Open up your mind and say, ahh...

I often share my thoughts to help global brands and enterprise organizations. But with this article, I would like to talk to the broader group of business professionals without reference to the size and shape of your company. Here and in many other media outlets, networks, and blogs around the web, social media is one of the most prevalent subjects in business today. While advice is everywhere, advice is becoming a commodity. Insight however, is precious.

Let’s take this time together to share with you my thoughts on some of the most often asked questions and how your role in finding the right answers and putting them into action is more important than you may think.

While you may read success story after success story, we cannot make any great assumptions in how they’ll impact your work.

There is a great myth that a winning formula exists for success in social media; that if you deconstruct the most popular case studies, you’ll find a winning recipe for your social media strategy.

It’s easy to get caught up in the creative examples we read about. Many times however, they feed the very impressions that can work against you.

- If we can introduce the right viral content we can get more views or friends.

- If we can maintain a rhythmic editorial calendar we can spark conversations that create a social effect.

- If we can develop the most amazing app, we can rise to the top of our customer’s attention span!

- And, my personal favorite, if we get our company in social networks, we can build better relationships with our customers.

Rather than seeking shortcuts, we should see these examples as inspiration. In the end however, we each have our own question we need to answer…what do successful relationships and experiences look like in social media for our customers?

The formula for success in social media begins with first defining what success is and how it will be measured. This is one of the most important steps in any social media strategy, yet it is the first step that many businesses miss. The truth is that there is no formula for success. It requires something special for each strategy and it’s dependent on the people you’re trying to reach, their expectations, your business objectives and how this engagement ties specifically to your organization (sales, marketing, service, products, etc.)

To help, let’s put social media strategy into an approachable framework. Begin by organizing the most important themes to form what I refer to as The 5 Pillars of Social Media Strategy. This will contribute to a meaningful social media presence as long as you revisit this approach through every step of the strategy process.

1. Listen, Search, Walk a “Daily in the Life” of your customers.

Research is critical in understanding how your connected consumer makes decisions, how they’re influenced and where they engage and learn. This is the dynamic customer journey. Here, you’ll learn that your social customers are not at all like the traditional customers you know. Please note that they’re still important, but a new approach is required to expand your reach. Essentially here you discover new touch points and decision-making cycles. You’ll learn that this isn’t just about social media at all. In fact you’ll see how social, mobile, digital and other traditional channels need to work together to guide a complementary, integrated and converged journey. Think of it as customer journey optimization (CJO) or customer journey management (CJM).

2: Rethink your Vision, Mission, and Purpose.

When’s the last time you read your company’s vision or mission statements? Did it or does it speak to you? Would you Tweet it? Take this time to redesign customer experiences and articulate your vision for how you will use social media to improve customer experiences now and over time.

3. Define Your Brand Persona

Take some time to answer the following questions…What do you want people to see and appreciate? What do you want customers to hear, see, think and feel? Who are they engaging with? What do you stand for? Defining your brand persona will humanize engagement and make takeaway impressions and value consistent across every network and in every scenario.

4. Develop a Social Business Strategy.

Make your presence matter. This isn’t just about concepting the next Facebook Like or Twitter Retweet campaign. Based on the first 3 steps, develop a business-level strategy that meets the needs and expectations of your connected customers. As you’ll learn in step 1, new touch points emerge. If you are not part of the awareness stage of the decision making cycle, you will not benefit from consideration nor a decision in your favor. They key is to also tie social media back to key business objectives while investing in the necessary roles to engage customers at the functional level (service/support, sales, marketing, collaboration/innovation, etc.)

5. Build and Invest in Your Community.

Don’t just think about social media as an editorial or marketing program. That’s just table stakes.  In fact, don’t just limit this to social media at all. This is a chance to rethink the entire engagement strategy and the customer journey. Ultimately, you’re setting the stage for something more meaningful and substantive…the experience. Community isn’t defined by Likes or followers. Those are essentially “in the moment” actions. We’re talking about human beings. Community is much more than belonging to something; it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter. Participate in the communities that you host and also the communities that host the conversations that are important to your business. That’s the secret to earning a lasting affinity the contributes to you becoming a trusted resource.

