Use this image to illustrate articles on, presentations about & screeds against Google+. It’d be swell if you linked to my portfolio.
I’m super proud of my friend Venessa for the CNN coverage of her Future of Facebook project, and stoked to have my STEEP analysis illustration run on CNN as part of it. Go team! 
Here’s the illustration that ran on CNN to accompany Venessa Miemis‘ article 4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy.
You should read Venessa’s blog, Emergent by Design, if you’re into the impact technology is having on our society, culture, economy & future.
Here’s how it looks on the site. Definitely a career high so far 
Who doesn’t need a good vector Facebook icon once in a while? Trouble is, there are so darn many social actions on the ‘Book these days, a designer needs more than a mere ‘F’ in a box!
So download these vector (Windows AI CS4) files here, why dontcha. My gift to you!
Bonus production assistance: need to type Facebooky stuff? The Facebook font sure looks like Lucida Grande.
Created for writer & digital ethnographer Venessa Miemis to accompany The Bank of Facebook: Currency, Identity & Reputation. Ran on Forbes, Brian Solis, and Emergent by Design.
A visual that came out of thinking about barcodes as a gateway to seeing another layer of reality. Click for a bigger look at it.
For the longest time the first slide of my New Media Manitoba QR code presentation was ominously blank with the words “visually compelling title page” scrawled across it. Finished it last night!
To download the fully fantastic 11″x17″ Voir QR poster, cliquez-vous ici.
Animated gif illustrating the components of an object tagging scheme. Hardlinking with QR code to the web, data returned via wireless network to handheld device.
Critiques?
My supposition here is that in today’s information culture, the mainstream media (MSM) are still an important conduit for information. They take raw information and give it the context that years of newsgathering provides, and the clout of accuracy commiserate with the individual media org’s brand. Amateur media adds a layer of commentary, repackaging MSM’s contribution and feeding it out to the social streams, where it’s reblogged and shared.
Does this graphic work* for you? Am I missing anything? Let me know your thoughts on MSM’s place in the infosystem.
The dotted lines represent MSM making it straight to FB/Twitter, which I suspect doesn’t happen much on the reblogging platforms (Tumblr & Posterous) because it’s not beautiful/pithy (too much context).
* A funny comment on information quality—what MSM represents—is that Google will return this graphic to people without the context where I’m saying “this is a draft; what do you think?”, unavoidably making me contribute to the unverified information that characterizes an unmediated internet. Sorry about that. What am I going to do, stamp ‘draft’ across it?
*Just kidding. Show your true Manitoban spirited energy with these glorious “Manitoba Time” desktop & iPhone / iPhone 4 wallpapers.
Download ‘em! 1920×1200 | 1680×1050 | 1440×900 | 1280×800 | 1024×768 | iPhone | iPhone 4
That should hold you til the real creative drops.
Apparently there’s some sort of animated gif renaissance goin’ down. I didn’t know they needed rebirthing. To me, this amazing format—low bandwidth, low tech, no plugins required—was always one of the beauties of the web.
The limitations of looped animation force you to think subtly. What can you do, what can you say with only a few frames to communicate?
In celebration of the reemergence of my favourite 8-bit art form, here’s an epic animated gif piece I created for my author’s profile when I worked on the design portal Nice to Meet You, a project of France’s Hello Hikimori.
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There’s a practice among foraging cultures called “social sharing“: when somebody scores big with the hunting & the gathering, they share all of it with the group.
Nomads don’t have a way to store or transport food, so it would just go to waste if it wasn’t eaten. This reciprocity then covers their asses later when they’re not having any luck and another member of the tribe makes a kill.
Social media communities like the interactive marketing professionals I follow on Twitter also have a formally informal sharing ethos, similarly crucial to network coherence & growth. We take what’s no use if stored—goodwill, news, how-to’s on the latest Facebook changes, inspiring marketing, artwork you can use in blog posts—and feed it to the whole tribe, so that they may be sustained and we will be included when they’ve got rare winter berries.
We have the same reciprocal obligation and the same enculturation of generosity. We get together annually (SXSWi, anyone?) in what are called among foragers bilevel organizations, which dissolve back into small, far flung units before all the local resources are used up (Austin’s beer supply).
It’s nice to be part of a tribe
In light of my recent dissertation on Twitter’s damn bird, the last thing I ever want to see is another blue avian anything, but here you go. Available on Flickr with a Creative Commons license.
Not your cup of tea? How ’bout this older, but no less adorable, free Twitter bird? I’m full of ‘em!
