August 18, 2010

In response to: Understanding Transmedia Story Telling; The Wizard of Oz as pioneer
Geoffrey Long commented:

Actually, from what I understand The Wizard of Oz developed in a similar fashion to Superman – although not as carefully orchestrated as contemporary transmedia franchises, Oz’s adaptations into different media added new ideas and interpretations of the story world, which then made it back to the core narrative. (In Superman, the idea that Clark Kent worked at the Daily Planet came from one medium, a handful of his powers came from another, and so on. We see the same thing with Batman now, with the character of Harley Quinn first appearing in Batman: The Animated Series and then later being incorporated into the comics and the videogames.) There’s much more about this in Mark Evan Swart’s excellent OZ BEFORE THE RAINBOW.

The concept of transmedia and Digital Storytelling is the new Social Media.

You can’t throw a Digital Marketing Strategist without hearing the words “transmedia” or “digital storytelling” before they plunk against the ground. It’s an exciting time to be in Marketing, Communications and Media. It’s no longer just about the big idea in advertising (more on that here: Maybe It Is Time For Marketing To Move Away From “The Big Idea”). As Henry Jenkins explained so beautifully in the brilliant book, Convergence Culture, there is a new “flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted.”

Marketing needs to up its game.

The brands that win are the brands that tell a great story. When it comes to transmedia storytelling, the brands that win are the brands that tell many great stories and are able to connect them all together. One way to get better at telling great stories, comes from understanding the structure, form and ingredients of a great story.

Here are 15 books on how to create a great story (in alphabetical order and compiled with the help of friends on Facebook and Twitter):

1. Accidental Genius by Mark Levy.
2. A Million Miles In A Thousand Years by Donald Miller.
3. A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink.
4. Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott.
5. Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins.
6. The Creative Habit – Twyla Tharp.
7. The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business by Robert Dickman and Richard Maxwell.
8. Give Your Speech, Change The World by Nick Morgan.
9. Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.
10. On Writing by Stephen King.
11. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.
12. Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.
13. Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte.
14. Story by Robert McKee.
15. The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling by Annette Simmons.

Which great books about storytelling are missing? Please add them below…

By Mitch Joel

Related Posts:

• The Art Of Marketing
• How To Market Yourself As A Speaker
• Six New Business Books For 2010

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What’s transmedia’s story?
Transmedia storytelling occurs when an integral element of a fiction get dispersed across multiple channels — including comics, videos, websites, and games — to create a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally content produced on each medium makes its own unique contribution to the story. So this content not only becomes part of the branding, but also part of the exposition. Think of it as content that transcends the original medium to become richer and more enjoyable through the participation of fans.

It also represents our overall cultural shift from appointment-based to engagement-based entertainment.

Thanks to the transmedia trend, fans can become part of a movie like “Paranormal Activity” before entering the theater. Or bond through their frustration at deciphering a blink-and-you-missed-it map on “Lost.” And this examine-and-analyze atmosphere has paid dividends for content creators, like film studios and TV networks. But for marketers, there’s a delicate balance between fostering a transmedia environment and micromanaging it to death. “It’s not about [putting a logo on] everything in sight. It’s about conveying to fans that they won’t get the whole story of their favorite show, movie, song, etc., unless they check out the videos on YouTube and the mobile campaign, etc.,” Jenkins said. 

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced at SXSW that his company is taking another step to integrate with the rest of the web with a new platform called @anywhere. Operators of third-party websites will be able to plug in @anywhere to integrate some basic Twitter functionality without requiring their users to navigate away from a page.

When you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter (

) account associated with that site without navigating away to the profile at Twitter.com. The Twitter blog suggests that the platform will let you follow a participating journalist from his or her byline. It also suggests that you’ll be able to tweet about a YouTube (

) video without interrupting it.

More @anywhere features are planned; Twitter says the above-mentioned items are are “just the beginning.” Integrating with the rest of the web is a wise move. Facebook’s (

) Facebook Connect platform is dominating right now, and while Twitter has a similar login platform, it’s lost its head start when it comes to openness and integration.

The person or organization behind a website can drop some JavaScript in the website to integrate with @anywhere, so there won’t be any arcane Application Programming Interface (API) to learn and implement. Initial partners will include Amazon (

), AdAge (

), Bing (

), Citysearch, Digg (

), eBay (

), The Huffington Post, Meebo (

), MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo (

), and — as mentioned above — YouTube. Twitter hasn’t said when those sites will begin using @anywhere.

Future announcements regarding the platform will come from the @anywhere Twitter account — you get one guess as to what the username is. Platform/API guru Ryan Sarver promised “lots more details” at the Chirp (

) Twitter developer conference this April 14 and 15.

