

Huxley’s futurology seeks to understand what’s likely to evolve, what innovations are likely to happen, and to understand what’s truly novel. The team here at Brave New Media goes a step beyond: it’s not just about understanding these things, it’s about creating them.

Pushing past conventions of marketing in order to build new concepts of engaging audiences. Moving beyond hundred-page brand standards to embrace the heart and soul of storytelling as the ultimate framework.

Making even the most stubborn skeptics embrace that digital is not just another medium, that in fact it is our era.

To work here has been a master class in this level of bravery. Bravery that’s not at all chest-thumping, but rather a humble, driving curiosity that will never be satisfied with an answer that begins with the word “because.”

To work here has been a constant study of not only what’s likely, but the outer limits of what’s possible.  This is the first place I’ve ever worked where the conversation is never about an idea not being feasible, but instead about when and how it will become possible, and whether or not we’re immediately capable of creating that possibility.

There’s a reason that it takes a compound sentence to describe this place when people ask “where do you work?” It’s because there presently isn’t a widely-used noun for this. It’s an environment of the future.

So as I move on from here and look forward to my own future, it’s with an enormous gratitude to Craig, and Damian, and this team, for having garnered a much better understanding of what that future is: not just in terms of what I do, or how I interact, but who I am.

Alissa A.

Timeline format for Facebook brand pages isn’t just a rumor, anymore. As we learned this morning, it arrives March 30, 2012.

Timeline for individual users has been met with mixed reviews, so obviously brands share some trepidation over what the roll-out of this new interface means for their online strategy.

Essentially, it means this: content isn’t just king, anymore; it’s been promoted to Emperor.

Timeline gives personal users a narrative organization of one’s life as lived online. It provides an easy way to highlight significant moments and easily recapture content shared in the past. In this sense, it deeply reflects the fundamental aspect of all great content strategy: storytelling.

The eternal challenge of great storytelling, then, is also magnified: content simply won’t survive if it’s not interesting. Brands won’t flourish unless they tap into the resonant moments in their consumers’ online lives, and present visual content that users will share as part of their own narratives.

The challenge Timeline really puts forward to brands is one that’s existed all along, and is the secret sauce of brands that have had ongoing success with their Facebook strategy. That challenge is for brands to authentically interact with their consumers about matters that are important to them. It’s much different than providing an incentive for consumers to interact with the brand about what matters to the brand.

According to Nigel Morris, CEO of Aegis Media America, it’s no longer about a brand message; the new brand page interface allows brands to get into “rich, adaptive, storytelling,” providing users the opportunity to tell their own stories with and through brands.  Of course the challenge is that “we need to talk to them, too.”

Walmart founder Sam Walton understood retail to be a fixture of local communities: in place to anticipate and fulfill the resource needs of its neighbors. In the past few decades, retail has been able to predict and respond to consumers’ needs on a much larger scale and more accurate level, thanks to market research and consumer insights.  On Facebook’s Live Marketing Talks, Walmart CMO Stephen Quinn explained that now, social is bringing retail “back to the future” of where it was thirty years ago: a community participant on the local level, with the added benefit of additional tools and metrics gleaned along the way. Facebook’s enhancements to brand pages reflect this evolution and bring brands and communities toward deeper levels of understanding and engaging with one another.

What of paid advertising across Facebook? Undoubtedly this is a mainstay for brands, but Timeline shifts even more focus toward “Sponsored Stories.” Facebook users want to read, see and experience their what their peers are publishing. Timeline and its focus on visual narrative brings this even more to the forefront of smart brands’ strategies on Facebook. Brands who use their paid media dollars to leverage sponsored stories are wisely placing user-generated content tied to their brands’ stories front and center on the News Feeds of millions of potential new customers.

So how do you make sure to stay ahead of opportunities and out from underneath challenges of the new format?

1: Adapt. “A brand will become obsolete on Facebook unless it takes the changes into consideration, because pushed messages will no longer be received,” says Shannon Baker, Director of PR and Social Media at GatesmanMarmion+Dave. “Communication on Facebook would revolve much more around relationships.”

