June 8, 2017

4 Cinematic Techniques Iñárritu Emboldens Us To Try

Can Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “visual poetry” push you outside of your cinematic comfort zone?<p>We are big fans of the never-ending fountain of …
Source: CW’s Flipboard Feed

June 6, 2017

5 WAYS TO CREATE BULLSHIT-FREE CONTENT MARKETING

This article originally appeared on Column Five.

Have you ever slogged through an article only to find out it was a complete waste of time? We all have. The Internet is full of content marketing that is all fluff, no substance, or totally irrelevant. Frankly, too many of us have been guilty of wasting our audience’s time. That’s why content marketing is facing a bullshit epidemic.

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH BAD CONTENT MARKETING?

This industry-wide problem became clear to me after reading Josh Bernoff’s book Writing Without Bullshit. The driving idea behind the book is what Bernoff calls the Iron Imperative: Be more respectful of your reader’s time than your own.

This philosophy seems intuitive, no matter what content we create, but the truth is we have become accustomed to BS, both consuming it and creating it. Why? Bernoff identifies four main reasons:

1. We got the wrong training in school. We tried to BS our teachers into thinking we knew what we were talking about.
2. Once we started working in the real world, we were saturated by jargon, from employee manuals to tech babble that only insiders understand.
3. We soon learned that avoiding risk is critical, and writing clear copy means someone can disagree with us.
4. No one edits what we read.

Now we’re drowning in meaningless content, which is a huge problem. But it’s also an awesome opportunity for your brand to stand out by creating A+ content.

The first step? Stop the BS and start focusing on creating high-value content that is worth your reader’s time. To get you on the right track, here are five things you can do to take the BS out of your content marketing ASAP.

1) AVOID BUZZWORDS

Wheelhouse. Implementation. These buzzwords have become a plague. Sure, every industry has its jargon, but too often it’s used as a crutch to sound like you know what you’re talking about. Worse, too much jargon can confuse your reader if they don’t actually know what you’re talking about.

Your audience wants to connect with you. They want your knowledge and experience, so write the way you speak—like a human. When you do use the occasional buzzword, make sure you explain what it means. (If you still want your buzzword fix, check out our marketing gibberish generator.)

2) GET TO THE POINT

A good content marketer has one job: To deliver a story or message as succinctly and efficiently as possible. Yet we see so many “thought leaders” drone on and on in 3,000-word articles simply for vanity’s sake. Avoid their mistakes.

• Be direct.
• Write to your audience (see #1 above). The content, message, and audience should dictate length and format.
• Don’t write long posts just for the sake of writing long posts.
• Channel your innerHemingway. Share a concept as economically as possible.

Remember the Iron Imperative: Consider your audience’s time.

3) USE A REPEATABLE PROCESS

Good content marketing requires the right team, the right ideas, and an efficient process to see those ideas to completion. That means planning, producing, managing, and reviewing content before it goes live.

You can always make adjustments during a project, but having a basic process, which all team members can rely on, will make your life a lot easier—and reduce lag time on projects. (That said, in the interest of efficiency, you should regularly review the way you do things to see if there are ways to improve.)

Also, before you undertake a project, ask yourself if you can reasonably produce it with your existing resources and process. For this reason, wWe ask our clients five questions before we kick off projects:

1. Why do you want to do this project?
2. What do you hope to achieve with this project?
3. Who is your audience, and what are their pain points?
4. How are we going to approach the project?
5. When do you need the project finished?

This ensures that the content we create will help achieve the client’s goals—and that production goes as smoothly as possible.

4) CONDUCT PAIN-FREE COLLABORATION

It’s incredibly frustrating to get a ton of last-minute edits a day before launch, from a stakeholder who has just been looped into a project. Likewise, it’s exasperating when you hold a brainstorm with so many stakeholders that you leave three hours later without a single actionable idea.

Finding the right type—and number—of collaborators is crucial. Some people like to be auteurs, but in my opinion, the best creative work tends to involve additional perspectives, experiences, expertise, and creative thinking. Of course, too many cooks in the kitchen is a nightmare.

