Hyper Island. There is an Intern for That.

April 12th, 2011 • 1 comment Ideas, Jobs, People
Tags: Apps, Cool, Creativity, Education, Experimental, Funny, Hyper Island, Ideas, Interns, Jobs, Mobile, People, Sweden, We like, World

Oh boy. I am so happy that I am not 20 year old creative. Otherwise I would get pretty quickly pretty frustrated by the competition of Hyper Islanders. The Swedish school Hyper Island offers one of the best learning experience for young digital people worldwide right at the moment. It pretty much goes like this: West Point – authority + digital + American Apparel = Hyper Island.

And yes, the school ‘produces’ not just some of the most brilliant young creative, developers and project guys I ever worked with – it also forms a very strong network for its students and ex students. Check out one of their latest ideas, the Hyper Island Intern Store created by some of their students. It hasn’t yet launched but it looks pretty promising, doesn’t it?

Intern Store Trailer 1

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My Amsterdam. A Love Letter to a Great City.

April 7th, 2011 • 2 comments Interview, Jobs, People, Underway
Tags: Amsterdam, Article, Page, People, World

If you happen to be in Germany and if you come across a kiosk try to get the May issue of Page. The guys asked me to write an article about my hometown Amsterdam and its agency scene. And that’s what I did. What I like even more about it is that my freelance colleague Wouter Boon (who also runs the Amsterdam Ad Blog) and up and coming Kiwi cartoon superstar Toby Morris were willing to get interviewed. Toby presents a couple of his great Amsterdam cartoons from his book Alledaags in this article. And if you are interested to see more of his stuff check out his latest project ‘200 people I used to know‘.

Unfortunately I am not allowed to publish the article yet. Just wait one more month or go to the kiosk and $#%%&#*@ buy the thing.

Daddy? What is a Corporate Community Manager?

März 9th, 2011 • Jobs
Tags: Agencies, Amsterdam, Blast Radius, community management, Interview, Jobs, People

I work as a digital strategist – a job profile that did not exist 5 years ago, as many of my colleague’s professions are also more or less new. One of my colleagues here at Blast Radius Amsterdam is Henry Greaves, a fresh Amsterdamer who originally came from the UK. Henry is a full time Community Manager and my real time counterpart on one of our key accounts. It’s still not too common for an agency to employ full time Community Managers. And I think some of you are pretty interested in a similar position.

Time to ask Henry what he actually does.

How did you become community manager?

It was a happy accident. I graduated with a degree in Theology five years ago, and then worked in various jobs in the media. I worked in PR for Amazon, but also loved writing and got published by some reputable magazines, like Dazed & Confused and Monocle. That led to work as part of two-man team writing a blog for French Connection, Manifesto. From then on my focus was working in Digital. The fact that there are no rules in Digital, and that you can try so many new ways of getting people’s attention makes it an incredibly exciting area to work in. So I was keen to stay in it.

Eventually Blast Radius offered me a job as Community Manager for a major client. I think they liked me because my experience of cultural writing suited the client. And the fact I had a small bit of digital experience helped. But I lacked many skills a CM needs at that time, but it was relatively easy to pick up, as the team at Blast is full of experts. So the SEO specialist taught me a bit of SEO, strategists taught me how to deal with analytics, and I could pick up all the specialists bits and pieces a Community Manager needs to know as I went along.

Henry, we are working together for quite some time now. Can you describe your daily routine as a corporate community manager?

I think the most important thing to point out as a Community Manager is that there is no all-encompassing job description. I solely work on my account, and other CMs work entirely on their projects. Each role is entirely dependent on the job and client specifications. So there is no “Community Manager’s routine”.

In my job, I spend most of my time planning and making content. Whether that’s blogs, or helping to concept for competitions, or writing creative briefs. I spend roughly half a day each week compiling statistics relating to the performance of the site, and monitoring Listening platforms. And whatever time I have left I am seeding the site, pushing the social media aspects, and dealing with individual queries from members of the community.
It’s quite a full-on job, as by its nature you can never be finished. There is always more work you could do to try to bolster community growth etc.

Do your parents understand your job? What do you tell them?

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Agencies. What the hell is a Creative Technologist?

Dezember 8th, 2010 • Jobs, Trends
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Agencies, BBH, Connection Planning, Creative Technologist, Creativity, Prediction, Strategy, Tech, Trends

The job profile ‘Creative Technologist’ has become something like the It-job of 2010. I don’t know when these thing start, but if you want to be hot in digital nowadays you must be into social media a creative technologist.

I doubt there is a desperate need for an autonomous job profile like this in most digital agencies. But I sense there is one in rather traditional shops. BBH (even far from being a traditional agency) have an attitude on the role of a Creative Technologist. Or to be more precise – BBH’s Griffin Farley has presented his vision about the (future) role of a creative technologist.

As usual, great stuff Griffin.