“When you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter account associated with that site without navigating away to the profile at Twitter.com.” So @anywhere makes it easer to get followers and can happen on the site of the twitterer i.e. you don’t have to go to twitter.com to follow.

FiOS to offer YouTube, Net radio

Media Manager lets subscribers stream music from PC to TV

By Georg Szalai

April 27, 2010, 12:01 AM ET

NEW YORK — Telecom giant Verizon’s FiOS TV service has signed new deals that, it says, make it the first TV provider to offer both YouTube and Internet radio on the TV screen.

The video service that competes with cable and satellite TV operators is adding YouTube and access to hundreds of radio stations, allowing subscribers to stream music from the PC to the TV.

Both services are accessible via FiOS TV’s Media Manager, which allows users to search and view on their TV sets user-generated content from such video websites as blip.tv, Dailymotion and Veoh.

The expansion of Verizon’s Internet content-on-TV services comes after July’s launch of Facebook on FiOS TV. Customers have viewed 15 million Facebook photos on their TV screens since then, according to the company.

Verizon has also expanded the Media Manager service to all FiOS TV HD customers after previously only offering it to DVR customers.

“Adding YouTube and Internet radio to FiOS TV further expands our customers’ digital home-entertainment world by giving them access to an unprecedented amount of online content on the biggest screen in their home — their TV,” said Shawn Strickland, vp of consumer strategy for Verizon. “Their TV and Internet worlds seamlessly come together to create experiences cable can’t deliver.”

Verizon also got Steven Hawley, analyst and consultant of industry research firm tvstrategies, to laud the content deals as a competitive edge.

“While other providers see the Internet as something of a threat, Verizon has embraced it in order to deliver the kind of socially-enabled personal media experience that so many of today’s consumers want to see, and have been asking to have on their TV,” he said.

FiOS to offer YouTube, Net radio

Media Manager lets subscribers stream music from PC to TV

By Georg Szalai

April 27, 2010, 12:01 AM ET

NEW YORK — Telecom giant Verizon’s FiOS TV service has signed new deals that, it says, make it the first TV provider to offer both YouTube and Internet radio on the TV screen.

The video service that competes with cable and satellite TV operators is adding YouTube and access to hundreds of radio stations, allowing subscribers to stream music from the PC to the TV.

Both services are accessible via FiOS TV’s Media Manager, which allows users to search and view on their TV sets user-generated content from such video websites as blip.tv, Dailymotion and Veoh.

The expansion of Verizon’s Internet content-on-TV services comes after July’s launch of Facebook on FiOS TV. Customers have viewed 15 million Facebook photos on their TV screens since then, according to the company.

Verizon has also expanded the Media Manager service to all FiOS TV HD customers after previously only offering it to DVR customers.

“Adding YouTube and Internet radio to FiOS TV further expands our customers’ digital home-entertainment world by giving them access to an unprecedented amount of online content on the biggest screen in their home — their TV,” said Shawn Strickland, vp of consumer strategy for Verizon. “Their TV and Internet worlds seamlessly come together to create experiences cable can’t deliver.”

Verizon also got Steven Hawley, analyst and consultant of industry research firm tvstrategies, to laud the content deals as a competitive edge.

“While other providers see the Internet as something of a threat, Verizon has embraced it in order to deliver the kind of socially-enabled personal media experience that so many of today’s consumers want to see, and have been asking to have on their TV,” he said.

Convergence strikes the living room.

Assessing the openess of Facebook’s “Open Graph Protocol”

Posted: April 25th, 2010 | Author: Elias Bizannes | Filed under: Analysis | Tags: facebook, open graph, open graph protocol | 13 Comments

This is an analysis by DataPortability chairperson Elias Bizannes and former chairperson Chris Saad.

Summary
In essence, Facebook is striving to create a web-wide semantic search engine and recommendation system based on a mix of open and closed technologies.

While some of the approaches are indeed open, the overall outcome is an attempt to further lock in Facebook’s dominance over the web’s social infrastructure and capture as much attention data and social graph data in proprietary formats and API’s as possible.

The Metadata
In order to bring their open graph to life, Facebook requires publishers to describe their pages using rich semantic data.

They provide this metadata in the page header, which is accessible by other services. It is described in a fundamentally open format. These are all good things for the web in general and the semantic web specifically.

Facebook is making good use of W3C endorsed standards, like RDFa. Exactly how RDFa works in HTML5 (and thus how this protocol works in HTML5) is still being standardised – so any criticism to date on Facebook’s compliance with these existing efforts are not significant at this time.

The spec is also released under the Open Web Foundation Agreement, Version 0.9. This is a good thing, because it clears IPR issues and links it with other maturing open efforts.

Social Plugins
As part of this push, Facebook has released a series of light-weight widgets that publishers can quickly embed on their site to get started.

