I’ve been recently trying to encourage a client to incorporate social media channels into their advertising efforts. Their fears are the same I hear with all clients new to social media: they will lose brand control, there will be haters who post negative things, they don’t have the resources to do it, they need approval from someone else to do it, etc. But the real root of these fears is the fear of the unknown. They don’t understand the way this “New Web” works, and they’re afraid of it.

The way it was

The “Old Web” was a passive library of static information sitting on a URL waiting to be found and read.  To add content to the Web in the old days required knowledge of HTML. Your goal was to “get people to your website” and then make them stay as long as possible. There were a lot of expensive techniques we used to get people to find your website. Your website cost a lot of money, and you paid hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly to companies to do “search engine optimization” so that you could be found on the Web. Visitors had no way share what they read, unless it was by forwarding a link to someone in an email.

Good news. Those days are long gone and will never be back.

The way it is

The “New Web” is the web you see when you go online right now. It’s full of interactive blogs. it’s got Facebook, it’s got Twitter. It’s all googled immediately, thoroughly, and with pictures. Much of the content on today’s web is actually conversations between people. It grows and expands organically through connections.

Your website isn’t the only home for your brand anymore, whether you like it or not.

Your brand doesn’t live exclusively on your website anymore. It lives all over the Web, all over the world, wherever people are talking with each other. With the boom in blogging technology, social media tools, and smart phones, now people can say anything anywhere, about anything, without an iota of technical skill required. They can post on Facebook, on Twitter, on Yelp, on their own blogs, on the blogs of others, or in a million other places. But even though you can’t control what people say, you still have control over how you respond.

People are free to love you or hate you as they always did, but now they have the power to tell whole world about their experiences with you. What they say about your company is determined by how good your product is, and how good your service is. If you’ve got something fundamentally wrong with your company, they will tell you. If you listen and fix what’s wrong, you’ll win a loyal following and create a stronger brand.

It’s scary realizing you don’t have control of your brand. You can’t control the spread of information and the flow of conversation. So you really have only 2 choices left:

1. Let it happen without you, or
2. Make it happen with you. Join in the conversation. Create a Facebook page, get a Twitter account, brand it like your website so it all looks cohesive, and create a venue where you can connect to your customers directly.

Your website isn’t the only home for your content, either.

The information from your website doesn’t exist solely on your website anymore. Now, the same exact content can be viewed any number of places. With a Wordpress-based website, you can simultaneously publish that content to your accounts on Twitter, Facebook, to your subscribers’ news readers or email boxes, with no additional work, technical skill, money, or effort. You can also add plugins to your website to facilitate visitors sharing your content with their own networks of contacts.

Free high-traffic advertising and web space for your very own content? People who like what you’ve said, and telling others about it? Pretty amazing! Remember how much we would’ve paid for that in the days of the Old Web?

I’ll leave you now with a couple of good articles I’ve run across lately in my quest to help clients get over their fears. They’re great reading, and I think will help the fearful to be a little less nervous about welcoming social media into their business strategy.

• The Top Six Reasons Companies are Still Scared of Social Media
• Top 4 Reasons Why Companies Are Scared of Social Media
• Are Local Business Owners Scared of Social Networking?
• Afraid of Social Media? Excuse 1: Lack of Control
• Afraid of Social Media? Excuse 2: No One To Monitor
• Afraid of Social Media? Excuse 3: We Do Not Have The Budget
• Afraid of Social Media? Excuse 4: Corporate Red Tape
• Afraid of Social Media? Excuse 5: Why We Aren’t Blogging

To quote one blogger, “The main thing I want you to take away from this article is that social media marketing is just a new twist on an old tactic. It’s not scary, and it’s not very different from many of the other forms of online marketing you’re probably already using.”

I am fascinated by anything related to neurological disorders, creativity and art, and especially how the two relate to each other. Creativity is such a deep, fickle and mysterious thing… it’s no surprise that it changes significantly when your brain does.

NewScientist has posted a fascinating story about a woman who suffered from a neurodegenerative condition called primary progressive aphasia that took her speech and eventually her life. Unaware at first that she was suffering from this disease, former chemistry professor Anne Adams found her creativity suddenly flourishing. Check out this visual painting she did of Bolero:

Visual representation of each note in Ravel's Bolero

In Unravelling Boléro, each of the vertical figures represents a bar of music, with its height corresponding to volume, and the colour representing the pitch of Adams’ favourite note within the bar. Like the music, the theme repeats and builds until a change of colour to orange and pink, representing the key change that precedes Boléro’s dramatic conclusion.  (excerpt)

Some patients with progressive aphasia develop a passion for art, a creative blurring of boundaries between the senses, and a fixation with repeating patterns. Adams became intrigued by her own disease, and after she lost her ability to speak, she found and presented to her neurologists a scientific article indicating that Ravel may have suffered from the very same disease!

