This sweet old man and his model of the UT Tower may not be a strategic priority, but they make a great story.

As managing editor of a higher education alumni magazine and news blog, I spend a lot of time thinking about story ideas. What are those brilliant topics/people/photographs/insights that will get readers excited, teach them something new or make them grateful they’re still in contact with the school?

Our editorial team goes round and round on what angle to take, the point of the story, the appropriate tone. Many of these stories require hours of research, interviews, reporting, editing and art direction.

And even after all that care and hard work, sometimes the story falls flat. No one reads it. Or they read it and think it’s a waste of time.

And then there are those “stories” that unfold like this:

1. An alumnus who graduated loooong ago writes you a letter and includes a printed photograph. The letter explains that the alumnus, now retired, finally achieved his dream of carving a model of a beloved university symbol, and he thought you’d like to see a photo of it.
2. You think it’s a sweet letter and photo, and your editorial pace has slowed down for the summer, so you decide to post it. (First of course you have to scan the photo.)
3. You quietly post it on a Friday and send one tweet about it.
4. It quickly becomes one of the most-read stories of the week and earns 4 comments.
5. The UT Facebook page posts the item and gets 260 Likes and 61 adoration-filled comments.

Sweet old man with school spirit: 1. Fancy story planning: 0.

Lesson learned? If you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has millions of devoted followers, don’t forget to nurture that spirit and loyalty, even if it means you’re not doing a Big Important Story. And if you don’t have millions of devoted followers, what kinds of stories can you tell  to create some?

Don't be this guy. Of course if you're young enough to be an intern, it's entirely possible you don't who this guy is. Sigh.

I’ve now been through the internship hiring process four times and have noticed the same trends keep popping up. Despite all the career training and resources offered, some students still seem totally unprepared for the interview or even the application process. And others completely shine.

So in the interest of saving everyone a little time and heartache, my list of the cardinal rules of internship applications and interviews that, unfortunately, are broken quite often:

Proofread everything. Cover letter, resume, writing samples, e-mails. I had one applicant misspell “business” in the first paragraph of her cover letter. For a writing job. At a business school. It even had the MS Word spell-check red squiggly underline.

Talk about ME. Well not me, but my company, my position I’m hiring for. You need to show off your own skills and personality too, but if your cover letter and interview answers say nothing specific about my internship, it comes off as if you’re just going through the motions.

Provide context. Don’t just drop in random work experience without explaining why it’s relevant to this job. If you’re submitting writing samples, please oh please I beg you, tell me what they’re from! It’s ok if it’s a class assignment–I just need to know what I’m reading.

Do research on yourself. If, during the interview, I realize I know your resume better than you, that’s a bad sign. Bring a hard copy with you for reference if necessary. Spend time beforehand reviewing your work history, class assignments, past challenges and successes, etc. especially as they might relate to this job.

Do research on us! Our internship is a writing position that contributes to our news blog and alumni magazine. Both are easily found on our website, and I expect you to have looked at them.

Check your e-mail. I know that’s so old-fashioned, but you’re not going to get an interview request via text or Facebook, so check your e-mail regularly. If you haven’t responded to me within 2-3 days, I start to doubt your interest.

Read instructions carefully. If you don’t submit the proper application materials or complete the writing test as instructed, that’s pretty much a guaranteed ticket to the “no” pile.

Be interested and show a little effort. The intern we just hired had less experience than other applicants, but she displayed the most passion and enthusiasm for both the job and the organization. Her cover letter demonstrated she did her homework on the organization and paid attention to the job description. She was prompt, engaged and professional in all her communications with us. And of course she had the talent and skills to back everything up.

Finally, hang in there. Keep applying. Keep networking. Keep being amazingly talented and connected to your field. I know it’s tough looking for a job. I did it for a year and a half after graduating! I apologize for companies that never respond to you, even if it’s just to tell you thanks, but no thanks. But hang in there.

Oh, and don’t ask if the internship is going to be a waste of your time and then lecture the hiring manager about being unprofessional.

Also check out Todd Defren’s Open Letter to Millenials for more great tips.

Images from Facebook pages protesting Arizona's SB1070 immigration law.