Put it into Action: shift editorial content from pushed messages toward visual content and direct calls to action.

2: Order Up Some Apps. We’re not talking about chicken wings. Timeline makes apps more prominent on users’ pages, so any interaction with your brands’ applications are going to be amplified to users’ News Feeds.  Creating an app that shows up on a user’s profile = engagement. Posting a status update facing only your own community = tree falling in the woods. Descartes wins again.

Put it into Action: Develop applications that offer users personal incentive to engage. Contests and promotions are always a winning strategy. Outside your capabilities? Check out Wildfire’s Page Manager.

3: Be Visual. Facebook’s evolving algorithm (as well as the new EdgeRank algorithm) puts increasing emphasis on visual content. Just remember that, while worth a thousand words, a picture could always use just a few more. Always include words with posted media to provide users with context.

Put it into Action: Does your brand have tangible products? Get fabulous photos and post them with status updates. There’s a reason that Pinterest is taking over your free time. People are visual, channels are evolving to reflect that.

What are you most excited about in light of these changes? What do you anticipate being the biggest challenge?

Wikipedia is blacked out. Google—ever the homepage chameleon—is wearing a censor bar over its logo.  At the heart of the hubbub: confusing acronyms.

When 4 capital letters get together and cause an uprising, one of three things is usually happening:

1)     A building is burning (let’s say a theater, for a little nod to our First Amendment);
2)     Someone has sworn on an FCC regulated TV network;
3)     There’s some controversial new legislation in Congress.

Courtesy of Google.com

What we have here is a solid example of #3. SOPA and PIPA are two bills currently in the legislature. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), otherwise known by it’s less sexy name, House Bill 3261, aims to curb online piracy by targeting foreign websites that illegally stream intellectual property belonging to others. (And by “others”, let’s be honest: we’re largely talking about three entities: movie studios, the recording industry, and Rupert Murdoch.)

PIPA is basically SOPA’s Senate cousin, the Protect IP Act. It is not to be confused with Kate Middleton’s kid sister. Pippa Middleton looks fabulous in jeans, whereas PIPA threatens a free and open Internet.

SOPA and PIPA target “rogue” websites, and the first alarming implication is that this definition of “rogue” is pretty vague. Who gets to decide which sites are rogue, are what recourse is available for sites unfairly branded with a big scarlet “R”?

These bills are new but their aim is not—remember the epic battle of the early 2000’s, Metallica versus Napster?

Pirates of the Internet are a lot like pirates of the high seas: they like pillaging, and are generally not headquarted on US soil. This latter fact is the crux of this legislation: it’s very hard to pursue the pirate sites themselves, so instead, SOPA aims to cut off their access to services provided by US entities that the government can oversee, including search engines and payment systems.

With definitions squared away, the biggest question remains: What does SOPA mean for me, the websites I love, the businesses I buy from, the payment method I use to make purchases, and ultimately my government’s legislated view on censorship?

In an oversimplified nutshell, our current legislation (provided largely by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) works on a “notify, take down” basis. Copyright owners are provided a process to notify sites of a violation, and those sites take the offending content down. The onus for policing copyright violations rests with the copyright owners. The responsibility of sites (like YouTube, for example) is to respond when claims are made, and remove content that violates a copyright.

Under SOPA, website themselves would be responsible for proactively policing all content to ensure its legal status. On the surface, this sounds fair enough, right? Even if you secretly love streaming Californication from an off-shores website instead of paying for Showtime, you probably know that those sly little sites with the shifty URL’s are doing something illegal. But this seemingly fair assumption gives way to broadly sweeping implications that factor in almost everything that takes place online.

Using YouTube as an example again, SOPA doesn’t only provide that YouTube would be held responsible for all the videos it streams, but also ads purchased on its paid advertising platform, and the content that exists wherever those ads lead consumers. Further, it applies to user-generated links to outside content that are placed on YouTube.