On a similar note, check out this article about a lawyer suffering from a brain disorder who suddenly developed an all-consuming passion for art.

After reading this article in the Guardian about the glasses for the poor, it got me thinking about how vision affects so many fundamental things in our lives and shapes us into who we are, especially as artists.

I had always taken it for granted that I, as an “artistic type,” was simply wired differently from the rest of the world. But how much of my personality and even my artistic vision was rooted in my bad eyesight?

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A Zulu man wearing adaptive glasses. Photograph: Michael Lewis

As a very nearsighted designer who depends on vision for my livelihood (I have 20/500 vision – if I were any more nearsighted, I’d be crosseyed) this article from the Guardian really made an impact on me. Josh Silver, professor of physics at Oxford University, has come up with a brilliantly simple solution to bring affordable vision to the more than 50% of the world’s population in need of corrected vision.

The premise is based on the fact that the thicker the lens, the stronger the magnification. Inside the tough outer lens is a water-filled sac which can be filled by the wearer to the optimal magnification level. There is no need for an optician; the wearer can adjust the fluid level, then seal it off by twisting a small screw.

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I wonder why nobody ever thought of this before. HP recently won the WalMart Design Challenge to reduce environmental impact by selling their HP Pavilion dv6929wm Entertainment Notebook PC in its own messenger bag rather than in a box, thereby reducing packaging waste by 97%. The bag guards the laptop during shipping and are placed directly on the shelves that way. It’s a win for customers, for HP, and for the environment! The only downside is that you have to shop at WalMart to get one!

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I am an anomaly: a long-time graphic designer who has worked exclusively on the Windows platform since the early 90s. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, especially at the beginning when design software was slow to come out for Windows, if it came out at all. Back in the 90s, if you were a print designer, you were generally considered a masochist and/or an idiot to work in Windows. But I was a pragmatist, not willing to dish out loads of extra cash when I knew how to get Windows to work just fine for design– albeit with some jumping through hoops. I churned out thousands of design jobs in Windows, sometimes getting compliments from prepress departments for how well my files were constructed compared to what typical Mac-based designers normally gave them. Occasionally a Mac-centric shop would tell me they refused to take PC files, despite my argument that file formats were identical, and that it makes no sense to discriminate on the basis of an .EPS file’s birthplace. (In those cases I’d compress those same PC-generated files with Stuffit to make it look like they came from a Mac, and… well, whaddaya know… not a peep of protest from the shops.)

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Reason no. 21,325 why little girls are the cutest things ever: Check out the note my 8-year-old friend Libby left for her father on the garage door, after having heard he had a really hard day at work: 

Transcription:
Welcome to Heven!!!! Where their is no work and only musages* and piece and quiet not to menchen hugs and kisses. So slip on those Ira socks** and fuzzy bear slippers and favorite P.J.’s but relax!!!!!

*I have a Free Musage Ticket that Libby once made for me as a gift for babysitting her guinea pigs. She will hole punch it to validate it after each massage. Unlike regular coupons, however, this one never expires. “If I run out of places to punch holes,” she told me, “I will just make you another!”

**Libby is referring to her dad’s black dress socks, which he has been known to wear with shorts, like their neighbor Ira does.

This past weekend, 6 babies– 4 little nieces, 1 baby cousin, and our little granddaughter—all younger than one and a half—gathered in Dallas for a mass baby christening. My mother, ever the optimist, invited over 50 friends and relatives, hired a caterer, outfitted all the babies in tiny christening gowns and bonnets, booked 2 photographers, and called the first presbyterian church to tell them we were descending on them.

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… he designs some cool funky bike racks for New York!

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I am writing this on my blackberry at 3am from a dark hospital room where our poor daughter has been since Friday, sick with severe abdominal pain. Between taking care of her, a big catalog project, and a various other websites, blogs, flash pieces and identity projects, there has been little time for any diversions lately.

Fortunately, this hospital (like nearly all nowadays) offers its patients and guests free wifi so we can get some work done and stay in touch with the living.

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