Our Firecat First Friday topic this month was Designing for Emotion. My thanks to Colette Vardeman for suggesting the topic (or something quite similar).
I really enjoyed reading Aarron Walters' Designing for Emotion book from A List Apart. It's a quick read. Aarron shares his philosophy and experiences as creative lead at Mailchimp, one of my favorite digital marketing tools. Their use of whimsy and super-solid, open, friendly visual design are inspiring, and it's great to have Aarron dig into why that all works as well as it does.
Here's the Jane McGonigal talk Chris McDermott mentioned.
If you're in the social media game for any length of time, tasked with keeping one or more business social media presence points stocked with interesting content, you'll know that it's not always easy to have something to say.
Every social media presence point you set up becomes like a hungry baby bird - always wanting more, more, more. You can cheat by recycling the same content through all of them - but that's a quick way to turn off your listeners, get unfollows, unsubscribes and unfriendings.
On Saturday, November 9, as part of BlogItSA Two, I'll be giving a short version of my Editorial Calendar workshop. We'll map out the coming year and walk through worksheets that help you block in your own and others' events, leverage holidays, stay in tune with your audiences' seasonal rhythms, and work in some fun.
BlogItSA happens Saturday, Nov. 9 - REGISTER HERE.
Nancy Duarte and her crew at Duarte have adopted Halloween for creating lots of seasonal fun and channeling the creativity of their team. Check out their pumpkin carving contest and their Horror of Frankenslides episode.