Last week we helped Jacob Rogen of Rogen Design-Build in Montpelier build out the brand of his business.  We designed a logo for his company, built a new website, and created a social media presence.  

Jacob is a joy to work with! It was a pleasure to visit  job sites with him in his truck and see his work,a mix of rugged natural building and a clean and sophisticated minimalism.  Fascinating to learn of his time in a Bhuddist Monastery in Nova Scotia and his days as a soccer champion in Connecticut. And we’re happy to see him land an interesting home-building job for the summer!

www.rogendesignbuild.com

While social entrepreneurship is a popular and widely accepted area of study, it has recently become viewed as far too limiting in the study of tackling complex problems.  That’s because the study of entrepreneurship is the study of the personal characteristics of the individual entrepreneur: cleverness, boldness, risk-taking, ambition, opportunism, etc.  Social enterprise, on the other hand, is the study of organizational approaches to solving social problems.  But social enterprise is also too limiting an area of study.

What has become the preferred vehicle for creating positive change for the public good is social innovation.  Social innovation focuses on the process and outcomes of positive changemaking.  Rather than simply looking at the characteristics of individuals and organizations, social innovation examines the full set of political, economic, and cultural variables involved in social change.

And we need plenty of social change!  So here’s to all you social innovators out there—keep up the good work!

The first, “Let’s Make it Happen,” was made as a year-end appeal for the Office of Advancement.  This video is a community engagement project. It was designed to bring together a number of different constituencies, including older alums, current students, parents, and faculty.  We worked with advancement to identify people, places, and situations that were part of the Champlain experience, and then we brought them together in the film.

“Let’s Make it Happen” has gone viral in the Champlain community and beyond.

Check it out on Champlain’s Advancement page. 

 

The second video, “Put Your Future in Motion,”  was made for Champlain’s marketing department and is used to welcome accepted students.  This video is short, punchy, and designed to motivate applicants to accept the offer and register at Champlain. 

Find it on the Accepted Student page. 

Both videos use original music created for the video.  Brian Boyes of Viper House composed the music for “Let’s Make it Happen” and James Kinne of The October Project did the music for “Put Your Future in Motion.” And both were filmed by Champlain grads Cal Hopwood and Jon Mendel. 

All of us at HigherMind would like to work with you on a video or other marketing/media project.  We have the talent, vision, and energy to bring momentum to your 2012 plans!

Let’s talk.

Some of our HigherMind clients are established businesses and educational organizations. Others are brand-new start-ups, like entrepreneur Dori Ross’ new CSA “Tonewood Maple.” How “brand-new” is Tonewood? Let’s put it this way. We’d link to their web site here, but it is still in the final stages of production.

Maple goes mobile: Dori sharing the Tonewood Maple web site prototype via her iPad.

Tonewood Maple’s web site is set to go “live” on March 1, but we’ve been Story Coaching with Dori for several months now, laying the multimedia marketing groundwork for sweet success down the road. (Read more about our Story Coaching process here.) Dori has all the natural ingredients of an entrepreneur. She is a “people person” with a great idea,  marketing experience, business acumen, a passion for her product, and a willingness to approach new social media platforms and marketing ideas with “beginner’s mind.”

iMaple: Tablet technology brings Tonewood's product line directly to the customer.

Story Coaching with Dori has given us the opportunity to explore how to work with a new business in start-up. Dori left the marketing world more than a decade ago to raise her three children. Stepping back into the 21st century, she says she was astonished at how social media has changed the marketing landscape, and felt overwhelmed by having to play “catch up.” She asked us to provide her with social media support – our Story Coaching weekly meetings have given us the opportunity to train her in using RSS and Google Alert technology to connect with “thought leaders” in her new industry (and begin to position herself to become one down the road), and to help bring her up to speed in the worlds of Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and mobile technology. This month, we’re in the sugarbush with her, shooting video of sugar shacks and sugarmakers for YouTube uploading.

