LifeStory Designing

Your story is always being told, regardless of whether or not you decide to be the writer and director. If you think Facebook Timelines are only about highlighting and pinning pics, you are missing the point.

Here is what I like about this article -- it actually contains concrete ideas for how to bring stories into your Facebook timeline. There are even links to Facebook company pages where forms of storytelling are actually happening. I think we have a ways to go yet in terms of being able to effectively share stories via social media. But this is a good beginning.

I hope you get some good ideas from this post!

Thank you fellow curator Debra Askanase @askdebra for recommending this article!

Visual, as it turns out, is also the direction in which the world of online marketing has headed.

The rise of visual storytelling as a means of spreading a marketing message couldn’t possibly have evaded you. A number of image-based platforms out there, including Pinterest, Instagram, and SlideShare, have already made a strong statement about how visual content can impact business results.

Images, presentations, and infographics are getting shared with ease, attracting thousands of views and sending tons of traffic to their original sources. Then, marketers assume the responsibility of qualifying the new visits and converting them into leads.

I like the 3 tips shared at the end of this post for how to get started.  And I like that the author covers 3 tools everyone can use to bring visual storytelling into their marketing.

And thank you fellow curator Gregg Morris for finding and sharing this article!

Recently, while I was in Las Vegas for the WPPI  (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) trade show, one thing that caught my eye was the proliferation of crowds at the booths selling camera bags that looked like designer purses.

A few ideas to help you find the perfect present for your dog. There's a variety to cater for dogs of all sizes and breeds.

Masher is an online free service which allows you to easily create video mashups, utilizing not only your own uploaded material, but also the rich and growing library of clips, images and music tracks provided by the service itself (though third-party providers).

Masher provides you with a very simple editor interface in which you can add, juxtapose and edit your media clips by simply dragging and dropping them on a timeline. It is also possible to overlay simple titles and add some basic effects to any video.

To be honest, I was quite impressed with the ease with which you can work in Masher, and although I spent only 10 minutes testing it out, I was surprised with the results. In less than 90 seconds I was able to put this together: http://masher.com/player.jsp?key=ff18beef-1996-ad26-ff66-0000fc97018c&adscheme=0 and altough it is a piece of tropical nothingness, shows that if you have a topic and know what you want, Masher can really help you to put together a video even when you may have no available material at all.

Try it out: www.masher.com

Video attorney bios for legal marketing and content marketing should focus on visual storytelling, not just cost and frequency...

Corporate storytelling, personal branding, back-stories -- it's all here in these 3 videos about lawyers in a particular San Francisco, CA law firm.

And they really work! Or at least 2 of them do.  The last one, not so much.  I guess I was looking for more of a personal story like in the first two videos, instead of "This is a nice place to work and we have fun."

What made them work?  Sharing a personal story right off the bat.  And the first 2 videos were all about the "How I Got Started" topic -- one of the essential core stories to master for any business/entrepreneur.

Each video also had a problem/challenge to overcome and a key message at the end. Do these videos have so much punch they are going to change the world?  No -- but they certainly are doing the work they need to do: they are engaging, give us background, and entice us to call these lawyers.

There are good lessons here for us to replicate in our own videos.

Thank you fellow curator Gregg Morris @greggvm for sharing this article!

image should be a text explaining what is in the image. In the photojournalistic world, it is called the W's : Where, When, What, Who, Why.

Oh this is so cool! This is another new tool for taking a static photo and turning it into  a story. I love the examples shared in this blog post. I'm getting lots of ideas already and know you will too once you review the material here.

Now go have fun with your photos!

Guest post written by Jamie Tedford Jamie Tedford is founder at CEO of Brand Networks, a social branding consultancy. Jamie Tedford As anticipated, Facebook Timeline for Pages was announced Wednesday.

All right -- I've had it today. I'm burning through the articles and am getting annoyed at all of the blog posts on storytelling and branding. Why? Here's the tone of them all: push push push your stories! Find them. Craft them. Push them out to your customers. Whether it's about the new Facebook timeline, or finding and telling your brand's stories, it's still the same old advertising/pr/marketing paradigm of 'telling.'

Yuck! These folks are totally missing the dynamics of engaging content through stories which includes listening, conversations, and story sharing back and forth.  Oh, and where's the conversation about authenticity??  It seems like brand storytelling is all about morphing and shaping stories to hook customers. Danger, danger! That sounds more like manipulation than authentic storied conversations.

OK, I'll get off my soap box now.

Here's what you can take away from this article that I like: tips in this article to use storytelling elements for your Facebook timeline.  

Your thoughts?

Last January I put together my first conference. Reboot Workshop was a sold-out day long workshop with presentations, Q&A and Networking. Michael from Get Storied was an amazing addition to the group.

Capture your computer screen and audio with GoView, then instantly share your recording online.

This looks very cool and it's FREE.

"A new web technology is promising to do for video what the internet did for text.

Called Popcorn, it brings interactivity to video so that, as the video is playing, other things can be synchronised with it such as explanatory text, links to Google maps, photos, other videos.

The possibilities of this technology are endless.

Although similar functionality could be partially achieved using a closed environment such as Flash, Popcorn uses a new standard called HTML5, which is built directly into the browser.

To explore the potential of the technology, Canadian director Katerina Cizek used Popcorn.js together with a 3D graphics technology called Web GL to create a new documentary.

Called One Millionth Tower, the film explores how two high-rise towers in Toronto could be “re-imagined” by the tower residents, architects and animators.

The web-based documentary allows the user to explore a simple 3D environment and click to view one of six narratives. The environment you see is linked to the weather in Toronto at the time you are watching – so if the sky is overcast there, it will be overcast on your screen.

The narrative segments are linked to Wikipedia articles and Flickr photographs that update as people upload more photos.

The documentary itself was made without much video, relying instead on photos provided by the residents of the tower and recordings of their comments. 

...

Because the documentary is essentially a 3D virtual environment, the viewer gets to control aspects such as the camera (viewing) angle.

The project was built using entirely open-source tools. The code for the documentary is available for anyone to browse, re-use or re-purpose."

Find out, a lot more, here: http://technologyspectator.com.au/industry/media/bringing-zing-web-video