By repeating steps one through five over time will help you achieve empathy, which will inspire meaningful strategies to earn relevance. I often think of my good friend Chris Heuer’s words, “There is no box!” In the face of something, something that moves and adapts so quickly, we can only be students to learn and figure out what others take for granted. It’s important to remember is that in social media, mobile, and in the face of innovation, there is no box to think outside of. In fact, there is no box. There is only a blank slate and a series of unanswered questions that separate you from your connected customers. Seek inspiration from the examples of others, but use The 5 Pillars of Social Media Strategy to learn how to reach, engage, and enchant your connected customers now and in the future.

Originally published in AT&T’s Networking Exchange

The U.S. government, automakers and safety institutions have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into getting cars talking to each other through an ad hoc Wi-Fi network. It’s a large piece of a puzzle that could nearly eliminate car crashes, but an initiative from the FCC could put it in jeopardy.

The FCC recently announced plans to open up previously restricted frequency spectra to general Wi-Fi use, although it was originally set aside for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, along with use by government entities such as the FAA. The Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) is concerned that the federal agency is setting up a collision between competing interests.

The FCC is acting in part because of pressure from the Obama administration to open up more of the air waves for data-hungry devices. In 2010 President Obama signed a memorandum designed to increase the sharing of airwaves to alleviate a shortage of frequencies, due in part to the public’s increased appetite for Wi-Fi. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January his agency’s plan to clear 195 MHz of spectrum in the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi use.

“As this spectrum comes on line, we expect it to relieve congested Wi-Fi networks at major hubs like convention centers and airports,” Genachowski said in e-mailed remarks in preparation for an FCC meeting on the proposal on February 20.

But the frequencies the FCC wants to open to new Wi-Fi applications overlap with the 5.9 GHz band set aside for future V2V communication.

ITS America recently sent a letter to the FCC signed by automakers and others, including the AAA and state DOT officials, warning the FCC that the new Wi-Fi networks could interfere with wireless communication between connected cars. The brewing spectrum battle brings to mind the tragic tale of LightSquared. The star-crossed company had ambitious plans to build a large-scale wireless broadband network that was initially approved by the FCC. But later the agency ruled that LightSquared’s plans would interfere with GPS transmissions, and that the airwaves weren’t big enough for both technologies.

“We don’t oppose spectrum sharing,” ITS America president and CEO Scott Belcher told Wired. “There is a shortage in this country. Our position is, between the private and public sectors, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in connected vehicles.” A decade ago ITS America successfully petitioned the FCC to set aside this spectrum, Belcher added. “Opening the spectrum to unlicensed usage is a change,” he says. “We’re at a point where connected cars are finally about to become real.”

ITS America has another federal agency on its side: the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. NHTSA along with ITS America, automakers and others are currently conducting a connected car field trial in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan that involves 3,000 vehicles. The goal of the test is to see how vehicles communicate with each other and traffic infrastructure to share information such as speed and location to reduce collisions by warning drivers of road hazards and dangerous highway conditions. Based on the results of the field trial, NHTSA will decide by the end of this year whether to mandate the V2V technology in new cars and implement it in the years to come.

“We’re talking about technology that can help reduce non-impaired vehicles crashes by over 80 percent Belcher contends. “That’s bigger than safety belts, bigger than electronic stability control and bigger than airbags. Do you really want to put that kind of safety at risk for unlicensed Wi-Fi applications? The answer has to be no.”

But there are ways to share spectrum, and enough time to figure out how to do it, according Egil Juliussen, an analyst with IHS Automotive. He acknowledges that tests need to be conducted to determine that the frequencies are not close enough to cause interference. “There needs to be a guard band between them, an adjacent frequency that’s not used,” he adds. Julissen also says that he doesn’t expect connected cars to hit the road until until around 2019. “So there’s time to test it,” he says. “There’ll be a way to make this work; they’ll find a solution.” But he adds that an unfavorable FCC ruling has the potential to squash hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into a promising technology. Just ask LightSquared.

“U.S. DOT is aware of the FCC’s proposed action to open up the 5 GHz wireless spectrum band,” NHTSA told Wired in a statement. ”Our connected vehicle research is ongoing and we look forward to working with our federal partners, including the National Telecommunications and Information Administration NTIA and the FCC, to evaluate the impact of spectrum sharing on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.”

The FCC did not respond to our request for comment.