Sap is Sexy: Marketing maple syrup for sophistication.

Look for Tonewood Maple’s official launch in just a few short weeks. And come taste the sweetness of Vermont’s newest CSA.

Last May, Moretown resident Lisa Barnes launched Vermont’s very first CSK (Community-Supported Kitchen): Fiddleheads Cuisine.

Lisa’s business model is built on the exploding popularity of Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs in which residents invest in their local farms at the beginning of each growing season in exchange for a regular supply of farm-fresh food throughout the summer and fall months. Fiddleheads Cuisine members receive regular “shares” of freshly prepared meals, made of locally-grown produce and health-promoting ingredients, and Lisa’s CSK is leading the localvore way in Vermont with a innovative business model that brings together chefs, farms, and food lovers around real good meals.

It’s a scrumptious “win win” business model. Neighbors buy weekly “meal shares” in Lisa’s CSK business, and receive some of the healthiest, tastiest, nutritious food Vermont has to offer, prepared with love and professionalism in her beautiful Moretown kitchen. Lisa also offers cooking classes in her home, and she keeps her followers informed with regular blogging about recipes, menus, and other fabulous foodie-related information.

We’ve been working with Lisa during the past few months on sharpening her business plan, networking capabilities, and multimedia marketing strategy. Our most recent marketing creation for Lisa’s Fiddleheads CSK? These beautiful community posters, suitable for hanging all over the greater Mad River Valley, that display a yummy-looking rotating “visual” of a Fiddleheads Cuisine meal, information about her CSK business and the CSK shares program, and (genius!) slitted tabs off the poster’s left side featuring Fiddleheads’ telephone number, email address, and web site, so interested neighbors can “grab and go” CSK information.

Interactive, and tasty. For you foodies who follow food on Facebook, dial in Lisa’s CSK at Fiddleheads Cuisine here.

Case in point. After our “YesterMojo” Story Coaching session with Yestermorrow staff and interns last week, I happened into a storytelling situation that illustrates what I mean. With my smart phone, I shot an image of the two interns below working in the shop – a vintage Yestermorrow “hands on” photo vignette. Classic. Great stuff. Love it. The learning is real, the collaboration is powerful, and they’ll end up (we hope) with a tangible product at the end of the design/build process.

And then, pleased with myself for capturing such a moment, I walked into the next room, and saw this scene. And my jaw dropped.

An entire roomful of attentive students. With laptops?! Interacting with their instructor via an LCD projector and shared digital documents?!

This image – “high-tech learning” – is one that I had NEVER associated with Yestermorrow before beginning to work with them. Based on my casual interactions with the organization as a friend, neighbor, and community member over the years, I would not have thought to associate laptop computers with the work that went on here. Yestermorrow’s executive director, Kate Stephenson (somewhat of a social media whiz in the nonprofit world, though she’ll deny this), assures me that this kind of high-tech learning goes on at Yestermorrow every day.

True! And our job is to tell THIS story of “hands-on” meeting “high-tech” early and often, to shift the traditional image of Yestermorrow as a typical design/build school where folks could come and get their hands dirty with mud and cobb (look at their marketing materials from back in the day) to a 21st century design/build school where laptops, tablets, smart phones, and other convergent media tools are as much a part of the experience as operating a planer or driving a table saw.

When will we know we’ve been successful? When potential students start asking if they can bring their e-tablets to their classes to share design ideas with their colleagues.

YesterMojo, ho!

We’ve now spent six months working with Yestermorrow on a wide variety of organizational projects – you can read our case study here at our site. (We are really proud of our design for their new 2012 course catalog – see photo above, and link to and read the whole catalog here.)

For 2012, we’re looking at how to involve Yestermorrow community members in telling the YM story – a project we’ve dubbed “YesterMojo.” Beyond the sexy name, “mojo” is shorthand for “mobile journalism,” and the exciting challenge before us is this – how do we train YM community members to intentionally, thoughtfully, purposefully use social media tools and platforms share YM’s evolving story with larger networks of people across the country (and the globe) in ways that are genuine and meaningful?

