Open up your mind and say, ahh...

It all began as a “purely creative exercise.” “My freelance work had dried up, and I needed to keep myself busy. I wasn’t trying to capture the interest of a certain market. I simply wanted to try my hand at branding something that had a lot of components, that had a deep heritage and that I felt had practical use.”

Click to enlarge.

That’s Tyler Deep. Not so long ago, he put a $15 deck of cards up on Kickstarter, hoping to accrue the $6,000 to send them into production. What happened instead was one of those dreams Kickstarter is made of–4,000 backers showed up out of nowhere, pledging $146,000 to support the project. “I never thought people would care this much. . .not in a 100 years,” he says today. “I am floating in a sea of amazement.”

It wasn’t just any old deck of cards, of course. With a creative-sabbatical approach, Deep crafted his deck from top to bottom, designing every aspect, from the illustrations of royalty to his own font-like riff on the traditional hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. The effect is borderline antique without feeling retro, like a one-off deck built for a high-stakes poker game in some Hollywood period piece.

Now in their second printing, this edition of cards will feature metallic gold backs, and they’ll reside in a bold red box that’s printed with gold foil highlights. Red and gold–it’s an incestuous duo of royal opulence that will make your imported clay poker chips look cheap. And should you prefer to look more Wayne than Lannister, the deck will also be available in black.

Content marketing? That takes a lot of time, doesn’t it?

Are you in a hurry to get somewhere? Yes. Content marketing takes time. And getting it right takes a lot of work, and by work, I mean practice, not research. You can look at demographics all day, but if you really want to get going, you’ve got to start doing, start failing, learning where to avoid the failures if you can, and keep going.

Pick Whatever Platform You Want

Have you seen Vine yet? Twitter just launched it. It lets you record six second videos. Like this:

Sweet yet healthy treat. Micro cooking show. vine.co/v/bJtLu2VYeDa

— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) January 29, 2013

Can’t see the video? Click Here.

I just started using it. There’s probably a few ways it could be useful. I thought of one right away, and some of my friends are already making their own version. I promoted who was on my radio show like this:

Radio show guests this week on hbway.com/radio vine.co/v/bJMtr7EbqwL

— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) January 28, 2013

Can’t see the video? Click Here.

So maybe little six second videos aren’t your thing. Maybe you prefer text? Great! Blog. And keep a great newsletter going.

A photo person? Swell! Use Instagram. Or Facebook. Or Flickr. Who cares? Pick whichever platform you want.

But How Do You Find Ideas?

You try things. You see what people are asking about. I dipped into Twitter and saw people asking about details of social media for customer service purposes. Pow. I could write a post about that. I looked on my free health and nutrition group and lots of people are asking for smoothie and juicing recipes. Maybe I’ll make a quick ebook and pop it into the Amazon store. Or I’ll have a live Hangout on Air and share recipes in real time with people from my kitchen.

Ideas are all around you. You need only scratch a tiny bit to find them. But you also have to have your “and this relates to the people I share things with like this” hat on.

Content is a “Pick and Scratch” Process

If you’re looking to build media and get some attention, you need to produce more content than just a little. Where do you find the time? You pick at it. I wrote this while I waited for a YouTube video I was uploading to process. Where did I find time to do the YouTube video? I had a space between two meetings and I knew I needed to shoot this particular video so I got things ready.

It’s the same answers I can give you for living in a little house. You find ways to keep everything functional instead of wasting it. Small houses save space. Content marketers find time. It’s related.

Serve Your Community Passionately

I think about you when I sit down to write. I think about how I can help you. I think about whether I can educate or inspire or instruct. You’re the only person I think about when I create. I don’t wonder what my colleagues are doing. I don’t wonder what’s trending. I work on finding something I can share with you to be helpful. You’re the focus. And that makes it work.

Here’s a formula I love to remember daily: First, earn an audience. Second, nurture a community. Third, empower a network. (feel like tweeting that?) If so, then maybe I’m doing my job well. If not, I’m still on step 2.

You Must Be Responsive and Fast

Gone are the days of “working on a blog post in drafts for the last week.” If the idea’s worth anything, post it. Even unfinished if you have to. You’re not being graded. You’re being consumed, absorbed, and if you’re lucky, passed around. If you don’t have time for the best blog post ever, what are you doing with your time? Reading Mashable? You have work to do.