The plugins focus only on Facebook APIs and datasets, although nothing more or less is expected from the company on this front.

The plugins are a way to bootstrap the usage of the new APIs. Alone, they are not complete solutions for serious publishers who recognize that the rest of the web (ie, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, etc) are collectively larger than Facebook. They need cross platform solutions that use the FB API but include alternatives.

These widgets will do fine for the long tail and may pose a real threat to social widget players focused on that market.

Gestures
This is a play to increase the quantity of semantic data on the web and then capture social gestures (aka “Likes”) made against those concrete semantic objects – think a web-wide recommendation engine. This is a big step forward for Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the semantic web.

This could be a concern for Amazon’s dominance over the product recommendation space and will hopefully lead to a more open recommendation ecosystem/technology set as the two battle it out.

Currently, however, these gestures are submitted to FB’s proprietary database using proprietary API calls.

This was not the most open way to execute on this functionality. Instead, these gestures could be written out to a site-specific Activity Stream that can then be indexed by any web-crawler.

The way the functionality is now – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and any other players would have to negotiate bulk access to the datasets, putting Facebook in a position to control who gets to innovate on these social patterns.

24 Hour Caching
During the f8 conference, Facebook also announced a rollback of their 24 hour caching rules for data usage. We think this is a good step forward and aligns Facebook with other major services.

Value for publishers
Facebook allows users to interact with content without authenticating themselves to the host site. This means the host sites have no access to the user’s data, gestures or friends while Facebook benefits from a complete picture of their clickstream and other actions.

While this is good for user privacy, it is a devils bargain for the publisher who is hosting Facebook user experiences while only seeing a fraction of the potential value.

At stake here is access to (and value extraction from) user actions on given sites. Currently many interactions on third party sites will not actually be accessable or monetizable by third party sites who host Facebook experiences.

Value and privacy for users
During the announcement, Facebook claimed to be placing user privacy at the top of its list of concerns. Although this does not strictly relate to interoperable Data Portability issues, it is clear that by automatically opting all users into this protocol, Facebook is more interested in on-ramping its entire userbase rather than giving users an initial choice.

In addition, for users to leverage this data in other services, those services need to – once again – code defensively against Facebook’s APIs and data formats instead of using open formats like Activity Streams to encapsulate the data.

Medium Term Outcomes
Ultimately Facebook is building a semantic search engine and e-commerce recommendation engine bootstrapped by pblishers hosting their social widgets and users making proprietary gestures.

While Google and others might use some of the same metadata, they won’t have access to the proprietary aspects of the system leaving FB in prime position to innovate and control outcomes.

It also furthers Facebook’s goals of turning their Identity platform into the default login system for the web, something that no company should own. Thankfully, OpenID, as an underlaying technology, already far exceeds Facebook’s closed system (having being used by the majority of login providers/login events such as Google, Yahoo and others). As a community, however, we should be sure to drive that point home where ever possible and ensure site owners offer the open alternative.

In order for true interoperable, peer-to-peer data portability to win, serious publishers and other sites must be vigilant to choose cross-platform alternatives that leverage multiple networks rather than just relying on Facebook exclusively.

In this way they become first-class nodes on the social web rather than spokes on Facebook’s hub.

Further Reading:

• David Recorden says why it’s good for the web

• Chris Messina talks about the Open Graph Protocol

• Lack of independent thought on the technology

• Login Marketshare – Facebook is just one player

We will be digging deeper into Facebook this coming week in class. Big new changes have occurred and we will examine effects.

Location just got much more interesting.

Twitter was the hot topic among tech tweeters this week, as it unveiled its long-awaited advertising model.

Starting with a blog post at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday Twitter began unveiling an advertising platform centered around the idea of highlighting advertiser’s “Promoted Tweets” amid search results.

Getty Images

Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Chirp conference.

At the same time, Twitter unveiled new services that compete directly with those offered by its third-party developers, causing some angst in the Twitter developer community.

It’s fitting, then, that this week’s Tech Tweets of the Week should come from the company’s first developer conference, Chirp, in San Francisco.

John Potter, who manages technology for the business sites of CBS Interactive, summed up the conference as follows: “@bigdougschmidt here’s my #chirp summary: eat our great lunch while we eat your business”

Seesmic.com founder Loic Le Meur noted that competition is healthy, tweeting that the Twitter team “did a good job reassuring the developers”, but noted he now has to pick up the pace with his own product across various platforms.

Tech blogger Robert Scoble declared that the most interesting thing to developers at Chirp was the new annotations feature, which will allow developers to add metadata to posts.

One ad per tweet search as top paid result. It’s a race to see who will own the tops slot.

We will be covering this in the class very interesting.