At its meeting on February 20 the agency decided to move ahead with its spectrum sharing plan for the 5 GHz band. But it too will take awhile since the FCC will be collecting comments before proceeding with rule making, and it could take at least a year or more for NTIA to sort out potential interference issues. And while opening up the spectrum could eventually mean faster Wi-Fi, it may also mean you’ll need a new router in addition to being a speed bump on the road to the connected car.

“The last thing the V2V initiative needs is a cloud being cast from potential interference from unlicensed use of the same spectrum,” Roger Lanctot, an automotive electronics analyst with Strategy Analytics, says. “The NHTSA-driven effort is already up against automakers’ resistance to adding cost and weight and the even bigger barrier of chicken-and egg-deployment – along with the lack of a business model.”

How often has some version of this story happened:

A group of young, eager innovators come together to develop a new, promising approach to one of today’s “wicked problems” in an area like climate change, poverty alleviation, food security, or off-grid energy.

With a mix of design and engineering prowess, good intentions and no small amount of luck, they develop a laudable prototype. This wins them breathless media attention, speaking invitations to conferences and perhaps a prize or two, followed by sufficient seed capital for a pilot.

The pilot shows promise; after the intervention, the relevant critical indicator (which might be a measure of market access, public health, etc.) shows marked improvement. On the strength of this happy outcome, more capital is raised. The intervention moves out of the pilot stage and is rolled out to the community. The press is breathless. Hopes are high.

And then, much to everyone’s chagrin: almost nothing changes. The new social innovation barely makes a dent in the problem, which appears more pernicious than ever.

What happened?

If you recognize elements of this story (or if you wince in self-recognition) you are not alone. This is the common fate of most social innovations, and it’s the field’s dirty little secret: many of the most promising new approaches to tough problems fail, in ways that surprise and frustrate their creators, funders, and constituents alike.

Wicked problems have earned that moniker for a reason.

The reasons behind such failures are complex. The most common culprit is a kind of cultural blindness on the part of would-be change agents, who fail to design “with, not for” the communities they serve, and end up trying to impose a solution from without, rather than encourage its adoption from within. More generally, it’s important to remember that wicked problems have earned that moniker for a reason–they are generally immune to “elegant hacks” and quick fixes that can be a hallmark of other endeavors, such as software development.

But there are other, deeper reasons why social innovations unexpectedly fail. They involve the many ways we unintentionally mismeasure the impact we’re having, and fool ourselves that a social intervention is working when it really isn’t.

The most common pitfall we encounter in measuring the impact a social innovation is failing to establish a control group. Without assessing a matched cohort that is not receiving an intervention, it is impossible to know what precise effect a social innovation is having.

We unintentionally mismeasure the impact we’re having, and fool ourselves that a social intervention is working.

For example, let’s say you develop an innovative literacy-improving program for children. You test a community of low-literacy subjects, then provide the intervention, and test them again. Their measured rates of literacy jump dramatically. Time to pop the champagne corks, right?

Wait a moment. Why exactly did rates of literacy improve? Was it your program? Or was it a natural byproduct of the maturation of the subjects? (Between the first and second tests, the children you tested got older–their independent cognitive development may account for the increase.) Or was it a practice effect of the test? After all, we tend to do better on tasks we’ve tried before. It might be the case that subjects simply got better because they’d seen this kind of test before.

Then again, perhaps we have run into a regression effect. These require a bit of additional explanation.

Many phenomena, like the temperature in a given month, or your bowling score, will cluster around an average. On some days, it may be moderately higher, on others moderately lower. But on average, these indicators will cluster around a central number, a “mean.”

Now, let’s imagine we take a group of subjects and give them a test, such as the baseline literacy test mentioned above. As with the examples above, most will score close to the mean, while a few will be outliers, scoring dramatically higher or lower. Given the same test again, with no additional intervention, its likely that the subjects who were outliers in the first test will “migrate” closer to the mean, while some that were at the mean in the first test will “migrate” to the extreme high or low of the range in the second. This is a purely natural statistical artifact.

Placebo effects happen in social interventions just as they do in medicine.

Now let’s temporarily assume, for the sake of argument, that the hypothetical literacy program we devised had an astonishing 0% effectiveness. We measure the baseline of the population; then we deliver this (useless) intervention; and then measure again, paying careful attention to those who did the worst on the first test. Amazingly, many will show marked improvement, “migrating” to the middle of the pack, though for reasons that have nothing to do with our literacy program.