Utterly stuck? Go for a walk. Ask yourself over and over again what your community wants. Don’t have a community of your own? Write for the community you want to serve! ( tweetable).

This is bigger than “just business.” This isn’t an avocation. This is a path. Are you willing to put in the work to earn what you want?

Guest post by Ian Greenleigh, author of The Social Media Side Door (Fall 2013) and social strategist with Bazaarvoice. Follow him on Twitter @be3d

Products were once contained by physical ownership and access. To experience a product, you had to buy it or try it. Brands extended beyond the idea of physical products into other types of consumer exposure to companies. Non-customers have always had access to brands outside of the ownership capacity, through advertising, word of mouth, and any other manifestation of a company that didn’t require ownership of their product. But this brand experience lacked depth—you may have seen an ad for something, but without having consumed it as a product, it would be hard to argue that you really experienced it in any meaningful way.

The web and social punched a million holes through this idea. Experience has streamed through these holes and spilled out beyond physical ownership and captive audiences. People want to experience products and brands on their terms, in new ways, and meaningful experiences aren’t reliant anymore on that historically necessary condition: product ownership. Relationships between people and brands have gone from binary and transactional to complex, with a kind of depth once reserved for human relationships. Exhibit A of this shift is the Millennial generation, for which brand preference is the top online personal identifier—more important, in this respect, than religion and ethnicity.

We’re seeing a convergence of identities, brands, and products, and a decentralization and diffusion of the brand experience. It’s everywhere. Consumers watch unboxing videos of other people opening things. They listen to total strangers who know a lot, instead of just their friends and family, who may not. They stand in line for hours to get things first. They use brick-and-mortar stores as their personal showrooms, whether the retailers like it or not. They customize their shoes (and even their candy) online. In all these ways and more, they are interacting with products and brands without—or before—physically owning them, and often, without having paid a penny.

Many brands have embraced this to varying degrees. Consumers, they have realized, are their best marketers. They are the people best equipped to transmit the brand experience to other consumers so that it resonates, instead of being ignored, distrusted, and forgotten. These brands have taken steps to create more things worth experiencing and sharing. They move at the speed of social (or as close as they can get to it), putting out videos, tweeting, blogging, updating their Facebook pages more than a few times a day. Consumers are rewarding the good stuff by passing it along, and in doing so, they pass bits of the brand along with it. Companies and consumers are talking to each other beyond the call centers and points of sale for the first time in history. Real, authentic one-to-one and one-to-many communication is making relationships less transactional, and more like real relationships.

Suddenly, an idea that had applied mostly to commodities and luxury items applies to everyone. That idea? The experience you build around your product is often more important than the physical product itself. People are increasingly buying physical things due to the experiences they associate with them because the experiences that surround—but aren’t contingent on—product ownership are more frequent, accessible, and fulfilling. Consumers can get value, for example, out of reading Kate Spade’s excellent Behind the Curtain blog whether or not they’re shopping for or own any Kate Spade handbags.

Physical ownership no longer has a monopoly on meaningful experience. It’s an extension of that experience, the highest and best version of a brand. The act of purchase is being transformed from one of the only ways to access a product or meaningful brand experience, to the step consumers take to unlock the full or best experience.

Every brand is now in the experience business.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

So I’ve been on this stupid diet in hopes of dropping a few pounds, but after reading this infographic, I ditched it and bought myself a candy bar. All the talk about chocolate, and caramel with nuts,  really made me crave some sugar. So I’m sorry in advance if this infographic inspires you to cheat on you diet also.

Today’s infographic is actually really interesting, it gives you 10 facts about your most favorite snacks. Who would have known that Pringles aren’t potato chips?! Mind. Blown. I was also really impressed with the pop rock information. I’v always wondered how those little things worked. Enjoy today’s infographic, perhaps you can use the information to impress your friends or win your next trivia game.

Via DailyInfographic: http://dailyinfographic.com/

It seems like law enforcement officials have always had sort of a rough time of things, probably from the very beginning of the profession. Most people tend to have an automatic reaction to seeing or interacting with police, and the general reaction usually tends to fall along the lines of either fear or anger. This, of course, makes the law officer’s job far more difficult as they try to deal with people who are doing their best to either lie to the police or just outright elude them.

While these problems that face law enforcement will likely never be solved entirely, police officers now have a powerful new ally in dealing with those suspected of criminal activity: social media.

