October 21, 2011 | By Gaia |
This post is the first in a series of interviews of leaders in Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability I am writing in partnership with Demeter Interactive client Opportunity Green. This interview was originally posted on the Opportunity Green blog.
Sharon Chang is kind of a big deal. Sure, she was Chief Creative Officer at 19 and has worked on multi-million dollar ad campaigns for the world’s largest brands, and is one of the youngest members on the Board of Trustees at NYU (along with, eh hem, Fred Wilson). But none of that is what impresses me the most. The thing that is absolutely staggering about this young woman in her professional prime, is that she has gathered her considerable abilities – business acumen, creative force, social influence, and the list goes on – and has directed them toward a simple and noble goal: making the world a better place, and with a razor sharp ability to execute at the highest level. She is betting on a very exciting framework that she articulates in the interview below, and the best part for those of us working to create change in sustainability and social entrepreneurship? She’s right.
Yoxi aims to discover, nurture and elevate social entrepreneurs – what Sharon calls, “Social Innovation Rockstars” – via mass-media, business-focused campaigns. Through collaborations with companies that focus on Shared Value opportunities, these Social Innovation Rockstars get visibility to amplify their message by using the global platforms of forward-thinking corporations. Sharon has seen first-hand all of the energy, creativity and tenacity that goes into making entertainment and sports stars, and now she wants to turn her attention and media prowess toward more pressing matters, like creating a more equitable, safe and sustainable economy for our planet. How does Yoxi do it? To start, by changing the rules of the game from the ground up.
Sharon says, “We find amazing people doing work we admire, and we ask, ‘How can we best accelerate their efforts via powerful stories that will reach a mass audience?’ Good marketing agencies know how to create campaigns that best fit their clients, and good political campaigns know how to tailor their approach to put their candidate in the best light, to increase his or her chances of success. That’s what we try to do for the entrepreneurs we work with who are creating social good, to maximize their chance of success.”
What follows are the best parts of the delightful conversation I had with Sharon last week.
GD: What’s more important in a leader, influence or great ideas?
Being influential is more important. Influence is the secret sauce to fostering high-impact collaboration. People don’t realize that the paradigm has shifted and we’re now in a post-information age. The ratio of the number of good ideas out there to the number of people trying to execute them is changing rapidly. You used to hear a really good idea come along every once in a blue moon, whereas now you hear great ideas every other minute, and there are hundreds of thousands of people trying to execute on those ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
What really matters is if you have the ability to motivate the right people to organize around a single idea and take it from just a spark to a fully executed product, while building a sophisticated, engaging story around it. I think it’s very important for all of us to stay open-minded and humble enough to work with other people’s ideas as well.
GD: You were intimately involved with American idol. What did you learn?
SC: American Idol taught me a lot about how to find talent, elevate them, work with them. We knew how to create stars out of nothing. I’d like to begin from a different starting point, and redirect this energy toward something more pressing. When the best practice of talent management is applied to a strong sense of purpose, we will create stars who can change the world. Continue Reading>>
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Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Susan Wojcicki, SVP of Advertising at Google, announced the latest Google Analytics tool: Flow Visualization.
Flow Visualization is going to be a great tool for a variety of different site owners. Flow Visualization can track the path users take when navigating a website. It’s visual representation of data that’s easy to digest for any user of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics has always had sales funnels, to track sales conversations, but Flow Visualization takes it to another level. For instance, you can sort your visitors by browser, determine which pages they visit, and at what point they might abandon your site. You can ascertain which links users are clicking on to navigate your site and if there is an optimal path that you can take advantage of. All of this represented in a graphical, interactive map, for free.
Ms. Wojcicki started her presentation saying that Flow Visualization was inspired by an obscure spaghetti map of Napoleon’s march to and from Russia in 1812. The map visually represents the number of soldiers who died on the journey. As soon as I saw this I immediately knew the relevance of Google’s new analytics tool and was quite enthused at the possibilities.
This very spaghetti map has been framed and hanging in my family’s living room for years. It first became relevant to me when I was a senior in college and finishing my degree with a required cartography class. Little did I know that years later, in an entirely different context, it would again rise to significance in my life.
At Demeter Interactive, we love data and this paradigm shift in data technology is very exciting for us. Which is why when I first saw Susan Wojcicki share the Napoleon spaghetti map I knew how Flow Visualization would impact our company first. When we create promotions on social networking sites, like Facebook, we can directly track how many visitors are sent to our site and which social network is sending us the highest quality traffic. Flow Visualization is going to eliminate a lot of the guessing game for marketers.
Flow Visualization is going to be rolled out to users over the course of the next several weeks. I’ll be sure to let Theridion readers know our thoughts when we first get the chance to experience it first hand. Is Flow Visualization as interesting to you as it is to us or are we just die-hard data junkies?
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October 6, 2011 | By Demeter |
Thank you for everything Mr. Jobs. You will be missed.
Love and gratitude,
Demeter Interactive
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September 26, 2011 | By Gaia |
Last Thursday night in honor of Social Media Week LA, Demeter Interactive and the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator co-hosted a panel titled Startups, Sustainability and The Social Web: Weaving New Stories Into the Urban Fabric of LA. The purpose of the event was to discuss the new stories that are emerging about Los Angeles and sustainability, and the ways in which they are being manifested throughout the city. With public transportation finally on the rise in LA, the cleantech corridor taking a huge step forward when LACI opened their doors a month ago, and advocates, events and businesses coming together in so many ways to promote a sustainable economy – we felt that it was important to talk about the exciting possibilities that reside in the fabric of this “city of the future,” and spread awareness about the startups that are driving its progress.
// Social Signals //
No longer considered new-fangled and far-fetched, social media has secured its place as a legitimate way for individuals, organizations and even government to communicate – in fact President Obama is conducting a real-time townhall via LinkedIn as I write. There are innumerable opportunities to connect, subscribe, share, filter and curate our digital worlds. What’s more, the social communications flying at dizzying speed through our digital networks are in the public domain, meaning that much of the communication in our vast global village is even more transparent today than live conversations between human beings in the same village were hundreds and thousands of years ago. Continue Reading>>
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