Social media: Have we finally hit the peak of the hype cycle? Excerpt from Ted Sapountzis' post on smartblog.com

  • Growth is slowing down: The New York Times reported that growth in Facebook visits was a “mere” 10% in the 12 months ending in October, down from 56% a year earlier. Meanwhile, Facebook is preparing for an IPO early next year. As George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, said at the LeWeb conference, “Social is running out of hours. Social is also running out of people.”
  • Companies are not able to generate value (aka return on investment): I wrote about the holy grail of social media ROI more than a year ago, and eMarketer published a flurry of research this month. Some of the mind-numbing statistics are that only 8% of marketers could attribute ROI for all of their investments in social media, while 60% still count fans, followers and “likes.” This translates to 2 in 5 marketers having little confidence in their ability to measure social media campaigns, according to a Chief Marketer study.
  • Corporate investments are decreasing: According to a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth study, “social media use among America’s largest companies is losing steam.” Their study, which focused on the Fortune 500, found no growth in corporate blogs, while use of Facebook and Twitter grew only 2%. This certainly is consistent with discussions with my peers in the industry.
  • Read the full post for Ted Sapountzis' recommendations:

    http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2011/12/27/social-media-have-we-finally-hit...

    Summary of My Story Architecture Talk with Karine Halpern @StoryWorld 201 « Grazie! Christine Wietbrecht

    StoryWorld 2011 in San Francisco: Day 3

    Written By: Christine - Nov• 03•11

    DAY 3:

    Talk: Story Architecture – Crafting Transmedia Design

    Siobhan O’Flynn, Karine Halpern with Scott Walker

    • How to lead audiences across different platforms is still a challenge of transmedia, and it is a crucial question for experience design.
    • Stories are so popular because they communicate experiences and emotions.
    • Design principles for transmedia stories:
    • Non-linear spatial storytelling – whilst keeping the coherent and cohesive.
    • Break the 4th wall: augmented reality. Transmedia offers tremendous opportunities for individuals to enhance their own experience of the story, to play with the content on their own terms.
    • Social (relationships, sustainability, social media marketing): The sustainability of communities surrounding storyworlds becomes increasingly important. It takes a huge amount of commitment and energy to foster and maintain fan communities, and stopping this fostering and maintenance is a seen as a betrayal of the audience by the fans. Producers must be aware of this from the very beginning.
    • Participatory and/or UGC: Both allow the audience to move from passive to active by offering opportunities to ‘touch’ the canon.
    • Transmedia allows for a shift towards spatial design:
    • Non-linear narratives open new narrative spaces for audiences
    • Fans can move between multiple platforms (spaces)
    • Characterss and story archs extend over time and across platforms
    • There are multiple points of entry into the story universe
    • There is increased room for interactivity
    • Producers need to ask themselves what the audience experience is supposed to be -  thrill, threat, excitement, competition, for example – and base their narrative design on this experience type throughout all platforms.
    • Your story and the technology are only two tools in transmedia storytelling. Your audience also becomes a tool in itself, particularly through interactivity and participation. This means that as a producer, you must understand people’s behaviors, their instincts and needs, etc. and use this knowledge to shape the transmedia experience.
    • The 5 “E’s” of experience design:
    • Entice – You have to find a way to invite your audience into your experience, and to lead them across the different platforms involved. Often, teasing them helps to accomplish this.
    • Enter – Once the audience enters your transmedia experience, you must make it clear to them what they have to do and what is expected of them. Direct them through the use of appropriate sign posts; genre, familiar story archs, and characters are very strong cues as well.
    • Engage – Now that your audience is invested in your experience, allow them to engage with it and to derive satisfaction from the engagement.
    • E-motion – Even if your audience is invested in your experience, they can still leave easily. You have to find ways to prevent audiences from leaving and to move them deeper into the experience instead. Once one sub-set of the overall experience is finished, help them to move to the next.
    • Extend – Help your audience to share the experience and to draw in others.
    • Designing a transmedia narrative doesn’t mean there is no ending to the story. There has to be a grand narrative composed of many smaller narratives, and all of them have satisfying endings in themselves.

