Electing a US President (in Plain English)

Common Craft strikes again. Swing thought: planners' job is to make strategic complexity as simple and succint as these guys continually do.

Fallonites ride Critical Mass Minneapolis

Last Friday, several Fallonites partook in Critical Mass Minneapolis, the Twin Cities' chapter of a nationwide bicycle awareness movement. For those unaware, Critical Mass is a group that meets in Loring Park on the last Friday of each month and consists of several hundred bikers who ride through the streets of Minneapolis. The group's founding mission is to promote bike usage as a regular means of transportation and raise awareness of how unfriendly city streets are to cyclists.

TJ, Claire, and myself took the streets of Minneapolis to experience what exactly this is like. The following is a photo storyline of our experience.

Cyclists begin to assemble at Loring Park around 5:30. Before the ride, a small civilians rights group makes a presentation about how to interact with police if they give you difficulty. (This was presented due to incidents like this which have occurred in Minneapolis.) The group also makes us write a "jail hotline" on our arm, in case we are arrested.


Claire's arm


The police arrive on bike and in squad car to escort the group. After multiple incidents, the MPD has decided to play nice. (Ironically they don't play so nice later, but that is a whooooole different story.)


TJ and Claire cruisin' Lyndale Ave.


CM heads downtown


Fallon represent!!


Post CM celebration at Preston's.


Overall great experience. I will be back on August 29 as will many others hopefully.

YouTube choose your own adventure

Online video has quickly become the most popular and mainstream form of social media participation. But as it becomes more mainstream, what ideas have surfaced to make video more interesting? Sure, sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, etc continue to spring up, but the videos themselves have remained rather one-side broadcastish.

Until now.



Choose your own adventure (nostalgic of the book series popular when I was in elementary school) utilizes the video response system in YouTube to make online video into a game of sorts. You have to go to the actual site to be able to use it, but the embed will give you an idea.

This particular adventure is about some guy trying to find his cat. I spent awhile searching and thought i had exhausted all of my options in order to find the feline. Apparently I was wrong and never found kitty. Maybe you will be more successful.

Visualization of Information: PicLens, Digg Labs and Twitter/Flickrvision

Here are three applications that allow you to search visually news, status updates, videos, pictures etc. in cool new ways.

PicLens lets you search for photos and videos in 3-D and in full screen. This web browser add-on makes it way easier to search for things with out paging through a website and its also makes it much more fun. Its like apple's coverflow to another dimension. Once you download the add-on a blue box in the upper right corner will light up when a page is viewable with PicLens.

Digg labs web applications organize all the news items on Digg visually. With Digg Stack, the stories are bar graphs that get taller given the amount of Diggs, so you can watch stories grow. Digg Swarm creates circles around stories that get bigger as they are dugg. All of these applications can be accessed online or used as a screensaver.


Twittervision and Flickrvision allow you to see what people are seeing and saying in real time around the world. Using google maps or a 3-D map this program shows you exactly where tweets and photos are coming from. It can get addicting. You can view it on a browser or download the screensaver. They also have a local version that only shows what is going on in your specific area. There is no way I know of to see only my friends on the map and have multiple tweets or photos up at a time. I imagine these programs will get cooler and developed as GPS is becoming more common in cell phones.

Agencies (re)Imagine the Stop Sign

"What if there were no stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one?"


via moneyries

Message For Future Generations

Mark Earls and Domenico Vitale have created Message For Future Generations a depository of planners' wisdom about Account Planning.

Fallon Planning Blog on Facebook

Fallon Planning Blog on Facebook, ya'll

don't stop, git it, git it
this app is still a bit *buggy*, so expect RSS feeds soonish...and "confirm" a brotha when you visit (or get my confirm email)...I can't activate the hot features til 10 peeps confirm that I'm me. Recognize.
Twitter feeds comin' soon, too, standby.

What the F**K is social media?

Found this great slide show on Blog de Nuit today. It's a very simple presentation about what social media is and what it means for brands.

For those social network connoisseurs out there, it probably won't say anything new. But I appreciate the simplicity and clarity. Reminds me a bit of the CommonCraft vids about Twitter and LinkedIN


My favorite quote from the presentation:


"Relinquish control: The goal is not to control the conversation."

| View | Upload your own

via Blog de Nuit

Virtuality: Onion Spoofs Virtuality

The Onion News Network explores the World of World of Warcraft, a game where you play a person playing a game.

'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'

Fallon Brainfood: Communicators Forum @ University of Minnesota Q2

I presented a keynote at last week's Communicators Forum at University of Minnesota and I ran over time before I could answer many of the Question Cards from the audience. Let's keep the dialogue going. Here are more answers to one of the cards (expect a few more posts in coming days):


Q: Many of the examples refer to "selling products" - can you talk about how we might translate this to "selling research"?
Great question. Ironic, too. Because I am, right now, "selling research". Or strategy. Or an odd hybrid, but I digress. My point is, thru all my social media tools, I am working to get insights out of the file cabinet, out of my notepad, out of the presentations for 6 people and never seen again, and into the hands and minds of my living clients/associates/collaborators/students, etc. In this day and age, there is so much data and research that the role of interpreter and guide is more vital than ever. Research matters not if the people who matter don't "get it". Your mission, as researcher, should be to demystify and help them "get it". So be the Virgil of your research. Social media can help you get your research "slippy" and out there and exposed and in the conversations.

How to get your research social? Dramatize your research's effects on people, show us on YouTube what the data means in an engaging way, blog about how it impacts us in ways we never expected, podcast the interviews of those at the frontlines of your research, Delicious your article links to parallel paths of other thinkers in your field. Slideshare your latest thinking, and Flicker the latest charts and graphs. Get it out of the research journals and into the spheres of influence, your peers, your bosses, your financiers, the press, whoevs and wherevs, get the research socialized, man!

The old school approach to research? A mysterious cabal sequesters themselves away and test and think, then come down off the mountain with tablets of new gospel. Well, the new way is

-Open share - you don't own an idea if you insist on hiding it, you own an idea by sharing it. Throughout the research process, tease us with drafts and sketches and updates.
-Open source - in college, collaboration on a test or paper is called "cheating"...but collaboration is the only way to solve problems faster and smarter in this age. Start cheating, and letting others cheat off you which requires
-Open code, make your info stealable, thus it is desirable, thus it is shareable, thus it gets spreadable. Give up a few secrets (charts, graphs, insights, interviews) and let others work on the equation with you and pay you back. Oh, and steal from others, too (just give credit so that person may own their contribution).

Some quickie sites that come to mind for me (while not knowing what form of research you specialize in) of making research engaging and slippy:
http://blog.compete.com/
http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html
http://twistori.com/
http://www.heynielsen.com/
http://www.trendrr.com/home