It would seem like basic knowledge (and really just common sense) that if you’re going to do something that would be considered illegal where you live, you shouldn’t post it on your Facebook page for anyone to see. It should really be that simple, logically. A staggering amount of police officers and law enforcement agencies, though, are now using social media to get pertinent information on suspected criminals, because they and their friends talk and post openly about it on social sites. Really.

Today’s infographic from PoliceOne.com outlines the growing use of social media as a tool for officers to do their jobs more efficiently. More than 70% of law enforcement departments throughout the U.S. frequently use social media as a tool, including agencies on the Federal, State, and Local levels.

For more information on the growing social media trend among our nation’s law enforcement refer to the infographic below and be sure to share your point of view in the comments. [Via]

Crowdtilt is a platform anyone can use to raise money for anything.

Sound familiar? Kickstarter shares the same crowdfunding focus. But what sets Crowdtilt apart from its better-known competitor is something that one of its cofounders, James Beshara, picked up as a microloans collection officer in South Africa: peer pressure.

Instead of advertising a fundraising objective to the world, Crowdtilt encourages users to share them within their social networks. The objectives can be more diverse than Kickstarter would allow: renting a vacation house with a group of friends, buying a birthday present for a coworker or collecting money for a self-financed production. Crowdtilt makes public who chips in and, implicitly, who doesn’t. Want to avoid being known as that guy who went on vacation with the group but never paid for the hotel? Pay up.

Microfinance is built on the same type of social collateral. Here, Beshara explains how leveraging social pressure door-to-door helped him build Crowdtilt, which powered $1 million in transactions within its first six weeks of business and was recently named Reddit’s official fundraising platform.

FAST COMPANY: What was working as a microloans collection officer in South Africa like?

JAMES BESHARA: I didn’t have any guidebook or guidelines. My orientation for being a loans collector was literally, they told me, “you’re big, you’re pale, you’ll be somewhat intimidating … so you’ll make a good loans collector.”

To give some color to what that means, it’s where you go regularly house-to-house or shanty-to-shanty in the townships right outside of Cape Town, and you are telling delinquent borrowers that they owe “X” amount back to the organization. I went to South Africa for “on the ground” experience, and that’s about as on the ground as it can get.

What did you learn there that factored into Crowdtilt?

Instead of putting up collateral, in microfinance you put up your social collateral. You put up your reputation among your family and friends. That guarantees higher repayment rates. I was fascinated by social reputational collateral surrounding groups and money. That’s where the fascination started.

How is social collateral built into Crowdtilt?

The whole model hinges on that you and your friends can see who has, and implicitly, who hasn’t paid. It creates some pure motivation to pay up quickly, and that has been pretty remarkable to see.

Kickstarter you hope that as many people as possible sees your project, and their success rate is about 40%. Our success rate is 91%. I think the biggest reason for that is that with Crowdtilt, you generally know the network that you’re funding your objective with. And since everyone knows each other, there is an amount of peer pressure to pay your amount and make something happen.

I understand the idea of social pressure helping you get a trip to Tahoe paid for, but what made you feel that was what made microfinancing successful?

My academic background has been economic development with a focus on microfinance and microinsurance. And that element of reputational collateral has been widely studied.

Have you seen it, though?

As a loans collector, in all my bag of artillery, that was my biggest motivation in getting them to pay their loans back. I would say, “the rest of your group has paid their part of the loans,” and I would list off the names: “Tibe, Simon, they’ve all paid back their part of the loan.” If one person in a group that takes out a microloan does not pay his or her portion, the whole group is banned from taking out further loans.

The groups are completely voluntary, so it’s similar to a Crowdtilt campaign and the social dynamic that it’s not random strangers that are lumped together as a group. That group comes as a unit to the bank for a loan. They organize themselves and the bank just provides the financial side of it.

With Crowdtilt, you already know the group. You bring the group to crowdtilt, and our site just facilitates financial aggregation.

I’ve heard that when you started Crowdtilt, you intended it to be a platform for charities to raise money. What happened to that?

Studying economic development, I knew the non-profit world really well. But the realization was that in the most consequential and impactful events in the last few years, socially, have taken place on Twitter and Facebook. In the Arab spring, people didn’t use social networks built for social change. They didn’t use social networks built around revolutions or social activism. They used the too their friends were already comfortable using.

