Throughout this quarter, Flip the Media will be featuring some of the best video projects from the winter Multimedia Storytelling classes.

“Cooking Up Ideas, Cooking Up Community” by Michael Bean

The subject of my video was The Food Education, Empowerment and Sustainability Team (FEEST) that meets every Wednesday afternoon at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in West Seattle to learn about food, themselves and one another – all while preparing a healthy and delicious dinner to enjoy with friends and community members.

I chose this subject for two reasons: I love to cook and always enjoy the social nature of cooking with friends or family, and FEEST is a youth-led initiative. I found it interesting and impressive that a group of young people would be taken with the idea, and I immediately knew I wanted to hang around and film them after dropping in one Wednesday to cook with them.

My goals were to highlight a cool youth-led initiative; produce a video that showed youth participating in their lives and communities in a unique way; and give a glimpse into just how amazing the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center is.
I think my video benefited from my strategy to first do some ‘deep hanging out’ – as Scott Macklin likes to say. Rather than simply showing up with cameras and expecting people to cater to the needs of my production process, I went for the first week and simply cooked and established a rapport with the group. (It helped also that I did most of their mountain of dishes).

After that, I had no issues when I came with cameras on subsequent weeks. During the cooking on the third week, I was able to get some really good footage (with the help of Scott), felt comfortable asking for quotes and generally just felt like I was welcome and trusted.

Showing up repeatedly, rather than hoping to get everything in one session, also helped when it came time to piece a story together.

I shot the video with a Panasonic GH1 Digital SLR and a Kodak Zi6 Pocket Video Camera. To capture audio, I used a Rode Mic. I must say, this might have been the most important part of the production process. I am very inexperienced with cameras and had some trouble keeping the camera steady. However, because the audio quality was generally great, it made it easier to not dwell on that less-than-stellar aspect of the video. I used Final Cut Pro 7 to edit.

Huge congratulations to MCDM student Jon Hickey and his YongoPal team, which won the University of Washington’s Business Plan Competition last night.  Here’s how TechFlash described the win:

Consumer Internet companies haven’t fared too well at the University of Washington Business Plan Competition in recent years, with judges typically leaning toward upstarts with more advanced technologies in the fields of medical devices, electronics or clean tech. But that changed tonight at the 13th annual gala as YongoPal — an online English language education service designed for South Korean students — took home the top prize.     The YongoPal founders — Darien Brown, Daron Hall, Jon Hickey and Kyung Hee Yun — appeared almost shocked as they hoisted the giant $25,000 check at an awards ceremony tonight at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle.

Other than to commend a member of our community, why am I blogging about this?

Well first, Jon partly credits his MCDM education for his success.  He actually worked on his business plan in our newly-formed Business Fundamentals in Digital Communications, taught by adjunct faculty Rick McPherson (who also teaches in the UW’s MBA program).  We made a conscientious decision to bolster our business-related curriculum this year for three reasons:

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As I complete my 3rd year as Director, we enter the 10th year of the program, and we leave our “startup” phase.  As such, we need to provide a support structure as our curriculum matures, focusing primarily on (a) instruction; (b) aligning student interests with what we have to offer.  Here’s the content of an e-mail that I sent to our MCDM community:

(1) A FUNDAMENTAL “WHY” TO THE MCDM [working premise]

(a) We work with a student body of professionals to develop sound strategies on how to communicate with influence and persuasion in this “noisy” digital age. [this is the program in a nutshell]

(b) We help them assess and measure what constitutes a successful communication endeavor [crucial in this new value-conscious age of "Return On Investment"]

(c) We provide the context and analytical skills to grasp the big picture of technology and communication, and provide strategic leadership within an organization based on these key insights [technologies come and go, but critical thinking and conceptual insight endure]

As another frame of reference for further discussion, MCDM student Madeline Moy suggested her own “logline” to me via Twitter:

The MCDM program equips business professionals with digital tools & strategies to effectively connect, persuade and inspire.