    Activity: Interactive Storytelling

    Grazie to Christine Wietbrecht's Thoughts on the T Blog for reposting!

    Doc Channel Blog, Interview: Wim Wenders on "PINA" & Why 3D is the Future of Documentary

    A very small excerpt from the Doc Channel Blog Interview:

    DCB:

    ARCHITECTURE IS AN INTERESTING SUBJECT TO TACKLE WITH 3D NEXT. BETWEEN YOUR FILM AND WERNER HERZOG’S CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS AND EVEN CONCERT FILMS IT SEEMS 3D IS A GREAT TOOL FOR DOCUMENTING DIFFERENT AREAS OF THE ARTS.

    WW: Most architects build this stuff and they already have 3D representation. They can enter a building before they even build it. But I think especially with modern architecture, to make a film that really deals with the sense of place and how it changes the way people use buildings and are shaped by cities and buildings, that could not really have been done before. To feel what the room does to you, that is something that you could describe almost better in words than in a two-dimensional film. It is really about a sense of place. That’s a feeling that many architects share with filmmakers and that’s a common thing the two professions have. I’m really excited to have this tool now that gives this sense of place, and so I am quite excited about my architecture project."

    THE TERRY GILLIAM SCHOOL OF FILM: 10 LESSONS FOR DIRECTORS TODAY | The Filmmaker Magazine Blog

    Excerpt from Ariston Anderson's original post - December 19 2011:

    read the original for the full list - I like this one:

    "3. Auteurism is out. Fil-teurism is in.

    Being an auteur is what we all dreamed of being, as far [back] as the films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, when the idea of the auteur filmmaker arrived on the planet. And people kept using that term, and they do with my movies because I suppose they are very individual and they give me all the credit, so they say I’m an auteur. And I say no, the reality is I’m a ‘fil-teur.’ I know what I’m trying to make but I have a lot of people who are around me who are my friends and don’t take orders and don’t listen to me, but who have individual ideas. And when they come up with a good idea, if it’s one that fits what I’m trying to do, I use it. So the end film is a collaboration of a lot of people, and I’m the filter who decides what goes in and what stays out."

    Social or Cultural Entrepreneurship: An Argument for a New Distinction | Stanford Social Innovation Review

    Excerpt from an excellent essay on the Stanford Social Innovation Review site:

    "...Think of cultural entrepreneurship as social entrepreneurship’s little sister. Social entrepreneurship has gotten considerable attention in the last decade in terms of resources, investment, and analysis—and deservedly so. Some of the most exciting new innovations in social change are happening under the ever widening big tent movement of social entrepreneurship, fueled by organizations like Ashoka, Acumen Fund, and Echoing Green. David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World, has founded the blog Dowser that focuses on “solution journalism,” giving voice to innovators who pursue the much-coveted triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit.

    As social entrepreneurship has come of age as a field, it’s become more and more apparent to us that a new distinction must be made between innovations that focus on changing markets and systems and those that change hearts and minds. Building on the work of entities like the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship, we argue that cultural entrepreneurship is different than social entrepreneurship, because it is focused primarily on reimagining social roles and motivating new behaviors—often working with and in popular culture to reach the widest possible audience. Social entrepreneurs solve problems by disrupting existing systems, as microfinance has, or through breakthrough product design, like the solar powered lights from d.light design or Barefoot Power. Cultural entrepreneurs, on the other hand, solve problems by disrupting belief systems—using television shows like Glee to initiate viewers into the disability or GLBTQ rights frameworks or the Twitter campaign #mensaythingstome, designed to expose anonymous misogyny online..."

    read the full essay here:

    http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/social_or_cultural_entrepreneurship_an_ar...