If you can build a platform that they’re used to using with their network and their group for trivial things, then you can basically onboard people, get them used to this system on a bigger scale and they’ll know it exists for them to use it for socially conscious objectives as well.

We’ve already started to see it actually. Our biggest use case in terms of number of campaigns are the fun thins like a party buses, like birthdays, tailgates, fantasy football, but he largest campaigns to date have been things like raising $100,000 in five days for a private school in Florida that was going to lose their charter.

So do you feel as good about helping people raise money for the party bus as you do helping people raising money for the school?

Well, I can say that we as a company, we believe the heights of our existence are the things we do as groups. So I would say in that respect, yea, it actually is as important for us to be able to go out and have the best birthday of all time because your friends all pitch in for a party bus for your birthday. I do think actually that it’s just as important.

I know most of the world might not think that’s as important, but we kind of see all of our campaigns as collective demand for something to happen. It’s hard to say which is more important than another.

You also own a fly-fishing store?

I own a fly-fishing company with one of my best friends from high-school. We started it in college.

Every product we sell provides fresh, clean drinking water to someone in the developing world for a full year. There’s a social bent to everything I’ve done so far. The one that’s been most successful to date, Crowdtilt, doesn’t have an explicit social bent to it. It’s kind of ironic.

Image: Flickr user Bolandrotor

I have a lot to say about the future of publishing. Having published 4 books (so far) with mainstream publishing, I’ve also done my share of self-publishing, alternative publishing, and more. I believe the landscape of publishing and media making is as fascinating as it’s ever been, and that there are so many new ways to make publishing work for both authors and readers.

I’m really excited to be partnering with NetMinds in an advisory role. With bright stars like Tim Sanders (pictured here at left) and Alan Baker behind it, I know that this company has a real shot at taking on the challenges and opportunities of a whole new model for getting a book made.

The concept takes a bit of unpacking, but I’ll let you check out NetMinds for details. The press release that went out today says, “Net Minds leverages a digital networking and publishing platform to build invested teams around book projects. The company is solving the quality/autonomy problem present in book publishing. There are currently over a dozen Net Minds Select book projects in production, including works by Nolan Bushnell (Atari) and Robert Tercek (MTV and Oprah Digital).”

I forgot to ask Tim if I can talk about my other project with them, so I won’t just yet.

But What About Traditional Publishing?

I must be really clear: I don’t intend to trash traditional publishing. One of my friends is the head of business publishing at Wiley. I have a new edition of a book coming out from Que (once I get my head around a million changes), and I love my editor there. I have a new book coming out with Penguin Portfolio in a month, and I’ve appreciated working with our editor there. I’m not going to trash them. I think there’s a spot for mainstream publishing and that disruptive models like the one we’re pursuing at NetMinds will somewhat be grafted onto the traditional players at some point (if all goes well).

Group Publishing, which is the NetMinds model, is fascinating because it works on the concept that everyone has a stake in the book’s success. At NetMinds, you get a ton more of your royalties, which you then share with the team you bring together to build your book. Thus, if you have an editor, you might give her 10% of your royalties on the book. Ditto the designer, etc. So, you start with 70 or 80% of the royalties, and you dispense them as you see fit. Co-author? No problem. I think that’s part of what makes it cool. The other part is distribution.

Traditional publishers have built very long and meaningful relationships with distributors. But we all know that the landscape for book distribution has changed a great deal. Borders is gone. Barnes is still reworking their model. Books-a-Million is working on growing into some of the gaps. Hudson has a near lock on the US Airports. But there’s so much more going on. Digital publishing is huge. Bundled SKUs is huge. There’s a lot to look at. But I’m sure I’m losing some of you at this point, so I’ll shut up about the guts of it all.

Part of the Plan

In my post, Where I’m Headed, I talked about working on human business. What’s more human than group publishing? I talked about bravery. You’ll see that reflected in what I do with NetMinds. I talked about storytellers. Well, that’s self-explanatory.

Again, I’m an advisor here. They’re letting me play with the toys. But this isn’t a full time job. It’s a passion that fits well with what Human Business Works is out to promote: sustainable, relationship-minded business.

And that, as they say, is all he wrote. I’m in. Check out NetMinds

These days, we’re running fast…sometimes too fast. Our social networks keep us connected, but in some ways they’re also pulling us away from our center. Our social streams feed us information about our friends, family, events and even the latest viral videos or trends, but the currents too can overwhelm us.