Arizona’s controversial immigration bill, SB1070 was just signed into law last Friday, but its social media footprint has already been firmly established. 

Search “SB1070″ on Facebook, and you’ll find 37 Pages, 89 Groups and 55 events (each with their own branding, of course) dedicated to the new law, both for and against it. The term has its own Twitter hashtag. There are dozens of YouTube videos showing protests and news clips of politicians and pundits debating the bill. You can even buy a “Do I Look Illegal?” t-shirt on Cafe Press.

I expect to start seeing bumper stickers and front-yard picket signs pop up around Tucson soon, but it has been fascinating to see the speed at which social media protests and rallies are created and spread. I’m curious to see how it translates to offline behavior.

Will the online calls for boycott really hurt the Arizona economy? Will social media advocacy campaigns look for civil rights abuses or have an impact on efforts to overturn the law? Will state politicians or law enforcement agencies respond to social media comments or even start their own outreach online?

Social media protests didn’t save Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show job, but it did help sell out his comedy tour in a matter of hours and certainly played a big part in the court of public opinion. And as much as I love Conan, illegal immigration is a much more important issue, so theoretically the power of a social media movement is far greater here.

UPDATE: It looks like this is spilling over to higher ed, too. Lane Joplin tweeted this morning about the immigration debate landing on Arizona State University’s Facebook Page:

People started posting immigration-related messages on ASU’s wall on Sunday, many of them filled with profanity and name calling. No response yet from the university.

• Passion – if you can’t get excited about your subject, no one else will.
• Details – “…12,000 people jumped to their feet for 16 and one-half minutes of uninterrupted thunderous ovation as flames illuminated her tear-stained face.” Tell it, girl! The way Julia paints a picture, I almost felt like I was in the audience at that fictional Georgia beauty pageant.
• Narrative arc – Julia reels her listener in, steadily builds up, smacks you over the head with a dramatic climax and slams the door on your face with an unforgettable ending. A master storyteller, even when–or perhaps especially when–she’s not pleased with you.
• Plain language – Julia is an intelligent, wealthy business owner, but her vocabulary isn’t clouded with grandiose fluff. She chose her words carefully and uses them to maximum effect. She doesn’t try to sound impressive and powerful, she just is.

RIP, Dixie.

People need understanding and connection, not just information.
If all you’re doing is blasting your community with content, you–and your audience–are missing out. Both the Future of Context and How to Spark a Movement panels beautifully explained this point. Help someone truly undersand something, connect your community members with each other and unite people around a common mission. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

Think Visually
Three of the best sessions were about this. Dan Roam’s Why Words Won’t Work explained that we’re all visual thinkers, and pictures are key to solving problems. Interactive Infographics showed off how data can come to life if the visualization is done well. And they pointed out that infographics have gone mainsream: How I Met Your Mother uses them regularly (Marshall even needed a charts and graphs intervention because he was using them so frequently) and comedians like Demetri Martin use visualiztions in stand-up. In other words, infographics are cool.

And Visual Note-Taking 101 was the perfect primer and call to action for all of us budding artists.

Stories are powerful
Storytelling, experiences, journey, quest – whatever label you use, a narrative arc is going to resonate with people. A panel about enhancing the museum experience asked “What’s the epic win for your user?” In Narrating the Crowd, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and his brother showed off their project, The Kahani Movement, which is capturing the history of Indian-American immigrants by asking people to record their own family’s stories. “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share,” they said.

Stories help us remember information. In his Perfectly Irrational presentation, Stanford prof Dan Ariely explained how we are motivated by short-term rewards by telling the story of how he treated himself to a movie day every time he gave himself a painful injection he needed to treat his liver disease. That kept him on track and made sure he got his medicine. I”ll never forget that story, and as a result, that lesson will stay with me.

Open Up
NASA has embraced President Obama’s call to government agencies to become more transparent, and as a result this massive, aging organizations is connecting with new fans in a way that hasn’t been seen in a long time. All of their content is in the public domain, which means anyone can participate in space research and exploration.