Working Wired. How I Model Real Time Brain Infusion.

Oktober 11th, 2010 • 3 comments Intelligence, Jobs
Tags: Diy, Information, Jobs, Knowledge, Strategy, Tools, Truth, World

Yes, we are all going insane. 27,053 tweets per day. 3,214 blog posts and 6 million status updates from your friends. There is absolutely no way on earth you can keep track  or even make use of this universe of stuff anymore.  Good news. There is a simple solution to working wired – train your knowledge ecosystem and model it to serve your needs. Real time knowledge infusion is possible. Even with a job. This is how I work wired. How about you?

Do you know these moments? Somebody you respect leaves a comment that is so odd that you start asking yourself why you hang out with this person in the first place? In my case this was 3 weeks ago when a friend from university asked if I ever work at all, since I sent out 4 tweets from 9am to noon.

Comments like that amuse me in a way. They are a metaphor on how we define work. Even though we pretend to work in a more enlightened society it still seems to be acceptable to work unwired. That means we sit in front of a computer screen and try to solve a problem when it pops up. We are not trained to set up a model of constant knowledge infusion. Wired working still does not fit into the average employee’s day job. But it should.

Why we usually don’t work wired
Theoretically it all makes sense – constant reading and learning will eventually make you gather more knowledge. And we are not talking about this one particular presentation seminar that you attend once a year. A constant stream of knowledge is what I am talking about. Knowledge about the latest trends in tech, music, advertising…whatever might be relevant for you. Just like reading a newspaper…you remember that concept, don’t you?

So where is the problem you might ask? The answer is simple – reality is the challenge for anyone trying to stay up to date with what is happening outside.

• As an employee in an agency and many media companies you are usually measured in billable hours. If you aren’t working on a billable client project your value all too often is considered zero.
• Learning real time is not part of our working culture. Social networking all too often is perceived as threat to productivity. Reading your tweets is all too often defined as something you do during a downtime. Even though statistics prove the opposite.

Why we need to work wired anyway
We work in a realtime era. Things change quickly overnight. This one particular piece of information might save your ass the next day or may guarantee a headstart in the next project. I have spent quite a while in my past to cultivate real time knowledge infusion. The objective is obvious. To know relevant stuff a bit earlier which is increasingly important personally as well as for the stuff that we are doing.

The key challenge of working wired is to minimize the efforts of generating knowledge while simultaneously maximizing the output. It is in fact not about reading twitter or blogs 24/7. Your task is to build a model to simplify real time knowledge infusion. My first recommendation is to integrate reading into every your working schedule. Generating knowledge must not be something you do if nothing isn’t left to do – it is part of your job.

The following methods are just some concepts I use. There will be many more and I am happy to learn how you simplify this process to maximize efficiency of real time knowledge generation. But they have worked well for me. And I think they highlight the importance of a calibrated information ecosystem in order to work wired.

• Step 1: Be the king of your knowledge ecosystem – In my world blogs and twitter are essential to stay up to date with what’s happening outside. When I first started using twitter I did not understand the platform at all (as most do) and could not quite figure out why people exchange bits of information about their lunch. I learned later that twitter is an extremely powerful source of professional knowledge – but you have to turn it into one. Reading blogs is similar. You can subscribe to TheChive (you should) or to Techcrunch (you should too). But whatever you subscribe for will define the type of information that you are going to read in the future. It may sound obvious – but if you are willing to integrate real time updates into your professional life you should think about what types of tweets and blogs will support your professional (or not completely unprofessional) needs best.

• Step 2: Use the right tools - Constant real time learning means you should be able to read updates wherever you are. The tools you use should offer interfaces to other tools/plugins and they should synchronize themselves automatically. My tip – use google Reader on your desktop to keep track of your favourite blogs. Intertwine it with the awesome Reeder app for iPhone/iPad. Reeder is an extremely handy application that synchronizes with google Reader and keeps you up to date with your google reader feed on the go. I personally use tweetdeck for twitter since it is extremely simple to setup lists and sources of inspiration here. Not much magic involved by now. Read more »

Creative Briefs. Two Decks on making them evolve.

August 11th, 2010 • 1 comment Jobs, Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Cool, Creative, creative briefs, Ideas, Jobs, Prediction, Presentation, Process, Strategy, Tools, World

As a strategist it is kind of a fixation to think about creative briefs. Creative brief? Yes, a piece paper which traditionally is created by a strategist/client directore to serve as a guideline for the creative process. There are literally hundreds of these templates out there. Some are good and some are bad.

In fact, most creative briefs circulating in agencies nowadays are pretty old school. That’s not surprising. Most agencies are pretty old school in the first place, secondly all too often the briefing context is the key problem and not the template. Finally, the ownership over the document is frequently not shared among the different stakeholders. Stupid process that is.

Jasmin Cheng has pulled together quite a nice deck that collects a lot of thoughts about this problem.