Posts by Janneane Blevins

Over the past year and a half, KA+A has been in league with Indiana's leading minds in the local agriculture and culinary worlds to bring back a revitalized Taste of Indiana, Dig-IN. (Read more about our re-branding process here.)

Set to premiere this August 29th, Dig-IN will take place at the White River State Park, featuring a rockstar lineup of Chefs (Neal Brown, Chris Eley, Greg Hardesty, Regina Mehallick, Eli Anderson, Scott Wise and many more) who are paired up with local producers to masterfully create an all-local dish. In addition, there will be over 20 local wineries and breweries brought together for you by the Indiana Wine Grape Council and Brewers of Indiana Guild. All…

Dividing up elephantine-sized projects is something I totally dig, and it's always the result that is the most stunning. So when I stumble across a new company or platform that is bringing forward this type of solution through crowdsourcing, I get pretty excited, particularly when it benefits the non-profit sector (easily crushed by large tasks that they lack the resources to address). By divvying up a daunting task, responsibility, or problem into micro pieces, not only is the cost and workload distributed, but also the good effects. Here are a couple of cool companies that I'm following:

The Extraordinaries
The Extraordinaries, a micro-volunteer network offers a platform to connect non-profits with skilled professionals. Non-profits submit requests…

For years now, KA+A has been using 37Signals’s Basecamp product to manage our projects and improve collaboration with our clients. On several occasions a colleague or client has even asked me to share how we’ve successfully implemented Basecamp, and how it might work for them. Which is why today, I want to share with you a great tool I've found to improve the way we use Basecamp.

With the advent of a particularly complex project, I began to have my doubts that Basecamp could handle it. The need for Gantt charts was especially desired, so that I could get a good handle on where each task was taking place in time and space. Fortunately Basecamp has a large following, so there’s a plethora of third party companies offering integrations…

There are many uses for Twitter - connecting with people, sharing status updates, promoting events, sharing content, generating support, finding employment - but one of my favorite uses of Twitter is to tell a story. Twitter can be used to engage your audience in your brand, and create a participatory entertainment environment in the service of your brand. Twittering Mad Men, Helen Klein Ross of Brand Fiction Factory (@BettyDraper @AdBroad)
 and Michael Bissell of Conquent (@Roger_Sterling @Bissell) refer to this as Brand Fiction. Read on to learn how they brought the AMC show Mad Men to life in the world of Twitter (earning them a Shorty Award), by employing Brand Fiction. …

This year, I took particular interest in a panel that focused on news & media, and the "Future of Context". At the 2009 SXSWi, much of the conversation was centered around the demise of journalism and whether or not the news industry would survive. I enjoyed the progression into this 2010 conversation about the news and identifying that by providing better context, the news industry may indeed survive. I look forward to the upcoming years of SXSWi and discovering what solutions have been developed to make the news a richer and more informative experience.

Overview
Conventional wisdom calls us attention-deprived, constantly seeking the next scrap of info. But Google reveals our true desire: Context. (Wikipedia entries, This American Life's financial crisis explainer, Gizmodo's definitive guide to smartphones, etc.) An exploration of how…

Whether a client or a designer, many of us have been through a not so ideal web site design situation, resulting in a frankenstein web site no one likes, and an uncomfortable void of silence. We know how it got that way - but how we can we prevent it from happening again?

Paul Boag of Headscape presented some best practices that keeps his team moving through these projects, and ultimately achieving satisfaction for both the client and the designers.

What's his secret? Collaboration not confrontation.

1. Ensure everyone understands their role in the project.
The client's job is to find the problems and the designer's job is to find the solutions. If this breaks down, because the client is presenting solutions (i.e. make the logo bigger), then ask them "why"…

I have long admired the BBC program World Have Your Say (WHYS), hosted on WFYI(NPR) in the afternoons. The conversation they can pull together on the fly, with real people discussing the latest topics, is remarkable. If you aren't familiar with the program, the show airs a live conversation that weaves guest callers with real time bloggers' comments, tweets, texts, Facebook posts, and emails.

It's a social marketer's dream, the way they can incorporate all of these mediums into a succinct show. It's accessible, fresh, and leaves you with the closest estimation to truth by providing you with so many points of view.

What's most unique is how dependent the show's content is on the listeners…

During a recent trip to Europe (London, Paris, Florence), I often found myself flummoxed by the inability to make simple consumer decisions - what to buy, where to eat, where to shop. Obviously the "foreign" factor was there, but I was acutely aware that in this sea of new brands, I felt off kilter because I had no conception of their value.

Sure, there were the American giants present - McDonald's and Starbucks. And international fashion stars Chanel, Dior, Prada, YSL, etc., had no problem catching my eye. It was the other 90% (that I could afford) that left me clueless.

Complicating it further was my desire to experience Europe as a local -…

Over the past weekend, I went to a few local shows. It's interesting to see what separates the good bands from the great. The good typically have nailed the melodies and lyrics, but the execution suffers. The lead guitar is loud, the bass is loud, the drums are loud, the vocals are loud. Everything loud doesn't make it better. Rather it's the subtleties of volume and scaling back the supportive harmonies that makes an impact and great bands. Audiences can identify the emotion and story line of the music when the band uses loud and soft, complex and simple, instead of just maxing out every detail.

During the work week I see a similar situation. We frequently hear the request to make things bolder, make them pop, punch them up and…

One week ago, on December 1st, HeadBlade, the leader in head shaving razors and headcare products for head shavers, tweeted that they were looking to hire someone to lead their Social Media and Interactive Marketing. Within 24 hours, a candidate's social media plan unfolded before their eyes. A concerted effort linking a blog with Twitter and Facebook grabbed their attention - and wowed the likes of Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book and blogging consultant; Joe La Puma, Editor for Complex Magazine; Lance Moore, New Orleans Saints(#16); and the Career Builder Blog (written by Chris Baggott, CEO/Founder of Compendium Blogware).

5 years ago, Eric Romer of Indianapolis, who had been BBC (Bald-By-Choice) since 2002 in his…