In a time when multitasking is just a way of life and communication is always on, I often wonder how distorted our perspective becomes until we realize clarity is paramount to productivity. Think about it for a moment. We expect immediate responses to our texts, emails, and DMs yet we grumble at having too many messages to which we need to read and respond. We may in fact be our own worst enemy not the technology we often blame. For every message you send, it seems that in an electronic game of hot potato, two always return. Connectedness comes at a very real human cost.

As we stray away from our comfort zone, we by default discover comfort by creating a new center. But that center requires consideration now and over time to ensure that we’re not only centered, but also moving along a path that takes us in a desirable direction. Seeking balance is more important than we might realize. Finding it may prove elusive for many, but pursuing balance and tracking toward a chosen destination is essential.

I spent some time with good friend Esteban Contreras where we discussed of course the latest books and my research at Altimeter Group. But, I also took it as a moment to reflect on the balance between professional and personal aspirations. I wanted to share the conversation with you here…

Esteban Contreras: Your book Engage further established you as a thought leader. What’s the story behind that book?

Brian Solis: Believe it or not, Engage has an interesting back story behind it… one that I rarely tell.

In 2007, I published the original Social Media Manifesto online to show exactly how businesses would benefit from strategic social media initiatives. It was huge.

But my first best-selling book was actually Putting the Public Back in Public Relations with Dierdre Breakenridge. We set out to show businesses how important the role of the public would become in marketing, advertising and customer service. I was about to tackle writing the follow up to the book, but noticed something in the process of promoting the last book…brands were embracing social media in a rather anti-social manner. They were using new tools to market in old ways. It was time to show businesses that social media was about meaningful and beneficial engagement on both sides.

I brought the idea to a good friend of mine and was given the green light to immediately begin writing it. However, it was written under a different title and also featured a different cover. The book was originally called The Social Media Manifesto. At the 11th hour, I changed my mind. I wanted the book to be less about social media and more about engagement where social media became the channel for building relationships, gaining insights, and fostering loyalty and advocacy. Of course, I addressed commerce and ROI as well, but I did so in a way that aligned business objectives with customer expectations. This lead to an entirely new name, cover, and also to the inclusion of Ashton Kutcher for the book’s foreword.

Social Media Manifesto: Original cover design

Another side story about the book is that it actually exists in two unique forms. The first edition was big. It’s size and density neared text book status. That was its goal however, to become the reference manual for social strategists. When it came time to publish the book in paperback form, I was asked if I wanted to make any changes. The publisher probably had a few updates in mind, but instead I took the opportunity to completely revise the book. I cut chapters, I cut blocks of text, I rewrote sentences and I added new experiences and lessons learned. The “revised and updated” edition is now commonly referred to as Engage 2 (note, not 2.0).

EC: The End of Business As Usual, has also been a great success. Do you see yourself following up with a fourth book at this point?

Solis: You never know.

The End of Business as Usual is an important book and I will support it for years to come. It’s not a book about social media. It’s a book for business executives to see how consumer behavior is changing, how technology impacts decision making, and how the rise of connected consumerism will impact the bottom line. Executives don’t care about Facebook or Twitter or smartphones for that matter. They care about objectives and meeting or exceeding them. To engage the connected customer requires a different approach.

Businesses must become adaptive in order to survive what I call Digital Darwinism, the phenomenon where evolution of society and technology evolve faster than the ability to adapt. Businesses are and will continue to fall because they focus on optimization, efficiencies, profits, and not on innovation and transformation to compete for tomorrow’s customer. This is a message that’s more important than ever before and this book shows executives how to recognize new opportunities and lead new and lucrative business strategies from the top down.

It’s also written for new media and social strategists who are fed up with the fear and skepticism that deflates their ballooning ideas. For everyone that asks them about ROI, the answer should be, “here, read this book.”

EC: Tell us about your experience at Altimeter Group and your particular role as Principal.

Solis: My work at Altimeter Group is both rewarding and eye-opening. I often say that we cannot possibly become “gurus” or experts of any medium that evolves faster than the ability to master it. I work with business executives and social strategists to bridge the gap between business objectives and social media strategies. Once the data is collected and analyzed, once internal conversations are transcribed and dissected, you start to see opportunities to bring people, departments, and thinking together. The work then becomes about recognizing new opportunities, direction, and the change necessary to create alignment toward new directions.

