Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

How to be happy in business

This is a wonderful diagram from Bud Caddel who writes WhatConsumesMe.com. I’ts a concept I believe in and one that I wished I had really understood a long time ago. Finding something that you really love to do is for some people is itself a lifetimes work. I think sometimes it takes a lot of [...]

Entertainment and Software Industry Adding Propoganda to Schools

I just got this email from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) which I decided to republish in it’s entirety because it made me so angry. Essentially a thinly veiled corporate mouthpiece and lobby is distributing books and curriculum to schools saying “think first copy later”. This to me is a disturbing indication of how corporations [...]

What Happens To Creative Ideas?

The best and most creative ideas are often based upon utter simplicity and beauty. All of us have seen elegant solutions and I know i’ve had experiences in companies where people have asked “why can’t we create a solution like that” pointing at a design led company. I think it’s because often people don’t trust [...]

To Be Sustainable Organizations Must Balance Empathy and Power

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change … And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar [...]

Foursquare - Dodgeball On Steriods - Is Going To Be Huge

Foursquare appears to be a wonderful evolution of Dodgeball, a much loved service that Google bought a couple of years ago but didn’t fund, and eventually shut down at the beginning of March. Dodgeball was a super simple SMS based service that you would send a text message to with the name of the venue [...]

Scott McCloud TED Talk - An Education in Visual Communication

It was about 10 years ago that a very well respected friend of mine suggested I read a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, his description intrigued me. He called it “One of the best academic books on visual communication and the psychology of visual perception… oh and it’s in the form of a [...]

Brief History of Advertising, Marketing and Branding

I found this great video from German Ad agency Scholz & Friends via twitter friend Gabriel Rossi. In the video they lay out a very accessible history of advertising with some lovely animation and music. What I do like at the end is the question they ask of their fictitious Brand X “Don’t you have [...]

My History With Social Media

I’ve been talking about Social Media for some time and believe it is going to have a huge impact on culture, society and business over the next 5 to 10 years. Anyway, I thought I’d dig up all my favorite posts about the topic and try to expose some of the chronology of what i’ve [...]

Is Advertising Worth Saving?

Exec Summary: Yes, advertising is still a valuable discipline, but what it needs is a higher purpose. Advertising needs to inspire more than mass consumption, it needs to communicate ideas that inspire action, and participation. The good news is the internet is one of the best mediums ever for the propagation of remarkable ideas, and [...]

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Post Consumer Society and the Culture Accellerator or What Are You Learning Today?

One of the things that struck me recently as I was teaching a class in Blogging and Social Media at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University is that whatever technology I was teaching about might not be here next year. I tried to take an approach where I didn’t teach tools so much as much [...]