YouTube reports that 48 hours of video content is uploaded every MINUTE. This is 8 YEARS of content added every day.  Imagine the implication of holding YouTube accountable for verifying copyright status of each and every new upload, let alone paid ad placement and outbound links.

That’s not the end. Think about illegal sites and the content they offer for a fraction of the legal version’s cost. There’s still a cost. And how is it paid? Online payment portals like PayPal and Visa. SOPA covers this too. Visa and PayPal would be in violation of the legislation if they processed payments that were made in exchange for illegally distributed content.  Again, on the surface this seems reasonable. But imagine the volume of transactions per day, and payment portals having the added responsibility of verifying the copyright status of each and every purchase made.

Arguably this is where SOPA makes some marginal sense, much like arguably, payment processing systems are where the rampant online pharmacies of just a few years ago should have been more vulnerable to exposure. But the overarching question still remains: when a site features illegal content, to what degree of separation should guilt extend to unknowingly complicit parties? If YouTube and PayPal can be held accountable for an errant link or an unethical transaction, one that simply served as a bridge between a potentially unaware consumer and an illegal distributor of content, how will that impact those sites’ ability to carry on with business on the whole?

Are the financial interests of those most affected by online piracy more important than the financial impact SOPA may have on others who use the same online systems to conduct business as the pirates do? More importantly: is protecting the ownership of a minority of the content found online worth infringing on the internet’s ability to foster an open and creative exchange of ideas?

We’d love to know what you think.

Read more:
Minnesota Public Radio featured a great discussion about online piracy on Wednesday, January 18. Listen here.

Gawker’s post helps even non-nerds know the SOPA facts.

Google invites you to take action with a quick and easy online petition.

Looking for a Pro-SOPA perspective? Rupert Murdoch unleashes on Google and President Obama on Twitter, Huffington Post has the story.

Friday night was a quintessential dose of Americana at Target Stadium: baseball, brats, and…blogging?

Micro-blogging, to be more specific. The Minnesota Twins invited fifteen power Twitter users to take part in a social media “Deckstravaganza,” bringing a cross-section of social media personalities to the Twins executive deck to amplify the game’s broadcast via their own established social channels in addition to FSN’s televised and online coverage.

I was honored to be among the invited guests, and found the event impressive on many levels. It’s no secret that the Twins organization is top-notch in terms of hospitality, and this was no exception.  A catered buffet and complementary brews awaited our arrival, as did key members of the organization including team president, Dave St. Peter (@TwinsPrez)!

I had opportunity to chat with Chris Iles, Twins corporate communications manager, about the team’s earnest foray into the reigning major leagues of social media: Twitter and Facebook. He shared some intriguing insights as to the exciting challenges and opportunities teams face online, where ultimately, all content is owned by the league.

The Twins (like most sports teams) are in a unique relationship with the league when it comes to marketing and a team’s ability to monetize it’s own electronic content. The must-follow John Bonnes (@TwinsGeek)–who is also a new friend, thanks to Deckstravaganza meeting and greeting–puts it best in his post “Twitter and the Twins”. (Bonus: as a long-time Twins blogger he also offers some great perspective on the evolution of social media relative to traditional broadcast channels!)

Secondly, the breadth and diversity of people and perspectives at Friday night’s even reminded me of why the Twin Cities is truly an interactive hub in this country.  From rising stars of the online marketing community, to communications executives dedicated to bringing social into their organizations from top-down, to seasoned sports bloggers, to a neighboring state’s Miss USA delegate: this was truly a cross-section not only of who’s who on Twitter, but representative of fans in the stands.

It’s like wandering the halls of the new Twins stadium or hanging out in it’s Town Ball Tavern and seeing photographs of local ballparks from around the state: wherever you’re coming from and whatever type of Twins fan you might be, at least one of us on the social media deck probably represented your voice. Which is the bottom line, after all, when it comes to social: consumers’ voices being heard in company offices, and businesses speaking to consumers directly, in their language, on their channels.

Hats off to the Twins for testing a cool engagement strategy, reaching new pockets of their potential fan base, and having a lot of fun along the way.