Embrace Contradiction
You can be a cool science museum, an open bureaucracy, a warm-hearted business person, a funny girl, a designer who fights malnutrition. In fact those apparent contradictions are often where we find the most interesting people and projects.

Bonus – 5 Cool Web sites
Each of these was mentioned in a SXSW talk. Click and explore!

Apture.com – add contextual multimedia content to any site
www.Walking-papers.org - print maps, add notes and scan them back to share with others
www.Futureofcontext.com and www.explainthis.org -making online journalism more relevant
http://www.data.gov/ – more data than you could ever ask for

This session’s description of itself best sums it up: a case study on how the California Academy of Sciences - a traditional museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park — transformed itself into a global online education and research presence and integral social hub for the City, using the best tools and techniques of technology, social media and design.

Jonathan Denholtz, the museum’s director of interactive media and Maria Gidudice, a designer who consults with the museum, explained how they transformed an “150-year-old dusty institution into an organization that’s committed to experiential 21st century learning.”

Sound familiar, higher education friends? 

Their approach covers 4 main phases of a museum visitor’s experience:

• Inspire (pre-visit)
• Enhance (during)
• Extend (post-visit)
• Export (the virtual experience)

Unfortunately Denholtz and Gidudice were a little too giving with the crowd, so audience questions took over the session and we didn’t hear about the museum’s in-depth approach in each of these areas. But even without that it’s a thoughtful example of a way to frame your audience.

Here’s what they did get to:

Inspire (pre-visit)

• 70 percent of a museum’s revenue comes from the admissions gate. This is good during the first year, but more challenging as traffic levels off.
• CAS uses the web, mobile, social media and hybrid exhibits
• Segmenting the audience
  -CAS uses social media to target 20-30 somethings to publicize Night Life - Thursday evening parties where you pay $12 for a DJ and dancing at the museum. They also sell drinks. Attract 3,000 people every week.

Enhance (during the visit)

• How do you focus on an experience and not just information?
• Audio tours for CAS haven’t been super successful. Now they’re trying downloadable tours built around specific themes. Connects different exhibits while giving people a reason to come back multiple times.
• Look at user-generated vs. curated content
• What is the epic win for the user?

Export (virtual experience)

• The museum can only hold 2 million visitors annually, so how can they reach more people?
• Your Web site can be more than just an information repository. Create new, compelling content that keeps people coming back.

Photo by Kevin Dooley

I expected this panel to be kinda off the wall, but I was pleasantly surprised at how prepared and organized everybody was. Way to go, comedians! Hargarave asked each panelist to share their top 3 tips for successful online comedy:

Malkof

1. Put together a great team.
2. It’s all about the idea: Be original!
   -Something that stands out
   -Something you love
   -Should be able to sum it up in one sentence (Think about it like a media pitch)
3. Think big; have a long-term plan.

Rubin

1. Have a hook
   -The reason you’d want to send it to your friend, beyond just the fact that it’s funny
2. Think Visually
   -Rubin showed this “Luigi Finally Snaps” bit to the room and noted afterwards that the biggest laughs came from the non-verbal jokes.
   -Even if something is text based, maybe you can make it visual – can you turn it into a chart?
3. Feel free to ignore comments.
   -If even half of the comments on a piece are positive, that’s great!

Wilson

1. Consistency
   -Make something often
   -Give people a taste of your ideas
   -Get them in the habit of coming back
2. Publicity
   -The Cyanide & Happiness team lets anyone put their stuff anywhere, and that has helped build their audience
3. Passion
   -Cheesy, but true
   -This is fun content, but people are working really hard on it

Cockerham

1. The title is by far the most importnat thing
   -Get a joke in the title
   -Anything with the word “prank” will rise in search rankings fast
   -Use “vs.” e.g. Shark vs. Octopus
2. Make the audience feel smart and useful
   -Cockerham posted 2 different quizzes about book titles. The easy one got 4-5 times more traffic than the difficult one.
   -People like being surprised at how clever they are.
3. Nurture relationships with link-keeping gatekeepers.

Other tips:

-When you run out of steam for fresh content — and that will happen — link to other people’s stuff.
-Regarding self-promotion – if your content is good, people will appreciate it.