For our agency, somewhere between two and five people tends to be the sweet spot for good collaboration. Some other rules that help us work together:

• Establish clear roles.
• Create a document that contains shared values, as well as aligned goals.
• Let the best ideas win, regardless of work titles.

Something that might also help is finding out what creative type you are. Once you know what you are, you can learn how to work and communicate with others without wanting to rip your hair out. (This has been an awesome revelation for our team.)

5) EMBRACE ITERATION

Most work that our agency does involves a good amount of iteration at multiple stages. That’s because we believe doing things right is better than doing things quickly.

Our creative director is constantly telling our team to never go with their first idea. First ideas can be good, but if you don’t explore other ideas or carefully vet your initial idea, then you’re selling yourself short.

As Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Don’t be judgmental when starting out on early drafts. Create, write, and draw like a wild person. Then put on your editor’s hat and edit mercilessly.

ALWAYS FOCUS ON VALUE 

Moral of the story: Respect your audience. Focus on delivering high-quality content that will truly help them. That means less BS and a lot more value. The more you demonstrate that you are invested in helping them learn what they need to know, the more they will look to you as a trusted friend and resource, and that’s the ultimate goal.

No matter what you do, always aim to create better content than the average content marketer. Remember: Average is not good. Average is average.

Want more content marketing tips?

• Learn about the strategy we used to increase our leads 78% in 6 months.
• Find out how to create content for every stage of the buyer’s journey. 
• Check out our 7 tips to create content that provides true value to your audience.

Source: Visual News

June 5, 2017

Creative Work Relies On Failure

This article originally appeared on Hubspot. 

Everyone wants to be creative, yet many of us are too fearful to pursue our most creative ideas. Why? Our fearful reaction is not a matter of choice — it’s often a knee-jerk reaction that can be attributed to our biology.

According to Adobe’s State of Create report, “At work, there is tension between creativity and productivity.” That could have something to do with previous research indicating that there’s a natural association of uncertainty with ideas labeled as “creative,” and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

So when you’re pursuing a creative path, this hurdle can feel insurmountable. How do you tackle and, ultimately, dismantle it?

Creativity vs. Fear of Failure

In my experience — and that of many creative professionals — the most familiar form of fear come is really that of failure. It’s a hesitancy to branch outside the norm and risk exposing yourself to the judgment of others. But that fear alone is not what inhibits your path to creativity. Not acknowledging is what’s truly damaging. Nelson Mandela summarized that notion quite well:

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

The traditional narrative about the creative process tends to leave out fear. We hear about and romanticize the lone genius’ bursts of inspiration but that isn’t always accurate. As David and Tom Kelley note in Creative Confidence, “A widely held myth suggests that creative geniuses rarely fail.” They go on to cite UC Davis Professor of Psychology Keith Simonton, who found that many of the world’s most famous creative people — like composer Wolfgang Mozart and scientist Charles Darwin don’t give up at the first sign of failure. Rather, they keep experimenting until they find what works.

That’s one of the things that makes fear a necessary and important part of creative work — learning how to work with it. Unfortunately, in many organizations, fear tends to dominate, often stifling what could have been some of our most creative work. Only 4 in 10 employees would even describe themselves as creative, and out of those who do, less than half think they’re “living up to their creative potential.” Those are forms of fear, and even if you’re not aware of it, you’ve likely let it take control before.

But how do you recognize it? Here are some familiar “traps” you might be falling into.

Letting Fear Hinder Your Creativity

Scenario

In the middle of a brainstorm, someone pitches an off-the-wall idea that the whole team thinks is edgy and hilarious. These ideas are often followed by a flurry of enthusiastic statements that start with things like, “what if we….” or, “imagine if…”. Despite the team’s excitement, you decide the client will think it’s too offbeat, so you pitch your safer — a.k.a., less creative — plan B.

When you focus on what seems like the safer path and make decisions purely based on risk-avoidance, you lose sight of supporting your actual objective. That’s common in group dynamics, and even has a name: Groupthink, which occurs “when a group values harmony and coherence over accurate analysis and critical evaluation,” according to Psychology Today. It’s often masked as rational thinking, but playing it safe is actually the enemy of good creative work — the more you stay in the same place, the less effective your work becomes. Conversely, doing good creative work requires comfort with risk.

