That was several years ago. Fast forward to the present. Tim and Alia invited Capulet to join the crew of Lifeboat to help steer the digital marketing efforts behind their new project. It was a no-brainer for us, not just because they are friends, but because we were excited to be part of something we think matters in our personal and professional world—how we connect with one another. At Capulet, we work with companies and organizations to help them identify what’s remarkable about their work, and then we help them tell their stories. It’s what we call creating “remarkables” and it’s part of a larger approach to movement marketing, or building an engaged community around an organization or product. We think Lifeboat is shaping up to be a big remarkable.

Since coming on board this project, we’ve encouraged Tim and Alia to do what comes naturally to them: honest storytelling, finding the funny, and being the first to identify and mobilize a movement around the friendship crisis. Here’s what we mean:

Stories float our boat
Often, what’s remarkable about a cause or organization can be expressed in a very simple story. It’s why marketers love to talk about myth (read Winning the Story Wars by Jonah Sachs, you won’t regret it.) Time and again, we draw from the archetypes that make up our oral and written history and apply it to marketing. As aptly stated in one of Alia’s blog posts, every story has an antagonist or bad guy. Lifeboat’s is the friendship crisis. A narrative is beginning to emerge from all of the work and research Tim and Alia have done on the science of friendship. It’s been our job to help them craft this narrative and share it with a wider audience.

Find the funny (or, at the very least, sound human)
Tim and Alia have an unwavering ability to speak from the heart. Their voices and personalities are infused in Lifeboat’s messaging. The ability to make people laugh is a worthy gift and when it comes to your own project or organization, the more you do to celebrate the funny/absurd/ridiculous/human aspects of what you do or the cause you represent, the easier it is to connect with your audience. You can see Tim and Alia’s personalities in full flight in this video.

Be the first
Lifeboat isn’t the first to argue that deeper personal connections can lead to a fuller life. It is, however, the first to build momentum and a community of practice for becoming better friends. When you’re the first to the mark, you typically get more attention.

Working with Tim, Alia and the rest of the Lifeboat crew reminds us of how much we love to do what we do: craft stories for the web. Not only are we lucky to be surrounded by good friends, we’re honoured to participate in their remarkable movements, like Lifeboat.

• The smartest marketers would be there
• The conversations would be about web strategy, not WordPress plug-ins
• It would be an emerging trust network, where we could talk about failures as well as successes
• It wouldn’t have any sponsors
• The speakers would have insights to share, not products to sell
• It would take place in a natural setting near, but not in, Vancouver

A few months later, Fireworks Factory was born. We’re betting our time and money on the belief that there’s an appetite for this kind of conference in Vancouver.

For who’s coming, who’s speaking and other details, visit the Fireworks Factory website.

Why is it called Fireworks Factory?

We lived in Malta for a year in 2007, on the small island of Gozo. Each town on Gozo has a week-long religious festival–Malta is the most Catholic nation outside of the Vatican–punctuated by fireworks and pyrotechnics. These explosives were all homegrown, crafted in a community-owned fireworks factory on the edge of town. Men from the village would spend time there building and testing fireworks, in the hopes of outdoing their rival towns. Occasionally, something horrible would happen.

Still, they were communal spaces where something risky and breathtaking gets imagined and created. That seemed like a good metaphor for the kind of conference we want to run.

We hope you’ll find our tech trends prediction video interesting and entertaining. Enjoy!

For the record, the trends are:

#1: We live in a multi-screen world.
#2: Now more than ever, we talk with images.
#3: Self documentation reaches new frontiers.
#4: We’ll see more push-button curation, particularly on mobile devices.
#5: Our online communications channels will continue to get more and more ephemeral.
#6: Computers know more about you than you think.

Crowdsourcing calls on people who are otherwise not connected to contribute in a small way toward a common goal. We see this on the web all the time… think Kickstarter and popular t-shirt manufacturer, Threadless. For Drawn to the Wild, site visitors were asked to use web-based drawing tools to trace or enhance one of the 1200 frames that made up the original music video.

This campaign was designed to raise awareness for threatened Canadian landscapes. For every re-envisioned frame submitted on the website, Mountain Equipment Co-op donated funds for protecting Escarpment Rural Land (PERL), Harmer’s environmental organization dedicated to protecting the Niagara Escarpment in southern Ontario.

“The Niagara Escarpment’s survival as a unique natural environment is seriously threatened. Drawn to the Wild is one way Canadians can both support its protection and collaborate with me and each other in a fun and creative way.” – Sarah Harmer

Full disclosure here. Capulet works closely with MEC, leading and managing its conservation project, TheBigWild.org. With Drawn to the Wild we created something fresh and fun for the MEC and Big Wild audiences, who are regularly contacted via newsletters and social media about environmental campaigns. This was a new way for them to participate.

Years ago while working as a technical writer, Darren’s boss encouraged him to “disteal.” That is, to be inspired by the very best ideas from colleagues and thought leaders and to emulate those ideas. In this case, Drawn to the Wild was heavily inspired by the crowdsourced Johnny Cash Project.