I like it, though I’d flip “strategies” and “tools” (we had an engaging conversation about this Sunday as well as I emphasized that the MCDM is primarily about communication strategy, but that we need to deploy appropriate tools to develop that strategy).
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The advice is so old that it is trite: to conduct an effective crisis communications campaign, communicators have to be present and conversant in the channels/communities/media where they need to talk to people before disaster hits.

And a second piece of advice is also so tired that it seems trite: secure your company’s brand name whenever there’s a new technology. With web sites, I was advising folks in the mid-90s to secure the .com, .org and .net associated with their names … as well as logical “spoof” names. And that was when it cost bucks to secure names!

But it seems no one at BP had taken either adage to heart before last month’s explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

@BPGlobalPR, A Spoof Twitter Account

In researching Business Week’s top 100 brands, I learned last year that BP had lost @bp, legitimately, to Brian Pendelton. The company has owned @BP_America since 12 August 2008, but didn’t really use the account until this month. This week someone began making hay with @BPGlobalPR (established 19 May 2010). In fact, although the account is less than a week old, it has three times as many followers as @BP_America.

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Twitter has become one of the most influential websites in the world with more than 105 million registered users, 180 million unique visitors per month, and 600 million searches per day. Twitter ranks second in the search market, merely left behind by Google. Twitter’s success isn’t just based on its innovative concept of using simple messages to share and communicate with the world. If you carefully analyze the traffic data, you will find 75% of traffic comes from outside of Twitter itself. This means many more people use supported applications and tools than Twitter.com.

Twitter’s business strategies led to this bloom in Twitter applications. The core business of Twitter is to develop, maintain, and administrate Twitter.com. For those interested in developing innovative applications based on its platform, Twitter releases open APIs; this allows creators to access the content on Twitter without barriers or difficulties. Twitter’s huge traffic also attracts application developers who enrich Twitter’s user experience in return for a share of the revenues.

This win-win strategy may have been jeopardized when Twitter founder Evan Williams announced just over a month ago that the company would be buying Tweetie, an iPhone app that had been for sale in the App Store for $2.99. The updated app was released today as Twitter for iPhone and is now available in the App Store for free. According to Twitter, users had been looking for an official app in the store and “we didn’t have one, so they generally got confused and gave up.”

Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie has aroused concerns Read more…

On May 6, the Seattle Chapter of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) presented a panel discussion on social networking and corporate policy, which focused on the need to monitor and/or regulate the use of social media in business. Three panelists discussed the established policies and needs of their organization.

Sharon Johnson, Public Records Officer of the City of Seattle’s Legislative Department, explained that when social media is used to conduct official business, it’s considered public record.

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Yesterday it felt to me like rabbits were at work and their progeny was Facebook privacy apps. Four crossed my screen within a space of hours: Privacy Check, ProfileWatch.org, ReclaimPrivacy.org and SaveFace. The first three are useful in helping identify the types of Facebook information that have made it to the public web, but they aren’t helpful in the shades-of-gray publicness that comes from tweaking “friends of friends” and “friends and networks” settings. The fourth is a giant reset button. Here’s what I found out about each.

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Twitter raises a few red flags in my mind. Not the concept. Not its popularity. Not how it is used. But I do have questions about  the speculative vagueness of its valuation.

So far, investors have put about $150 million into Twitter. A month ago, the Associated Press reported that Twitter is still sitting on a significant portion of this nest egg and is no a rush to expand its advertising base. So far. its only two revenue streams consist of:

• Selling its internal analytical data. I’ve seen no detailed information on what data are sold to whom—and how much Twitter is making from this revenue stream.
• Promoting Tweets–an innovative concept announced on April 13. This experiment in advertisingmay or may not work; it’s impossible to tell, because there’s no track record to go on. Plus, the Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter will split those “advertising revenues equally with smartphone and Web partners”, which will cut into this new income stream.

Twitter’s revenues so far may be minimal, but that’s not reflected in its valuation—according to the most commonly cited figure, the company is worth—1 billion dollars.

This valuation is not based on publicly scrutinized or audited figures, but on numbers floated to the media by Twitter and its potential suitors. Read more…