Letting Fear Dictate Your Creativity

Scenario

Your competitor releases a new product or service, or updates its branding/website, thereby staking its claim as the industry leader. Your fear of being outshined prompts a response focused solely on beating your competition, instead of doing what’s going to benefit your customers — and therefore, your business — the most.

While most people are aware that their respective brands must constantly innovate and evolve, letting fear control your efforts is also dangerous. When fear fuels your motivation and objectives, your work can become less meaningful due to a lack of passion or enthusiasm behind it. Plus, spending an unbalanced amount of time trying to keep up on every trend saps your resources and focus. When you succumb to fear, you often end up paying the price in the long run, with results like a bad user experience or looking like a copycat. As Karen Martin wrote in her book The Outstanding Organization, “When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.”

Why You Need Failure

Yes, there is a right way to fail. When you creatively experiment — just as Mozart and Darwin did — there are times that you will fail. But when you fail in this manner, you learn from it. For this reason, it is important to accept and even honor your creative failures. View them not as a hindrance to creative success, but as a powerful conduit that gets you closer to your goal next time around. Accept that failure is an option, and one that you are quite capable of recovering from, with the right perspective.

In my experience, the only way to overcome your fear — or at least prevent it from sabotaging your day-to-day — is to reframe it. When you think of the framework for failure, replace the word “failure” with “learn.” That approach encourages confidence and a willingness to learn, which are vital for high-quality creative work.

At my company, C5, our vision is to help build a world where everyone can have a healthy and fulfilled life. We take this mission seriously in the work we create, the clients we work with, and the way we interact with each other. But “healthy” and “fulfilled” don’t have to translate to “rainbows and sunshine.” Fulfillment really comes from the fruit of your labor, which only grows through hard work and, sometimes, results that you weren’t hoping for. Knowing that, we believe that sometimes rising to the challenge is its own reward.

In our organization, we are pursuing an effort to remove unnecessary sources of fear and anxiety from how we approach our work. Letting our creativity come to front doesn’t mean we do things flippantly, take uncalculated risks, or play roulette. But we do cultivate environments in which we can take intentional risks.

We’ve outlined some of the pieces that, to us, comprise a calculated risk.

Determining Objectives of the Situation at Hand

Naturally, your actions are influenced by your goals. But creativity can always be cultivated within confines. In fact, structure is often beneficial. Just because you have always done something one way, doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it. When strategizing how best to achieve a goal, consider alternate solutions, try new methods, and conducts A/B tests. For example, when Microsoft Internet Explorer requested an infographic from our agency, we ended up pitching a video concept, instead, because we felt it would deliver the message more effectively. The client agreed, and the “Child of the ‘90s” spot we created for them garnered over 49 million views.

Learning to Operate From a Place of Conviction and Commitment

If you have a unique or unusual creative idea, lead with confidence. Whether you’re pitching it to a client or trying to secure budget from management, if you drown in self-doubt at every stage, it’s likely to show. You should certainly listen to valid objections, but remember that passion and enthusiasm are contagious. Again — Microsoft would have surely rejected our pitch had we not made a well-supported, confident case for it.

Allowing the Freedom to Fail, Learn, and Grow

Nurturing an environment that not only encourages but demands experimentation is vital to push your creative boundaries. You can help cultivate this at every touch point in your organization, whether it means building out longer timelines, schedule regular out-of-the-box brainstorms, or encourage employees to work on their own passion projects. Pushing your team to experiment will only benefit you. Our agency has even closed up shop for a “hack day,” during which everyone — from accountants to designers — collaborated on creative solutions in a consequence-free environment.

Be Brave

As you face creative challenges, I encourage you not to give into fear — in fact, give it a chance. Without fear, there is no bravery. And without bravery, no risks are taken. And you can’t improve if you aren’t taking risks. Learn from what doesn’t work, and use it to build something even better.

Source: Visual News