Yestermorrow is doing critical “hands on” design and build teaching and learning – inspirational stuff, as anyone who has visited their site will tell you. And they are doing a fine job of sharing their story across a wide variety of media platforms – just visit their web site to see what I mean.

But (and this is where it begins to get interesting) – it is largely their visionary executive director Kate Stephenson and a few other staff members who are doing the “heavy lifting” here as storytellers, on top of the zillion other daily and weekly tasks they must execute to make the school run smoothly.

So…opportunity!

Peter and I were over at their school campus last week meeting their new interns, when I happened to look over the railing and see three straw bale building designers (see above) take a brief break to snap a “work-in-progress” photo on an iPhone. The proverbial cliched “light bulb” went off in my head. What if we encouraged, nay ordered (kidding) every YM builder to  start capturing and sharing their YM work as it unfolded?

“YesterMojo”!

Will it work? That’s where HigherMind comes in. Our job is to “Story Coach” YM to storytelling success, by 1) training YM staff and interns in effective use of social media platforms and technologies, 2) helping YM staff and interns discern how to identify and share “the YM story” in all of its many manifestations, and 3) ask and attempt to answer the attendant philosophical questions that accompany any social media “Story Coaching” endeavor. And we’re excited to work with YM executive director Kate Stephenson, here providing an overview of all of YM’s storytelling platforms to the new crop of interns last week.

You can find Yestermorrow using all kinds of social media platforms.

Facebook. - where they already enjoy 2,077 “likes” and some fantastic story sharing.

Twitter. - where they have tweeted more than 1.045 times and have built a network of close to 1,000 following/followers.

Blogging. - where they have begun to rotate story sharing responsibilities amongst staff members.

YouTube. - where they have 130 video subscribers and 56,000 + video views.

Follow along, and learn about this cutting edge design/build school’s story!

YesterMojo. Let’s go!

Last week, they asked us – why do we want to host our video on YouTube, if we already host it on Vimeo and have had killer success out the gate?

In answering this question, we encourage big picture strategic and evolutionary project-building when it comes to using video sharing platforms.

Initially, we used Vimeo for the initial video roll out.

Why? Vimeo is more professional, cleaner-looking, more “respectable,” and aesthetically more pleasing all around than YouTube (too much distracting and poor content) for the initial “watch.” Did it work on Vimeo? Yep. We garnered 5,200 views in 3 weeks  in 15 countries during holiday break for our video, thanks to our coordinated media campaign just prior to the three-week vacation.

So why go to YouTube now? Here’s why.

1. POPULARITY: YT is the single most-popular web streaming platform on the planet. ‘Nuf said.

2. PORTABILITY: YT’s soon-to-be finished HTML 5 standard means you can watch your video on ALL mobile phone platforms. (Vimeo’s iFrame is new and buggy, and not quite as hip with the iPhone).

3. AGGREGATION: YT ferociously aggregates “like-tagged” videos together, so anyone searching for “Your Topic” on YouTube will pull up a raft of videos connected with yours, some good, some bad. Over time, this will work to your advantage, as your new video, if it is any good, will “rise to the top” based on views and popularity. Initially, out the gate, you might want your new video to “stand alone” and not be associated with other crappier productions. If so, go with, Vimeo. If you just want  it to be seen, then go YT and Vimeo. The more, the better.

4. NETWORKING: YT is second-to-none in terms of ease and popularity of comments, subscription sharing (connecting and sharing YT videos between users), AND (most importantly), in-bound marketing, as Google owns YT. If you want your video to get “seen,” then you want it on YT.

So, the short answer is — you want your video on BOTH Vimeo AND YouTube now.

Two platforms instead of one = twice the fun.

More views. More comments. More sharing. More visibility. More community-building.

Game on.

I pondered this question while in the midst of a gloriously normal Vermont winter morning last Friday.