The research that we do helps us capture a state of “what is” and when combined with experience and the vision of the other analysts in the firm, you can start to chart a map to what “should be.”

EC: Beyond your work at Altimeter, you continue to be an avid blogger, content producer, speaker and event organizer. What would you say is the secret to maintaining balance in life?

Solis: The strive for balance is a journey and not a destination. Balance is less like spinning plates and more like running your finger around the rim of partially filled crystal bowls with varying depths of liquids. Each singing bowl makes a unique sound and as a result, music to “one’s” ears. When we think about the spinning plate metaphor, we think about how our quest for balance affects those around us as well as our pursuit to keep everything spinning simultaneously without falling and breaking. When you think about the bowls, you make music, the music you like, by bringing together different sounds. And it’s different every time. The point is, balance is a state of what’s important to you and those around you in the moment.

The Boston Celtics know how to win. And while the team is now preparing for the next NBA season, Peter Stringer, Senior Director of Interactive Media is on the court every day. With 6.5 million fans on Facebook and 600k followers on Twitter, Peter’s work is just getting started. Serving customers in today’s hottest networks is one thing. Catering to a worldwide community of rabid sports fans requires in a series always-on digital arenas takes a different level of engagement altogether.

As part of an ongoing series that celebrates the experiences, vision, and strategy of those leading transformation, Peter shares with us how the Celtics approach social and digital strategies to compete for attention and affinity before, during and after each season.

What is the prevailing mission and purpose for the Boston Celtic’s social media strategy?

Fans have an insatiable appetite for news, information and inside access to the team, and we try to provide that across as many platforms as possible where we’ve established an audience. For the Boston Celtics, that currently means Celtics.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. If our fans are congregating on these platforms and discussing our team, we want to be the dominant voice in that conversation.

From a business standpoint, we want to learn as much about our fan base as possible, and turn those passionate fans into customers. To achieve that, we are actively collecting data from them in exchange for opportunities to win tickets, merchandise and unique Celtics experiences. We want to know where they live, what other brands they like, if they already buy tickets, etc. We have a product that our fans are incredibly passionate about, and therefore, they’re willing to make that value exchange.

What are some of the unique challenges you face as a sports franchise?

Social media and sports dovetail very nicely, so in some ways my job is actually easy. But the challenges I face are much more practical in nature. For instance, when you’ve got a massive audience like we do, you can’t afford to make a mistake. That toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube. You want to be sure that the message you send out is on brand, not only from a marketing perspective, but also from a basketball operations perspective.

I take great care in managing our social media properties to be sure that they reflect our team and brand in the right way. The Boston Celtics have a reputation built on 17 championships and 60 years of history. I don’t want to tarnish that with one poor tweet that doesn’t hit the mark or sends the wrong message. It can be tempting to try to be funny, sarcastic, or irreverent, but risk usually far outweighs the reward.

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but that’s the lens through which I see our social channels. I look at every tweet, Facebook post and Instagram photo as an official statement from the Boston Celtics. And at the end of the day, the social media channels should reflect the team’s brand as a whole, and not attempt to create it’s own identity. After all, our product is our players, head coach, and the team’s incredible legacy. So I try to channel their voices, their thoughts and their moods and deliver them to our fans.

What is the current size of the communities you manage and what has overall growth and size of your social media footprint evolved?

Facebook is obviously our biggest channel, with over 6.5 million followers. That makes us the second biggest Facebook fan page in North American team sports. We were growing by about 15-20,000 fans a day until last year’s F8, when changes to the News Feed throttled our growth dramatically. That seems to be true for most teams and brands, and our reach rate per post has been decimated by the Edge Rank revisions. Given how frequently Facebook tweaks their platform, it was bound to happen, but I think Facebook has really hurt brands in this regard. These days, only photo galleries really seem to get any penetration into News Feeds thanks to heavy sharing by fans.

We’re at about 580,000 on Twitter, and that number continues to grow. During the postseason it’s been escalating at much faster rate than normal, which is to be expected. The quotes, pictures and notes we’re tweeting are getting a lot more attention the further we progress in the NBA Playoffs.