Even controlling for regression effects, there may be other phantoms lurking in our measurement. Placebo effects happen in social interventions just as they do in medicine. Some people who believe they’ve received an effective intervention may do better whether the intervention is actually effective or not.

Much more common, particularly in measuring social innovation initiatives is the problem of selective dropout. This occurs when the “users” of a particular intervention find it either too easy or too difficult, and stop participating. When that happens, the results of any subsequent analysis can be markedly skewed. Perhaps its true that the average literacy rates of a particular classroom of students improved by 20% after the administration of our program, but it’s meaningless if 20% of the students found it too difficult and left the class altogether.

The inverse problem–a form of priming–is particularly common in social innovation and makes measurement difficult. This occurs when the measurement of an intervention suggest–often subconsciously–what the “right” answers should be.

Finally, there are compensation effects that can occur when we change a social system. When we make cars safer, people may drive more dangerously, precisely because we made driving less dangerous. When we make cookstoves more efficient (and therefore more healthy and less polluting to use) people may use them more, offsetting the benefits of the efficiency.

All of these biases–sample maturation, practice effects, regression artifacts, placebo and compensation effects, and countless others–can dramatically distort the perceived success of a particular intervention, often making it look much more effective than it actually is.

Does this mean we should just throw in the towel? Hardly. Social science and fields like medical research are replete with tools for designing effective impact measurement. Data scientists and information economists in particular are beginning to pair with social innovators to understand the dynamics of interventions, and separate what works from what doesn’t. Technologists are uncovering new ways to aggregate core impact data and make it open. Yet this work has little bearing on the kind of impact statements demanded by many funders today.

What we need now is a revolution in both the practice and culture of social innovation, one that recognizes that meaningful measurement is every bit as essential–and artful–as the interventions themselves, and bakes it in as a core component of the work. Otherwise, we may very well be wasting everyone’s time.

El Anatsui, the artist behind more than 30 works at Brooklyn Museum this month, will knock the wind out of you. There are two ways in which this will happen; you’ll be stunned either by the shimmering, monumental beauty of the work or the weighty historical narrative that blasts through Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui. Or both.

Anatsui–who is Ghana-born but Nigeria-based–is that rare kind of artist whose work is both beautiful and critical, ornate and intellectual. He is best known for his hanging sculptures made out of bottle and can tops he collects from around Nsukka, pieced and patched together by a group of workers in his local studio. These are “non-fixed forms,” meaning that the jingly aluminum sheets are transported to the gallery in a suitcase and hung according to the whims of the curator. Each time a piece is shown, it looks different, folds in novel ways, and reflects thousands of light points in new ways. “I don’t believe in artworks being things that are fixed,” Anatsui says. “You know, the artist is not a dictator.”

After building a successful career based on appropriating local Kente cloth symbology (and, for a time, sculpting with a chainsaw), Anatsui started collecting liquor bottle caps in the 1980s. The caps–which come from local Nigerian distilleries–offered him what The New York Times calls “a locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded” material. Rum, you see, is a by-product of the slave trade. The triangle of trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and the colonial powers went like this: Europeans bartered for slaves using manufactured goods. Then, the slaves would be sent to the New World in exchange for sugar (and other raw goods). In the Americas, the sugar was turned into rum, which went back to Europe to fund another round of the cycle. Soon, distilleries popped up along the Gold Coast, including Nigeria.

Colonialism asserts itself in subtle and obvious ways, both in the names of the liquor brands (Dark Sailor, Chelsea) and in the titles of the works themselves. In Drifting Continents (2009), eight luminant, gold textiles hang on the gallery wall, connected by a single continuous thread of colorful tops. Other works address problems within Nigeria and Africa itself, like the towering Waste Paper Bags, a standing sculpture made from discarded commercial printing plates. As the curators point out, the plates look a lot like a loaded symbol of Nigerian-Ghanian conflict. “The forms resemble large woven bags that became known as ‘Ghana-must-go’ bags in the early 1980s, when Nigerians hostile toward Ghanaian refugees who had fled political and economic unrest suggested they pack their belongings in such sacks and return home,” they explain.