Here’s how it played out.

After an hour of work in the HigherMind office in downtown Waitsfield early in the morning, I threw my telemark ski gear into the Subie and headed 15 minutes up the road to Sugarbush’s Mt. Ellen, getting there at 9:00 am for “first chair” and “first tracks” on a perfectly ordinary Mad River Valley winter morning.

Here’s a mobile photo to remember the moment.

After five runs on freshly groomed snow with a handful of other enthusiasts, I skiied down to the car, and was back in the HigherMind Mediaworks office working again by 10:30 – a much more blissed-out and happy camper for having spent just a bit of time communing with snow, speed, cold, and the mountain itself.

Creativity does not come from sitting in an office all day alone.

Creativity requires getting outside and getting the juices flowing doing something you love.

Vision. Energy. Momentum.

This new year, we hope to see you in the mountains AND in the office.

TeeVee hyperbole aside, times have changed, thanks to the power of 21^st century convergent media and organizations increasingly impatient with advertising firms unilaterally telling them how to market themselves. I had a conversation with a potential client the other day in which she expressed disappointment with the marketing work of one of Vermont’s senior agencies. “What happened?” I said. “They came into our office, took notes, and then returned several weeks later with a plan they dropped onto our desk telling us everything we already knew and were already doing,” she replied. “And they charged us a lot of money, too.”

Her story confirms what many of us understand about how marketing’s rules have changed. The famous 20^th century advertising phrase “Content Is King” has been replaced by a new 21^st convergent media mantra: “Conversation Is King.” In a world of storytelling networks, developing a compelling story that generates meaningful dialogue about your brand, business, or organization is job #1. In the 21^st century networked world of “many to many,” marketing agencies are no longer the exclusive experts with the magical key to the kingdom. Instead, we must look beyond the heroic Don Draper model to new forms of collaboration between marketing agencies and the clients they serve.

With these two challenges in mind, we at HigherMind Mediaworks have developed an approach we call “Story Coaching,” built around a “Conversation is King, Collaboration is Queen” philosophy and designed for a 21^st century convergent media universe. Here are “Story Coaching’s” five basic elements.

#1: Storytelling = Creative Collaboration, Emergent Possibilities

In our HigherMind story coaching approach, we invite the client to the media table, early and often, to collaborate on the storytelling process. We’re convinced that regular dialogue between stakeholders is the key to successful story coaching. Equally as important? Be attuned to new emerging possibilities beyond Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, vlogging and other storytelling standards. Mobile marketing via smart phones, new networks like www.foursquare.com, fresh apps like Instagram – all offer new and emerging venues for telling your story.

#2: Fresh Ears = The Art of Listening

Organizations understand their own stories. That said, we are confident that HigherMind can offer new ears for listening and fresh eyes for seeing what organizations may miss – a new angle, an unheard voice, an underutilized resource, a gap in the network. Let us be “fresh ears” to listen as we work with you to tell your story more effectively.

#3: Question Everything = Sharpen The Story

We understand that in a new networked world of conversation, asking about an organizational story’s “whats” and “whys” lead to sharpening an oft-told story, or co-authoring a new chapter, often with new tools and platforms. (See #1, above)

#4: Process = Conversation is Critical

In working with our clients, we expect that the best part about story coaching is the internal conversation it generates about vision, energy, and momentum. Conversation is King, Collaboration is Queen, and process is everything.

#5: Metrics Matter = Measure Your Storytelling Success

We recommend using available analytics tools to try and quantify collaborative storytelling, of course, but also suggest tracking building of your community beyond metrics, as well. Who has joined your network through your storytelling efforts, and are you taking full advantage of their connection to your story?

And, whatever else we do, let’s not forget this last informal rule. Have fun. Story coaching in the service of your brand, business, nonprofit is part art, part science, and, if done right, ought to fun and feel fulfilling, as well.

Interested in story coaching for your organization? Have comments or questions for us? Contact rob@highermindmedia.com