As for Instagram, we just passed 200,000 followers today, and that growth has been driven by taking a unique, more artistic look at the team. The credit for that goes largely to our team’s creative director, Keith Sliney (@pantone356). I snap a few photos here and there from the road, or if I see something at practice that warrants sharing, but by and large, he’s the driving force behind that platform and I believe we’re the #1 or #2 sports property on the service, and among the biggest brands globally as well.

We’ve been dabbling in Pinterest this season with merchandise and photos from our Instagram feed, and that’s picked up some steam. We were also the first team to my knowledge to try running a “Pin It To Win It” contest based on Pinterest to promote our Celtics web store.

What are the expectations of fans and how are they engaged as customers and as stakeholders?

Sports fans expect scores, news and information instantaneously on their phone during every waking hour. They no longer want to surf to ESPN.com, Celtics.com or anywhere else. They just expect it to show up in their Twitter feed. And so for us, that means tweeting our news as soon as we can effectively (or realistically) break it. Running social media for a sports team is an around the clock job, because this type of news can break at any time.

The challenge here is that some of the news fans really want will never be able to come directly from the teams or leagues first. When it comes to trades, for instance, that news never breaks on a team’s official feed first, because we’re not allowed to announce anything until it’s actually official and approved by the NBA league office. By that time, players’ agents, league employees or even team executives have already leaked the story to reporters. So connected journalists have a huge edge in that regard, when it comes to breaking news first. However, we still have a massive advantage in audience size. A beat writer who covers us probably only has 10-20,000 followers, so it may take them time to get their tweet circulated. Our tweets, on the other hand, get a lot more amplification and tend to circulate quicker, especially when we have big news.

That said, we do spend a lot of time mobilizing and orchestrating our fan base. We were the first NBA team (and to my knowledge, pro sports team) to put our @Celtics twitter handle on our court, and we’ve been promoting #CelticsChat throughout our local TV broadcasts throughout the season. We curate the conversation from #CelticsChat into GameTime Live, our live stats and game-blogging application on Celtics.com that allows fans from all over the globe to follow the action and join in a conversation around the game.

But I think the biggest thing we can provide through our social channels is an inside look at the organization. For instance, last night’s Eastern Conference Finals Game 6 vs. Miami is a perfect example. I snapped a photo of a simple message on the dry erase board in our locker room that was authentic and symbolic. It said, “12:30 Flight – Pack for a Week.” The implication was simple for fans in the know; it was a message to our players that after we win Game 7 vs. Miami, we’re flying directly to Oklahoma City for the NBA Finals. It was a motivational message from the coaching staff to our players, and by sharing that picture with 200,000 fans on Instagram, and 500,000 on Twitter, we sent a message of hope to a fan base still reeling from a disappointing loss. It helped turn the page from the past to the future. It was simple, raw and powerful; the perfect combination of insider access and emotional marketing. We just shared our coaches’ marketing to our players with our fan base. It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever shared with our fan base, and I really think it struck a chord with them.

What were some of the challenges you faced to get here? What challenges do you still face?

Staffing and bandwidth remain a challenge for us. When I started with the Celtics in 2005, I was a one-man show and my job was simply managing Celtics.com, a site that had little-to-no basketball content and was simply a ticket sales driven property. Given my journalism background and existing passion for the team since childhood, once I got my feet wet, I started overhauling the site, revamping the design and emphasis into a content driven site. Then we started dabbling in video and production in the 2008 season when we won our 17th NBA championship.

In the following seasons as Twitter and Facebook emerged, to me they were obvious extrapolations of what I was already doing with Celtics.com. But every time you add a platform or distribution channel, you add additional work. We’ve yet to launch a mobile app, and part of the challenge is simply a resource issue. Professional sports teams spend millions of dollars on world class athletes, but our technology and staffing budgets aren’t anywhere near what outsiders would imagine.

How did you get buy in?

Buy-in on social wasn’t really an issue here at the Celtics; I’ve been given a lot of freedom to drive the direction of our digital and social media platforms by our CMO and Team President and they’re very much sold on the importance of social media. As our Facebook and Twitter grew to become some of the biggest of the biggest in pro sports, and the audiences wildly outgrew our email database, it became clear that these channels would evolve into a large marketing channel and that’s exactly what’s happened. I’ve certainly done some evangelism internally, and I’ve done quite a bit of speaking around the country talking about what we do as a brand in the social space, so that helps as well.