Anatsui’s work reverberates off of works from African-American artists in Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection, creating feedback loops between American and African experiences of postcolonial identity. The museum owns several Basquiat paintings, and though their life experiences couldn’t be more different, it’s hard not to think of them while wandering through the show–Basquiat and Anatsui tread the same thematic ground. The triangle trade is something Basquiat obsessed over, repeating words like “gold,” “sugar,” and “rum” again and again in his paintings. Anatsui’s tone–his rich, rococo wall hangings–is completely at odds with Basquiat’s. But you get the sense that they’re grappling with the same thing, these ghosts that take the form of consumer goods like liquor bottles and sugar bags.

Check out Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui until August 4.

A hack of our 43rd president’s email account this week netted not state secrets or major scandals–but it did reveal three paintings. We already knew that George W. was an aspiring painter, but until yesterday, none of his work had been publicized (except for a portrait of his recently deceased first dog, Barney). The three grainy shots of his handiwork were released by an anonymous hacker, alongside photos of George H. Bush, Ralph Lauren, and Bill Clinton.

It’s very easy to mock these paintings given their context. And plenty of people already have. Dubya is an easy target for reasons entirely outside of his skill or ambition as an artist. And certainly, when I first saw them, I laughed along with the rest of the Internet. But the more I look at them, the more interesting they become.

The two paintings, which seem as though they were painted in acrylic, show Bush in the shower and bathtub. In one we see his toes sticking out of the murky water as the faucet runs. The former is more interesting: It shows us Bush’s back as he faces the shower, while a reflection of his face stares from a hanging shower mirror. It’s a startling effect, and it immediately made me think of Jan van Eyck’s 1434 Arnolfini Portrait, which shows a posing couple reflected in a nearby mirror. I’m not arguing that Bush’s work is on a par with the 15th-century Flemish genius, but he is using a mirror in the same way van Eyck did–to point out his presence and reject the gaze of the viewer at the same time. There’s also something of David Hockney here, in the luxury bathroom trappings and the gridded tile background.

Write off the other leaked works as crude acts of stress relief if you will, but these two paintings are fascinatingly blunt. We’re seeing a man who’s thinking about his image, his role in public life, and his legacy. Wonderful New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz explains:

I love these two bather paintings. They are “simple” and “awkward,” but in wonderful, unself-conscious, intense ways. They show someone doing the best he can with almost no natural gifts–except the desire to do this. The reclusion and seclusiveness of the pictures evoke the quietude (though not the insight, quality, or genius) of certain Chardin still lifes. These are pictures of someone dissembling without knowing it, unprotected and on display, but split between the promptings of his own inner drives and limited by his abilities. They reflect the pleasures of disinterestedness. A floater. Inert. The images of a man who saw the entire world from the inside but who finds the smallest, most private place in a private home to imagine his universe. Of almost nothingness. Sweet, sublime, oblique oblivion. The visibility of invisibleness.

Read that as deep satire or sincerity, as you see fit. Either way, there’s some truth in it: these paintings put us in Bush’s shoes (had he been wearing any), and force us to look at life from the perspective of a former president who’s currently wildly unpopular. It’s uncomfortable–and isn’t that what good art is all about?

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?

Hooray! I get to post a completely pro-Google infographic! If you don’t know, I love Google and hate Apple, mainly because of Apple’s uncanny ability to milk every last penny out of their customer base. Google, once again, has produced one of the greatest mobile apps, for completely free.

Google Music is a free music cloud storage and streaming solution. When I first heard of Google Music, I could not believe it. Free streaming of my entire 15,000+ song library? I’m there. Not only that, Google Music’s app works 99% of the time, even with slow internet.

Now I’m not going to say that my Google Music app will be obsolete soon, but it will. I’m sure I’ll be making the switch to Spotify Mobile shortly. Not because I don’t like my Google, but when entertaining as many new musical artists as I do, all the downloading and record storing takes up too much time. I’m getting older now and I don’t have time to hipster out on obscure music blogs all day. I need a service that can do some of the work for me with similar artist functions and app capabilities. I’m sorry to all you online music stores, instant music streaming is the only option for the future. Now I just can’t wait until Google comes out with a free version of Spotify Mobile.

You know the profile well. That lippy underbite. Those downturned jowls. But recreating the contours of director Alfred Hitchcock’s face on screen for the movie Hitchcock involved months of trial and error — and some hurt feelings along the way.

“We did six different versions,” says makeup artist Howard Berger, who began by laboriously crafting a near-exact replica of Hitchcock on the head of actor Anthony Hopkins. “The first one looked like Hitchcock, but it was super heavy.”