    Edward Burns, Director of Newlyweds, on the Changing Face of Indie Film Distribution & VOD Platforms - The Daily Beast

    Edward Burns on indie film distribution - Excerpt from a longer post on thedailybeast.com "...As all indie film distribution companies will attest, the economics of a theatrical release for smaller budgeted films just don’t really make sense. And many of these companies have gone out of business clinging to this old model. The few specialty distribution companies that are left are exploring different models, with a greater emphasis on VOD and shorter windows between theatrical release and digital release. These companies even regard the theatrical release as a loss leader, a way to market the film for its more significant ancillary revenue to follow.

    Ed Burns

    Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images

    To be fair, bypassing the studio forces you to make some significant compromises, but as a filmmaker, these are things I am comfortable sacrificing. While I may not get the comforts of a big production—the fancy equipment, the big set pieces, working with huge movie stars, I also have complete creative freedom to tell the story I want without any outside interference. Any decision, from casting to script to music, is made between me and my creative collaborators. When the terrifically talented (but largely unknown) actors that I’m able to work with come on set, they know there won’t be a spread from craft services waiting for them. Or a stylist and makeup artist on hand to fix them up between every scene. We’ll likely have early mornings and late nights, and without a giant machine to move after every set-up, we are shooting about 10 pages of dialogue a day. The actors get to act, and typically love the liberating, creative environment we have created. But that is what I love about filmmaking. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to make successful films on small budgets. And now I’ve found the best way to distribute these films to an audience—using digital platforms...."

    Tis the List Season & this is a Good One! Innovative Interactivity (II) | Top 50 multimedia packages of 2011

    Top 50 multimedia packages of 2011

    By December 23, 2011

    Listing Tracy Boyer Clark's categories:

    Journalistic Multimedia:

    Advertising Multimedia:

    Student/Training Multimedia:

    Philanthropic Multimedia:

    Documentary Multimedia:

    Find the full list here: http://www.innovativeinteractivity.com/2011/12/23/top-50-multimedia-packages-...

    This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

    The year in mobile apps: Where we’ve been, where we’re going: HyLoMo & NFC - got it? — Tech News and Analysis

    Excerpt from gigaom.com projections for 2012:

    "In 2012…

    More HyLoMo everywhere. “HyLoMo” is a cutesy, shorter way of saying “hyper-local mobile,” a concept that’s already being infused into apps, but should take off in a big way next year. The basic concept: Much of our activity is reasonably local — we tend to shop, eat and travel in the areas near to where we live and work. Smartphones already know where we are, so apps and any service can now take advantage of the river of information that’s now available from a variety of sources about where we tend to go, what we tend to buy and what we want to do. “The amount of real-time data that’s available can change apps into being infinitely more useful,” says IMMR analyst Phil Hendrix, who’s researched this HyLoMo trend at GigaOM Pro. Whether that’s searching, making purchase decisions or looking for travel information, both consumers, businesses and advertisers should benefit...."

    Jeff Gomez' Keynote at Storyworld 2011 - Inspiring! TY Simon Pulman on Transmythology.com

    Excerpt from the full transcript - well worth reading the whole

    "...In essence I was writing them into the mythology.

    This is what is possible now on a colossal scale, on a global level. What I created was the Land of Corondor, a fantasy world, and I would tour these friends of mine, then later my college classmates, through this world. I made it feel real and relevant and I allowed them to explore every nook and cranny of it. There would be a dozen or more people sitting around the table playing roles like fighters and wizards and elves and participating in this narrative.

    It became a kind of communal narrative that was actually shared by multiple groups because it had become so popular. That made me a tiny bit popular, at least among the nerd elite at college. I ran games every other day so there would be two or more entirely separate groups of players who were exploring different parts of this fantasy world. There would be dozens of separate plot threads, and then there would be that big epic story line (usually right before finals) where all of the groups met one another and clashed, and then had to band together against a common enemy…and it was amazing! Climactic battles, old rivalries settled, romances meeting tragic ends – it was really cool..."