What are some of the prime metrics that you use to define success?

From a success standpoint, I keep my eyes on how many tickets we’re selling via our social channels, and database growth. I look at the number of names we acquire for our database from each promotion we run, the best of example of which would be Celtics 3-Point Play, our first-of-its-kind Facebook application. On a more granular level, I look a News Feed reach and post sharing; ‘Likes’ and comments on posts are far less important in my view. Most comments are garbage anyway, and a ‘Like’ is almost meaningless unless the numbers are well above or below the norm. Sharing is far more relevant – if someone is willing to share your content with their friends, that’s a far better indication that you’re hitting the mark.

How does strategy materialize in the organization?

We revisit strategy mostly during the offseason, because during the season, there’s not much time to be plotting this stuff out. There’s always another game or practice to cover, corporate partner to satisfy or internal fire to extinguish. But on the whole, our strategy is simple: Our fan database is at the center of everything we do, and all of our digital platforms should be geared at building our database, which in turn gets us in front of more potential customers. “Engagement” is a great buzzword for social media, and it has its place, but monetization is the leader in the clubhouse for me.

How have you organized around social media to manage an extensive and engaged network? What does the social media organization look like?

I oversee our digital marketing and social media, and have a full-time direct report who generates a most of the written content we distribute. We also have a part time video producer, a full-time video host, and another part-timer who helps out on our game nights. We’re looking to add a technical developer this summer, and may potentially add additional staff as we continue to bite off more initiatives and create more content in the digital space.

Any special practices for internal coordination?

– Social CMS?

– Style Guide?

– Best practices?

– Training?

Given how small our organization is, a lot of this stuff isn’t formalized. As we grow, we’ll need to put more processes in place. For now we’re small and agile, but we certainly aim for consistency in our approach in terms of how we deliver against our digital and social media platforms.

Any final advice, tips, or cautionary tales to leave us with as we put your experiences into action?

I think to do social media right, you have to appeal to your fans’ passion points, even if your brand isn’t something they’re are organically passionate about. The only way to do that is to understand your audience and your customers. That’s easy for the Boston Celtics to sense, but probably a lot harder for consumer brands to decipher. I would advise figuring out who they are and what they want before you formulate your strategy. That means collecting data, surveying fans, keeping up with your competitors and studying leaders in the social media space.

It’s fair to say that Millennials are the most tech-savvy adults in history. That advantage, one might think, would make them poised to become the most financially successful–if it weren’t for the fact that they entered the job market during a global recession. That doesn’t seem to faze them: If surveys are to be believed, they’re also more progressive and less materialistic (perhaps by necessity, as they’re all more debt-saddled than their predecessors).

These images, taken by the young Swedish photographer Sannah Kvist, seem to bear that out–snapshots of Millennials surrounded by all of their worldly possessions, which generally occupy no more than the corner of a room. The “All I Own” series stems from Kvist’s personal struggle with consumerism: “I had lived for 23 years when I took the photo of me and everything I owned and thought it was a sad collection of junk I’ve managed to buy,” she tells Co.Design. Similarly, the friends and acquaintances she has photographed since then have been amazed by “how much shit they actually owned.” (If you’ve moved recently, you’re probably familiar with that feeling.) “I think most people actually got an eye-opener when they built the piles.”

All of Kvist’s subjects were born in the ’80s, like herself, which, the artist says, is the most important limitation of the project. “It is the first generation, at least in Sweden, who had to grow up with worse social conditions than their parents, while the way we consume has changed radically.” Rather than investing in a permanent apartment, Kvist’s models tend to live in sublets, traveling with a few boxes (or Ikea bags) from one short-term arrangement to the next.

Age wasn’t the only requirement; nothing could be left out of the picture. “Everything should be in, but one can hide some stuff in the back,” Kvist says. The models are given carte blanche to arrange their things and give their most valued objects most prominence. “I noticed how quickly they began to ‘compose’ their stacks,” the artist continues. “Much time was devoted to fine-tuning them. They were proud of some things, less of others.” The compositions, in effect, became self-conscious expressions of each participant’s persona.

As for Kvist’s own fight against collecting junk, it may be a losing battle. “Now that I live in Gothenburg, where it’s easier to find a sublet where you can stay longer, I have increased the household goods again. I just recently bought a life-size skeleton made of PVC. I have no further comment.”