More than six weeks out from shooting the movie, camera tests were conducted and screened for the producers. “People were harsh,” recalls Berger. “Producers nitpicked my work and, at first, I was offended.” But Berger, a seasoned pro who has been doing makeup for movies since 1985, heeded the wise advice of his wife. “She said, ‘Why are you offended? Wouldn’t you rather have this happen now than first day on set?’”

His resolve was firm, at last: “We’re all working towards the same goal.” Still, he goes on, “Getting everybody to agree that we were going down the right path was the hardest part.”

That’s about the time when it became clear what everyone involved in this loving tribute to the work of Hitchcock absolutely didn’t want. They didn’t want Hopkins to end up looking anything like Leonardo DiCaprio did in J. Edgar, the 2011 biopic that has become an object lesson in how to overdo prosthetics and get in the way of a fine actor’s performance.

“They’re incredibly talented,” Berger says, defending that film’s makeup artists. He explains that their work is the inevitable result of the often painful interference of a committee of executives who often oversee the creation of a movie, especially one at a studio J.Edgar was produced by Warner Bros..

“We had to do prosthetics,” Berger explains. Not every movie takes that route; see Lois Burwell’s prosthetics-free transformation of Daniel Day-Lewis into Abraham Lincoln. “We knew we had to do appliances. But as we felt more comfortable we removed aspects.” In subsequent tests, Berger pulled back, leading to a less-is-more approximation of Hitch. Smaller nose, smaller ears. They lost the dentures that had reshaped Hopkins’ jawline. There had also been a strong center brow line Berger had created, “but it only made more problems for Tony” — that’s Anthony to you and me — “limiting his performance.”

What had begun as an exacting likeness had become what Berger aptly deems “a portrait of Anthony as Hitchcock,” which gets at the essence of the character rather than duplicating the real man. “We wanted to create a transformation, a combination of the two,” says Berger. “There’s a good mix there.” And not a moment too soon: In the final makeup test — the night before production began — he abandoned the lip: “Tony decided to push out his lip into a pout.”

Berger sings Hopkins’ praises, not just as a person (“He’s such a sweet man, with a wicked, wicked sense of humor”) but as a canvas for his makeup (“He was very, very still. Some actors are like moving targets; you end up constantly chasing them”).

Doing makeup for movies was a childhood dream for Berger. He grew up in Los Angeles, so he was well aware of the career possibilities. “At 8, I said, ‘I’m going to be a makeup artist.’” As a teenager he started “stalking my idols.” He skipped college and started working on movies as he finished high school.

He started out doing horror, working on Day of the Dead, followed by Night of the Creeps. “That’s what makeup guys did in the 80s and 90s,” says Berger, who was eventually able to diversify, thanks to Kevin Costner, who came calling for Dances with Wolves. “He figured if we can do bloody people we can handle bloody buffalo.”

“We” are Berger and his partner Greg Nicotero. Together they formed KNB EFX Group. Both are credited with work on The Walking Dead and Hitchcock, but in recent years Berger has let Greg take over the gory stuff while he’s stuck to fantasy and reality. “I don’t like it,” he says of blood and guts. “I don’t like having it on me, I don’t like the sticky feeling. Whereas Greg wears it like war paint.”

Berger realized there was more to life than blood and guts when he got to work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which came out in 2005. “I said, ‘I’m done wrangling fake bodies and dragging them around.’ I like the fantasy world, creating characters and creatures, and running giant makeup crews.” Projects like next year’s Oz: The Great and Powerful, Sam Raimi’s reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, coming out in March 2013, have placed Berger solidly in the world of fantasy.

It’s a world he’s thrilled to inhabit as it brings him back to what first captured his imagination as a child: monster movies like Planet of the Apes. No blood, no guts. Just good, old-fashioned movie magic.

Images: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Ezra Stoller was an architecture student at New York University when he bought his first camera, sometime in the late 1930s. But that purchase marked a significant shift in the trajectory of his career. Over the course of the next several decades, Stoller would become known for photographing buildings, not designing them. His shots of modern masterpieces like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Guggenheim Museum often helped those structures attain their iconic status. Now, his work is being collected in a new book, Ezra Stoller: Photographer, that includes many of those famous photographs as well as much of his lesser-known work.

