Marketing 2.0

BBC Motion Gallery

Via the excellent blog titled Research Buzz, I found the BBC Motion Gallery. This is a good resource for video enthusiasts, researchers and educators. The BBC claims to offer over 300,000 hours of video footage from its archives and those of CBS News. Registration is required but at no cost. The video clips can be downloaded and licensed. Content is available from a wide variety of subjects including news, art, celebrities, culture and natural history.

BBC Motion Gallery - Home Page

Blogging With The Boss's Blessing

Here's a good article from Business Week on the trend for employees to maintain their own blogs with the blessing of their employers. It raises lots of questions for me. For example, it's fine to have a dedicated product manager get customer feedback through a personal weblog but what happens when the disgruntled guy from the Buffalo office starts slagging the organization? A disclaimer can be posted on personal blog sites but there's still the potential for malfeasance. On the other hand, honest communication from an individual can be much more effective than corporate PR. Read and decide for yourself.

BW Online | June 28, 2004 | Blogging With The Boss's Blessing

The Best Things In Life Are Free

Seth Godin offers good advice on achieving sales growth in this article via Fast Company. In his words, " If your goal is growth, the only way to achieve it is to market a product or service worth talking about--a purple cow (as I called them in my last book). With all the clutter out there, you're either remarkable or invisible."

Fast Company | The Best Things In Life Are Free

Turning the Pages

The British Library offers a dazzling virtual exhibit called "Turning the Pages." Check out the exhibit on Leonardo DaVinci's notebook. This is one of the best examples I have seen of using technology to actually enhance and transform a traditional experience. Most virtual museums offer little more than photos pasted on the web with some commentary. The British Library actually lets you turn the pages. You couldn't get this close to Leonardo's notebook in a brick and mortar museum. Very cool.

What's it have to do with marketing communications? Well nothing really, except I thought you would enjoy seeing this and maybe applying a similar approach to a product catalog or a marketing application. Any suggestions?

Turning the Pages

Using weblogs to create engaging learning experiences

This article, from the Australian Flexible Learning Community discusses how weblogs can be used to facilitate training. The author lists three key attributes that make blogs successful - personal point of view, chronological postings and byte-sized posts.

LearnScope

Digital Storytelling Site

The Center for Digital Storytelling is a nice resource for those interested in using technology to express themselves. Digital storytelling is a broad term and can include many types of presentations. A few that come immediately to mind are family history, memorials, documentaries of important events and historical profiles. Perhaps the most influential practitioner of digital storytelling is Ken Burns, who pioneered many of the techniques such as panning and zooming with his camera to animate old photographs. There's even an effect in iMovie, named after Mr. Burns that all of us can use to create a similar effect with photos in a video piece.

The Center offers tips and techniques for making your own digital stories. While some of the techniques are specific to software tools (Premiere and Photoshop), others offer general advice on planning and creating digital assets.

Digital Storytelling Site