Do you follow the @Twins on Twitter? What are your favorite teams/events to follow along with via social media? What untapped opportunities do you think exist for sports teams in social?

“The NSC Minnesota Stars fully support Rock the Cure and the energy with which it helps combat and raise awareness of women’s cancers. We greatly admire the enthusiasm the organization brings to its events and believe it’s a perfect fit with the high-energy, exciting atmosphere of professional soccer,” Stars CEO Djorn Buchholz said.

Admiral Sportswear has donated a set of pink kits for the game, which Planet Soccer will print with custom graphics for the match. The game-worn jerseys will be sold through a silent auction during the game. The Stars’ merchandise tent on the stadium concourse will have a variety of pink Stars and Rock the Cure merchandise.

“The color pink has become a powerful symbol of strength and courage in the past decade, representing the women and men who are diagnosed and treated for breast cancer,” said Angie Hanzel-Palomo, president of Rock the Cure. “When professional athletes like the Stars take the field in pink jerseys, it really helps the public embrace this cause. Soccer is such a family sport, and when breast cancer strikes a parent, the whole family goes through the experience together. There will undoubtedly be children in the crowd at this game who will see their soccer heroes in these jerseys, and will feel a sense of unity with them.”

Bringing an element of rock and roll to the awareness-raising evening is Rank Strangers, a local indie-rock group who is appearing thanks to the generous sponsorship of Frattellone’s Ace Hardware. “Selecting Rank Strangers to headline this event was a no-brainer,” shares Brave New Media president Damian Petrou. “Rank Strangers provided their track ‘Never Work’ as the punk anthem of the Stars’ Shine On web video series.” Professional soccer in Minnesota has a long history of connection to the local punk rock music scene, solidifying the great fit of this band and this particular event.

General admission tickets for the game are on sale for $5 for youth and $10 for adults through a link at RocktheCure.org. Half of all proceeds from tickets sold through this link go directly to Rock the Cure. Tickets can also be purchased at the discounted rate with proceeds going to Rock the Cure by calling the Stars’ ticket office at (763) 792-7355 and mentioning Breast Cancer Awareness Night.

About Rock the Cure

For the past 10 years, Rock the Cure has been dedicated to the fight against breast cancer. Through our annual concert events, merchandise sales and third party fund raisers, we have proudly donated over $150,000 in Minnesota. We cannot thank enough our generous sponsors who cover our event costs so that 100% of the money we raise at our events will be donated directly to our charities.

About Rank Strangers

The band was born in the spring of 1990 in East Lansing, Michigan before moving to Minneapolis that August. They released their first album, Far Cry From Here, in 1993 under the Crackpot Records label. From there, the band went on to release several more albums including Target, in 1997, which was awarded a Minnesota Music Award for Best Rock Recording that year.

Here are some of the highlights. I’ll try to make this as interesting and non-technical as I can! Learning about analytics isn’t quite as exciting as watching an action movie, so please bear with me.

Advanced Segments

This made viewing analytics data fun instead of just interesting. You can compare data between segments effortlessly. What does this mean?

In the example above, instead of just looking at a graph of total visits, we’re comparing that with new and returning visitors, at a glance. The comparison permeates the entire site, so any graph, table, or chart will display all three segments. There are a bunch of predefined segments, and you have the ability to make custom segments too.

Intelligence

Something we all want. Well, Google Analytics has it! What “intelligence” means in this context is keeping track of sudden changes in data. If your site was expected to get 305 hits one day, but it got 892 instead, Intelligence will flag it as significant. So if you see a huge spike (or drop) in the middle of a graph, chances are Intelligence can tell you all about it.

Annotations

When you do see some weird phenomenon in the data, and you figure out what caused it, how can you remember that information later on? You can annotate it! Annotations can be made on any spot on a graph—just click on one of the dots and you’ll see the option. When it’s saved, it leaves a little talk bubble icon on the graph to remind you there’s a note there.