Stoller was a meticulous photographer. According to Nina Rappaport, a professor of architecture and the editor of the new book, it was common to see Stoller “exploring every angle, spending a day on site to understand the passage of the sun on the building.” Of course, with a career that coincided with the golden age of modern architecture, Stoller had plenty of good subjects to shoot. But he had a way of composing and framing shots, Rappaport says, that brought out the formal and structural qualities of those buildings.

“He was an artist,” she contends, “but never considered himself as one.”

In the preface to the book, Erica Stoller, Ezra’s daughter, offers an anecdote that transpired when he was shooting Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, illustrating the photographer’s exacting eye:

I recall hearing about a problem at the Salk and his fearing that the equipment had been damaged; even with the tilts and shifts of the view camera, he couldn’t get the lines straight. Finally, he realized that the camera was okay–it was the building that was the problem. In construction, some of the concrete pours had bellied, creating vertical lines that were not exactly straight.

While Stoller’s architectural photography has proven to be his most enduring work, Rappaport points out that his oeuvre is a bit more diverse. In addition to photographing interiors for publications like Ladies’ Home Journal, he also had a great deal of personal interest in industrial subjects, shooting factories, machines, and equipment “in a time of a postwar optimism, focusing on the idea of production and progress,” Rappaport explains.

The new book, published by Yale University Press, is the first complete survey of Stoller’s career, during which he took nearly 50,000 photographs. It’s currently on Amazon for just over $40.

For the founder of a company as hot as Pinterest, Ben Silbermann has been awfully quiet of late. After claiming the title of fastest-growing web site ever (according to Comscore, at least), wowing audiences at the South By Southwest Interactive conference, and bagging a cool $100 million in venture capital from the Japanese retail giant Rakuten, Silbermann went off the grid this summer to address what has been in the eyes of many a rare shortcoming: The lack of apps. Despite Pinterest’s exploding web traffic, the three-year-old company has not had a presence on either the iPad or Android platforms.

“Pinterest was made for tablets,” Silbermann confided to me last month. He agreed to temporarily lift Pinterest’s summer-long lockdown to give Fast Company an inside look at its development process. (It was the first time he’d spoken with a reporter at length; the results will be published next month in a cover story as part of October’s Design Issue.) During a visit to the company’s new headquarters, an expansive loft in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, I sat in on a design critique for the new iPad app and got to play with an early version, which Silbermann unveiled at a launch party last night.

Sharp, on the left, and Silbermann Pinterest calls this their biggest launch since the grid design was unveiled, in 2009.

Reporters and some of Pinterest’s most active users were treated to a make-your-own terrarium station (terrariums being a popular Pinterest meme), as Silbermann showed off the new iPad app as well as a new app for Android devices and an updated version of the Pinterest’s iPhone app. It was the biggest, Silbermann told me, the most important launch since he and co-founder Evan Sharp created the original Pinterest grid at the end of 2009. “In perfect world we would have had this a year ago,” says Sharp.

Though the update to the iPhone app and the new Android offering give Pinterest an improved presences on mobile phones, the big news is the iPad app. Even before last night’s launch, iPad use accounted for more than 50 percent of Pinterest’s mobile traffic—despite the fact that the company had no app—according to data from AddThis. More than that, iPads, which tend to be used in more relaxed settings, seem perfectly attuned to the laid-back user experience Silbermann and Sharp are trying to cultivate. “You want to be comfortable and just let yourself really explore things,” says Silbermann. “Pinterest is a discovery experience.”

The iPad app largely mimics the look and feel of Silbermann and Sharp’s popular website. Users can share, or “pin,” images and can explore the pin boards of users they follow. But crucially, the new app uses a feature called “sheets” designed to make it easier to skip between pin boards in a manner similar to tabs on a web browser. Another nifty tweak: A button that allows users to see all the pins from a given web site. The idea behind both features is to subtly encourage users to find new people to follow, and ultimately, to create a way for users to easily discover new stuff without going to a Google search box, the Amazon.com homepage, or anywhere else.

That’s important to Pinterest as a business. As Silbermann told me repeatedly—and as the forthcoming Fast Company feature will explore in depth—Pinterest isn’t trying to be just another social network. Silbermann and Sharpe are trying to solve the problem of discovery, helping their millions of users find (and eventually buy) new things. “We want to build a service that helps you discover things you didn’t know you wanted,” Silbermann says. “There’s a ton of opportunity in that core behavior.”

Top image: Africa Studio/Shutterstock