So how did it all come together? We selected Sarah’s tour documentary, “Escarpment Blues” as the featured music video on the microsite, www.drawntothewild.org. Website visitors were asked to draw on, fill in or highlight a film frame using a simple web-based drawing tool before submitting their work. This was a high-friction ask with lots of moving parts, so we created a YouTube how-to video to walk users through the process.

Developers and designers at Vancouver digital agency, Agentic, built a custom interface that was both straightforward to use and enabled us to vet and organize submissions on the website back end.

Frames were added to the video on the fly so that participants could click play to watch the music video take shape right before their eyes.

Now, let’s crunch the numbers. We shared the project via various online channels, including the TheBigWild.org and Mountain Equipment Co-op newsletters. Interestingly, Facebook advertising delivered the highest conversion rate of any source that sent significant traffic to the campaign. Twitter also performed surprisingly well. We put that down to the fun and unexpected nature of the project, which in many ways parallels the serendipity of Twitter.

To complete the video, we needed a minimum of 1200 frames. In total, 1822 frames were drawn and submitted, which was above our expectations. We kept 1477 of the frames submitted and rejected 345. It’s the Internet after all, so it’s no surprise that some rude drawings appeared in the mix, which is why each frame needed to be vetted before being added to the video. The average visitor submitted two frames and some keeners drew several each. Two enthusiastic contributors drew 56 and 54 frames, respectively. It took the average visitor about six minutes to add their frame.

Ultimately, we wanted visitors to play and have fun with the site, and feel good about contributing to land conservation at the same time.

Sharing your customers’ success stories with the press can be a great way to highlight your work and to help bring attention to your customers. However, getting customers to participate in joint PR isn’t always easy. Here are some of the ways we prepare business PR stories and get customers excited about coming along for the ride.

1. Tell a Winning Story

Select winning stories to share with the press to improve chances of success. If your story is weak, or even mediocre, sit tight until you’ve got a winner. That way your customer isn’t disappointed, and you don’t overwork your press contacts.

2. Timeliness Is Key

If your customer is keen to participate, clearly articulate expectations and deadlines early on. Don’t get stalled waiting on an indecisive partner. If you need customer feedback, prepare content in advance for quick and easy approval.

3. Align PR Goals

If your customer has their own PR team, get to know them and the kinds of stories they’re trying to tell and who they’re trying to reach. Develop story ideas that align with their internal goals and you’ll find they’re keen to work with you.

4. Show, Don’t Tell

Show customers examples of successful PR. This is tough if you’re just starting out so, instead, point to examples from other companies of what you’re trying to achieve.

5. Build Joint PR into the Contract

An easy way to ensure that customer success stories are at your fingertips to pitch to press is to build that activity into contracts. That way, your customers are prepared for PR right out of the gate.

Now, you’re ready to start pitching customer stories. Here are a few examples of the kinds of customer success stories Capulet has helped to land: A Technology Switch Bears Mobile Commerce Fruit; Deepening Engagement, One Drawing at a Time; and Open Sourcing May be Worth the Risk.

1. Losing Can Sometimes Mean Winning

Loosing fans isn’t always a bad thing. If you’ve recently gone from not working with a social media strategy to consistently scheduling content once a day that aims to engage and inform you audience and you’re still losing people, it could be that those dawdling audience members are simply not interested in your new approach. If you hadn’t been posting  that much before and only recently changed up your routine, you have to expect some of your fans to opt out because their expectations aren’t being met. The good news is that from here on in, armed with your engaging content and new schedule, you can hope to connect with fans and community mangers who care about what you have to say and have the potential to turn into donors, customers and heavy-hitting supporters later down the line. In other words, your fan base may be smaller but the fans themselves are more likely to care about what you post.

It’s also worth noting that, according to Mashable.com, Facebook recently began to aggressively deactivate fake accounts and remove those account “likes.” If you’ve noticed your very large fan base taking a plunge, that could be part of the reason.

2. Moving From Likes to Comments to Shares

Likes are great, comments are better and shares are the best when it comes to Facebook. Keep in mind moving community members up this social media engagement ladder takes time and effort or, at the very least, really great content curation. Those fans who comment and share your posts have shown a commitment to you and that commitment should be rewarded with content they want to share with their own, online communities.

3. Schedule Your Content Consistently

Post once a day, even on weekends. Unless you’ve tested it thoroughly and can honestly prove that an audience wants to hear from you multiple times a day, chances are posting once a day is enough. That’s certainly what Darren Barefoot and I learned from our study on Facebook and the kind of content that goes viral.

4. Listen Carefully and Respond Thoughtfully

It’s easy to forget about your fans who post to your Facebook wall with the timeline feature now enabled. Don’t forget to check-in every so often and use the drop-down menu at the top of your timeline to see who’s been tagging and sharing content with you. If you can, always add a little note to the posts that make it onto your wall.

5. Stop Name Dropping and Start Telling Stories

If you’re managing sponsorships on behalf of a non-profit campaign or responsible for mentioning corporate partners in a capital campaign, remember that you have an obligation to your community to curate quality content. In other words, don’t waste your time by posting logos and listing off tags or names (that’s what #ff or “follow friday” is for on Twitter.) Instead, if you need to make a corporate or sponsor mention, first ask the company in question what story they want to share with your community. From there, you can build a story around the mention.

(Blog post photo courtesy flickr user, Adikos)