There is so much more going on in Google Analytics than what I’ve outlined here, but let’s be honest. You don’t want to read a dry, detailed account of advanced analytics features. Just rest assured knowing that any analytics data going through Brave New Media now comes with 99% more sweetness.

Usually, it was in the context of heavy creative work or intense 3D computer animation.  Healthways, it turns out, came to BNM through our ongoing relationship with Dan Buettner’s Blue Zones project.  With Blue Zones, the focus is on people making healthy choices and living fuller, longer lives; with Healthways, these themes would continue.  It would also be Damian’s first big project with Andy, our 3D animator, and their first opportunity and build a creative rapport.  It turned out this was an important part of the creative process.

After they successfully delivered the final animation to the client, I wanted to know: how’d it go?  What in the world had they been doing on the 4th floor?  So I asked Andy to fill me in:

Jeff: How does the process start? Does Damian come in and tell you what to do?

Andy: Damian comes in – and tells me what to do… (laughs).  OK, (we start off with storyboards).  They were just sketches, and I started mocking those (boards) up in 3D just trying to get the look right.  Well, even before that we started with the existing vector (graphic) of the city that’s on the website.  And we took that and I played around trying to get that into 3D, replicating that look in a 3D environment.  Which was a fair amount of work.

Jeff: So it started with the idea of the city, the graphic of the city.  How do you incorporate that into a 3D space?

Andy: I use Cinema 4D.

Jeff: What was involved with starting with that city vector graphic and making that 3D?

Andy: Mostly I just isolated the different types of buildings there were in the vector- two dimensional thing, and recreated them in 3D.  Using cubes pretty much.  And then replicating them to build the city.  Then there’s just trying to get the lighting to match the stylized look of the vector work.

Jeff: How did you cover them or paint them?

Andy: I actually tried not doing that ’cause I thought (another) way would be easier but in the end it probably would have been easier just to texture them. They are just one solid color and I put (an invisible) plane in front of it that reflects (the color on the buildings).  So then all of the buildings that face that plane would have that color.  Then it would match the art direction where one side is kind of yellow-yellowish and the other side is more reddish.

While this sounded like an interesting approach to the problem I wasn’t sure I was getting the difference between creating an invisible plane in computer 3D space that would color everything, and just painting the colors over the building shapes.  Andy explained that instead of doing every single object separately, he could affect them all with just one adjustment… or at least that was the idea.

Jeff: So it sort of streamlines the operation?

Andy: Yeah, that was the theory (laughs).  But in the end it ended up being a lot of tweaking trying to get it right.  And then if we tried to make a global change in the lighting everything would be going off and I’d have to re-change it.

Jeff: Graphically what else is involved?  Is it just the buildings?

Andy: In the vector graphic?  It’s like a rocky shore… there’s water in front of it reflecting the city.  I started kind of building it then we ended up going in a different direction.  One of the things we ran into was following the original plan, was it didn’t feel very “natural and healthy”.  It felt very bleak and “on Mars”.

Although cool looking, as it turns out a “bleak” rocky Martian landscape didn’t fit in with the whole “people making healthy choices and living fuller, longer lives” focus that BNM wanted to build on.  With this change came a whole new creative direction which was practically a whole new project – and in turn a lot more interaction between Andy and Damian.

Andy: In the original plan we have a red ground with red and everything was orange and Damian didn’t like that and I think the client didn’t like it either in the end so we had to go back and then… we went with grass which is pretty render intensive to do.  So we had to cover the majority of the area with the grass.  Then they ditched most of the buildings and just had the text coming out of the grassy area.

Jeff: Was having the text come out of the ground always a part of the animation?

Andy: Yeah, that originally was just the first section, with the text coming up.  And the other parts were buildings.  We got rid of the buildings and just continued… just kept that grass part in and used that several times.  Just simplifying it overall.

Jeff: How labor intensive was animating the words coming out of the grass?  Because it looks like there’s a lot going on there…

Andy: Yeah, I mean actually animating the text is just two key frames… down, up (laughs).  But getting the grass, getting it to look right.  And then rendering it ’cause it’s actually hair… that’s how it’s done in Cinema 4D, it has to calculate each individual one.  It tripled the render times at least.