Random:

An audience member asked the panel if they ever think about or are concerned about the lack of females in comedy. The panel – 5 males who had just finished showing a bunch of clips about video games and beer – cited Tina Fey as proof that there are plenty of female voices in comedy. Inspired by the Visual Note-Taking panel earlier, I drew a sketch to capture this part of the session:

#futureofcontext

This was one of the most intriguing, thoughtful panels I’ve ever been to. NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen wrote about how they prepared for and ran the panel, and their work really paid off in a terrific presenatation:

Definition of Context: Something that precedes or comes right after what you’re talking about.

Thompson asked “How do we encounter news?”

Chances are that what you’re hearing about healthcare reform is episodic. It’s hard to keep track of. Constant, torrential.
We sell you quantity and newness of headlines – every time you go to NY Times home page, you expect to see new headlines that were updated just minutes ago.

We believe that over time, all these headlines will cohere into real knowledge. But evidence indicates this is actually debilitating. So we start gravitating to things we don’t really need an attention span for. So….

We need a larger framework and system to organize all these episodic bits. Create an intellectual framework and systemic information.

This is good for readers, but also for news producers. CONTEXT SELLS!! This American Life’s financial crisis reporting – “The Giant Pool of Money” has been enormously popular.

***

Rosen asked “What is the future of the timeless web?” Rosen: I’m a pragmatist. We advance when we have a really good problem.

“In order for news to be informative, people need to be informable,” Rosen said. We can’t receive updates to software that was never installed.

After listening to This American Life’s financial crisis series, Rosen “found myself following financial news with ease.”

***

Harris: Think about 2 ways of walking around a museum:
1. You wander around on your own, staring at art and reading a little card next to each piece that lists the artist’s name and the title of the work.
2. An art historian guides you through a tour of select pieces, explaining the historical significance, the painter’s state of mind at the time, his personal background, etc.

Trained musicians here more complex patterns in music than someone who doesn’t play an instrument.

Context and familiarity deepen our understanding.

Journalism is structured around an article. How valuable is that?

Harris founded http://www.apture.com/publishers/ – super cool platform/plug-in that brings rich video, reference articles, images, maps, etc. on to your site so readers can get more context without leaving.

***

Thompson: NPR creates topic pages, but he worries that their approach to context on the web too closely mirrors other formats. What’s the effect when we just sell context as more info?

Context should be the foundation. The episodic stuff should be the “More info…”

Context is not just a collection of links that looks like a fancy google search. Are we creating a topic ghetto?

Harris: Use past content you’ve already created to help provide context.

It’s writing something today that still has value in the future. It doesn’t go out of date.

Object-oriented storytelling. Engineers never do work they can’t use a second time. That helps scale context.

The movie “Food Inc” helps people understand the food industry. You put someone through that movie, they come out the other side as someone who now understands.

The web REWARDS context – google searches! Wikipedia pages are often the top search result.

Thompson quickly hacked together an Wordpress site: http://www.themoneymeltdown.com/ to gather and archive quality stories about financial crisis. 50,000 people looked at it 75,000 times in 1 month.

It’s ok to pull together links, but you start to lose context when it’s just automated.

Rosen: Freedom of the Press includes the right to avoid and ignore the press! There are people who don’t want to be informed. But let’s start with what people do care about and expand from there.

Get people to do something: make things easier for the reader; Incorporate game mechanics (What if a news site was more like Super Mario Bros?)

Rosen: How are we doing at turning mystified users into people who understand something?

Think of journalism as a source of continuing education for readers.

Reorganize an article as a quest for clarity, not just reporting on something.

The panel created www.futureofcontext.org to continue the conversation.

Also check out http://explainthis.org/ – Started by Rosen. A demand-driven assignment desk where people can ask to have something explained and journalists can respond. Not much traffic yet.

YouTube’s Margaret Gould Stewart joined TED Talks Director of Film and Video Jason Wishnow and Damian Kulash, he of the OK Go and Treadmills viral video fame. The session was the perfect blend of informative and entertaining.