In preparation for my new job as United Way of Winnipeg‘s Interactive & Social Media Engagement Manager, I’ve been reading a few of the current SoMe classics, including Brian Solis’ Engage!
I’ve heard Brian reference “social objects” on his blog, and I’d already come to the conclusion that brands will be better understood in the social world by creating and spreading content of their own, as opposed to just listening and participating in existing conversations.
As part of my engagement strategy I’m going to produce simple videos that convey just how important and life-changing the programs United Way supports are to the people who use them. There are a thousand amazing stories out there, and I believe that if people just heard them, they’d be moved to donate—whether for intellectual or emotional reasons.
These stories, in social media marketing terms, are “social objects”—ideas around which people who care can congregate, comment, and share to their networks.
Here’s my conception of a social object creating “brandvocates”—fans advocating your organization’s work:
![1] Content is published to the social web. 2] It sparks conversation, which leaves a perception of the brand in people's minds. 3] People share the content & their newfound understanding of the brand that produced it.](http://ericaglasier.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/SocialObject-Brandvocate.jpg "SocialObject-Brandvocate")
1] Content is published to the social web. 2] It sparks conversation, creating a perception of the brand in people’s minds. 3] People share the content & their newfound understanding of the brand that produced it. And here’s a more structured version of Brian’s idea, showing the journey from content to conversation, to enhanced brand perception and brandvocacy:
Perhaps Brian will drop by and tell me if I’ve got the concept down!
So, part of the idea behind technological #singularity is that it might be possible to build a machine that’s smarter than people. Then all heck breaks loose, and humans do not necessarily come out on top.
“Theoretically, if a machine built by humans could bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine. If built, this more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability.” Machines get smarter and smarter, outpacing humans until they’re the boss of us.
I’m working on a series called “Man & Machine”, about the coming (or not, depending on your philosophical attachment to humanity) singularity.
Umair Haque recently advanced a hypothesis that social media is a bubble, and that when it bursts we will see that we were not brought meaningfully closer together by the growth of social communication.
I don’t want social media to be a bubble, because I like it.
First, let’s define a bubble. We mean an economics-style bubble, like the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble. In this sense, a bubble is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”. So lots of new relationships that aren’t worth very much. I think Unmair was saying we’ve been placing undue value on the relationships generated by social media, both from a personal standpoint (these aren’t real friends) and a marketing standpoint (these aren’t very devoted ‘fans’).
Here are the reasons I feel the shiny, soapy dome of social media’s bubble should be left alone.
“Thin relationships” are not a new phenomena to society. If we rechristen these friends “acquaintances”, you might recognize them better. Aquaintances are certainly not without value.
Clay Shirky’s SXSW keynote touched on the evolutionary impetus to share and to cooperate, calling it “spiteful” not to pass on information when it’s very little effort for you to do so. This is the link economy in action.
It’s easy to share links to interesting content. It’s fun to add to the conversation by commenting on blogs and liking updates. It’s gratifying to contribute content to the collective by taking photos, writing essays (blog posts), illustrating, designing fonts and photoshop brushes, and shooting funny videos. It’s meaningful to lead culture and capture the zeitgeist by giving birth to memes, defining ideas, pushing for human thought development.
The more the merrierThin relationships, or “weak connections” make these upper-Maslow interactions possible. You don’t need a high level of investment in someone to trade ideas. Their input is valuable precisely because they come from a different perspective, and aren’t bound by politeness or concern for your ego. I’ve mentioned the findings that novel input from new friends sparks more innovative, creative solutions. The more the merrier.
From a marketing standpoint, I hate to put the idea out there (there being Google search) that we’re overestimating the worth of social media and it’s practitioners. It could sour corporate decision makers who ponder how much to invest in newfangled media.
This isn’t about protecting our jobs, it’s about making them better. My firm belief is that all marketing, communication, PR, customer service and sales efforts (not to mention internal communications) can be enhanced and made more worthwhile and productive by conversing instead of broadcasting. I don’t think organizations have a choice, because public expectation of brands/services/orgs has changed.
This being a nascent revolution in the mainstream, still, I don’t want to throw the word b-word around. I want to work to show that teaming up with customers to get them what they want is going to succeed.
In researching an illustration project, I made an incredible discovery I now offer to the world. Did you ever notice how much Gerald McBoing-Boing and his concerned family look like an RSS icon? Allow me to demonstrate:
That’s crazy! There’s no way the artists at UPA could have known about RSS back in the 18th century!
Who will dominate location-based status? The Big Blue Boot stomps Gowalla & Foursquare into ‘roo & d0u¢hebag soup. Illustration available creative commons-style on Flickr for all your bloggy uses.