He wasn’t kidding.  It was so processor intensive that for the first time BNM had to build an ad hoc render farm – simply put we gathered all of our workstations together in order to increase our processing power.  With all our computers working to render out the frames of the animation in parallel with each other it still took days to finish.  They ran 24hrs a day over a weekend to produce the final (how long is it????) animation.

When it was delivered, Healthways was ecstatic about it, and we had an awesome new feather in our cap.

Jeff: Having finished this a little while ago, is there anything you would have done differently?  Anything you learned from this project?

Andy: Probably… not be afraid to abandon a bad idea that isn’t working out – how I did the lighting and everything.  I would have saved a lot of time overall just to do it as textures.  The fundamentals I already had.  I don’t think I’ve used hair before in Cinema (4D) so I had to learn that and the whole different way that I was doing the lighting is not something that I’ve done before.

Jeff: Was that part of why you stuck with it?

Andy: Yeah, a little bit (laughs) I think the whole process has been kind of a learning experience for both me and Damian.  This is the biggest project I’ve done since I’ve started here.

And part of that was Alison and Jerry’s (but mostly Alison’s) inclusion of WPtouch Pro into Brave New Media’s toolbox. WPtouch Pro is a WordPress plugin which allows us to present a mobile theme incorporating the design work that we’ve already put into the full version of a site but in a way that’s specialized for phone and tablet use across all mobile platforms. And it’s going to look like it’s supposed to be there.

Alison: “We don’t have to figure out how to make it look right on every phone, it’s doing it already.” Right… but what does that mean technically? “The design we start with comes right from the plugin itself, and it’s already been programmed to respond differently to all major mobile devices. Basically, we’re taking what already works and making it prettier.”

Pick up your phone (assuming you’re not already on it) and go here: Sunnyside Gardens. You see that? How cool is that? And what’s even cooler is it’s already simpatico with Google Analytics allowing for that mobile data to now be included in your metrics report. Even someone who’s not a statistician can see how that adds up.

To that end I find I am doing at least half of my web browsing on my phone (it’s probably a lot more than that) and there’s nothing more annoying once you’re using the web on your phone than having to pinch and drag all through a site playing hide and seek with whatever information it is that you’re looking for. It’s like grabbing at ants and about as futile and wasteful.

And with all of this mobile technology, the phones as well as the tablets are just going to get more affordable and in more people’s hands. That means that Brave New Media recognizes the importance of the design decisions that have already been labored over, and is making the lateral shift to a mobile format won’t compromise any of that work.

Jerry: “… that’s the recent news. They’re (Apple’s) gonna make a more affordable iPhone so that means more people are gonna use the web to view stuff, which means people should have viewable sites. Mobile designed sites.”

So now that’s covered. We can get back into the fun stuff… like viral web videos and massive project renders.

Sometimes it’s a product like the CanopyCo.com Jumba® iPhone4 case with two integrated 1/4″ – 20 screw threads (for tripod mounting) that starts the ball rolling. It’s a great idea… how would we use it? To me the answer was naturally – day long time lapse photography! It’s so obvious, a child would come to the same conclusion. Keeping a rock steady mount as my iPhone4 captured the shadows growing across Northeast Minneapolis and the sun racing through the clouds ending in a brilliant flash of crimson would not have been possible for these shots with out a tripod. This thing is an elegant solution!

Sometimes it’s a need we are tasked with filling (and is such a thing even possible?). Like a turn-key (stay with me here) location based, live green-screen compositing “thing” that anyone without any training could in a single operation:

1. launch from a laptop
2. composite static as well as moving as well as live feed elements
3. have it all upload to YouTube in one fell stroke

Um… Sure. One day later we were close, and by noon the next day we had all the parts sourced, put together and uploading!

Pretty freaking sweet!

The thing with the cereal, elbows and flowers is self explanatory and I don’t want to bore you numbered dodecahedron results.

[flv:jerry_1.flv 600 450]