Some of the big points:

• “Viral” doesn’t have to mean 10 million views. It’s people responding to a clip and feeling compelled to share it. The numbers may be different for everybody. Try your best to set a goal, and see what happens. TED hoped to get 40,000 views on their first video. Now their talks have been watched 230 million times!
• Match the style to your content and purpose. TED Talks need high production values, mutltiple angles and close ups to help make the lectures come alive on camera. But the low-budget, single-camera approached was important for the first OK Go videos because that was unusual for a music video and made it clear the band made it themselves. It felt more personal and helped fans connect with them.
• Most common traits of viral videos: Inspiration, surprise, a sense of wonder, clever and POSITIVE. “People don’t really like sharing negative stuff,” Stewart said.
• Kulash says internet communities have a “permeable wall,” so this means you should involve your community by hosting shoot-offs, inviting or linking to parodies, holding contests, etc.
• You don’t have to always create content–you can be a curator too, like Fail Blog.
• Wishnow says there is no one way to reach your audience. You have to be “platform agnostic.” TED posts videos on their own site, YouTube, iTunes and many others.
• Emededibility is key. On average, during the first 48 hours a video is posted on YouTube, half of its traffic is from people watching it on some other site. Bloggers want to keep people on their own site, so they’re most likely to share a video they can embed.
• Your video’s title and meta-data are just as important as SEO on Google. Wishnow suggests adjusting your title for a video based on didfferent audiences and platforms.
• Make something people want to watch multiple times. The average viewer watched Ok Go’s new “This Too Shall Pass – Rube Goldberg Machine version” video (below) 4-5 times.

The panel’s favorite viral videos:

Kulash said they had a team of 60 engineers working on this video for months. It took 65 takes, and they only got all the way through the sequence successfully 3 times.

I think this one definitely has the element of surprise.

Kulash added that any good viral video should have boobs or kittens.

And how do you wrap up a viral video panel? By making one of course! Kulash and Wishnow used the audience to remake the surprised kitten video. Can you spot me?

And now, because I can’t stop, 3 of my favorite viral videos. Interesting that they all share the traits listed above:

First, a great example of using positivity, for a subject that could easily have been much more serious.

Next, a beautiful video that shows the power of fun and humor to change people’s behavior. Good lesson for, oh I don’t know – everything.

Finally, this video just makes me happy and bolsters my wish that sometimes life was a musical.

University of Kansas Professor Nancy Baym led an interactive session about conducting great interviews, whether for broadcast, print or recruiting. Some of the points were pretty standard, but overall it was a helpful discussion. Some main points:

• “What questions should I ask?” is not the first step in prepping for an interview.
• You have to understand who you’re interviewing, but also what audience the interview is for.
• Design questions with a story arc in mind.
• If crowdsourcing questions (i.e. “What would you like me to ask They Might Be Giants”) – make sure your crowd matches the audience the interview is for. Don’t ask fanboys to give you questions for an interview that’s meant for a general audience.
• Don’t call it an interview – say ‘I’d like to talk to you about ______” or “Let’s have a discussion.” Often less intimidating.
• Dry questions elicit dry answers. “What do you love about your job?” will probably pull out more passion from someone than “What’s the best part of your job?”
• Give people a chance to tell stories. Rather than ask “Are you a self-starter?” try “Tell me about a time when you had to build something from the ground up.”
• If you’ve noticed someone often repeats themselves in interviews, pull out one nugget from one of those interviews and ask them to elaborate and expand on that point. This will help get new answers.
• Instead of e-mail interviews, consider an online chat. Real time back and forth, and you’ve got a transcript of the interview built in.

I asked the crowd to share their favorite all-time interview questions and got some great responses:

• What’s next for you?
• Why do you keep coming back to this (line of work, perspective, city, etc.)?
• What do you wish people asked you?
• What do you wish I had asked you?
• What did you want to be when you grew up?
• What’s your story?
• Do you have any questions for me?
• How have you changed? How have you grown?
• How have past experiences changed or informed your current situation?
• What gets you out of bed in the morning?
• What keeps you up at night?

For more on conducting great interviews, see my post on 10 Interview Tips from former Texas Monthly Editor-in-Chief Evan Smith.