As many of you know…I am drawn to the story of the un-insured here in South Carolina. Each person I meet, each interview I sit through, each image I capture…I am reminded where I was a few years ago.
There is a massive, polarizing conversation right now surrounding health care, access to care, and american rights vs/ patient rights. The one area that has me most sympathetic are those who are struggling each day to pay the rent, pay to put clothes on their children’s backs, work, and have access to quality health care.
Telling 25 Years of Stories…that sounds like a lot! It was a bit overwhelming, but a huge opportunity to embrace a powerful narrative right here in Anderson, SC. I was hired to help find, tell, and share 25 stories for 25 years…and what I found were passionate stories told by passionate people!
It is hard to completely wrap our heads around what it means to operationalize a digital content strategy. There are so many barriers to execution, ranging from the operational portion of generating content, finding unique stories that are consumer friendly, training people to share unique narratives, and even just getting the written word on digital paper.
Facebook Signal displaying posts related to #SCFlood – October 6, 2015
I have been sitting watching the television news feeds and social media outlets, and I all I can think of is Hurricane Katrina. I am not making this comparison based on response, type of storm, or the types of people impacted…I am basing my comparison from the images and similar flooding narratives.
I was one of the first to fly over Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and capture aerial imagery just a few days after the storm passed. What I witnessed from the helicopter reminds me of the flooding in Columbia. Lots of water, dams breaking, lots of homes under water, and lots of efforts to evacuate in real time as each of the dams broke.
I have always been caught in this dilemma…when it comes to managing a brand’s community or community within a brand, what is best for the community? Who should be really managing the community? One with experience with the Message? Community Management? Social Media Management? Brand Management? The actual brand employee(s)?
Yes…I said it…give them the middle finger and prove them wrong!
What is your passion?
Many times, I am asked to speak to college students and they always want to know my path. They want to know what I do and how I was able to get where I am today. I always ask them, what is their dream job? I ask them to tell me, what would they do if money did not matter!
Many students struggle with that question, having a hard time to frame the wisdom of what tomorrow might hold, given the frankness and reality of their upcoming graduation. I ask them…what is you passion?
You see these hands…they have scars from years and years of cameras, cold shoots, 1k and 2K light burns, cuts, bruises, broken fingers, years of typing with carpel tunnel and consistent camera movements…they represent the battlefield.
It is our battlefield and it is something we hold dear to our hearts. The mere process of finding, telling, curating, sharing, and engaging interactive narratives is more than just an experience…it is years in the making.
Many of us storytellers have learned from our personal experience, failures, and experiments. We have learned from numerous mentors as we have spent years in the apprenticeship process. We have cobbled together lots of job descriptions, career tracks, educational experiences to get to where we are…and we protect our knowledge base(s), we hold it close.
What is your ministry? What do I mean?
I met a very cool person this past weekend, his name is James Morrison. James has a simple mission, chopping firewood for those in need this winter. He has been volunteering his time to AIM in Anderson, SC for the past 25 years. Yes…for 25 years he has chopping firewood.
James has a simple passion, simple ministry…to use his God given natural talent to help others. This passion has led him to find others with similar passion. Now he has attracted a group of men to help him every year. He has volunteers in the community donation wood, logs, and limbs; wood he transforms into firewood for many individuals that depend on this resource to keep their homes warm during the winter.
I have to say I am speechless. I am having a hard time articulating how much this is bothering me. This blog post is by no means trying to make this situation about “me”…but it could have been me. Yes…I was that guy, that photojournalist. They had no idea…none!
This comes almost a few days after the ten year anniversary of Katrina. I was a part of a crew that covered Katrina for Belo Corporation, who owned WWL-TV. Yes, we flew helicopters over areas where people were stranded, many of whom were trying to get our attention hoping we would help them. Some used guns to shoot at us while flying over, mainly to get our attention…we could not land because of the location and the danger.
Yep…I am talking about this very specific relationship one that has been riddled with miscues and online battles of digital lines in the sand. It was last year our health care digital team launched a Google Hangout embedded inside Facebook, since that successful campaign..it has been a lot harder to pull off technologically speaking.
But I am not really thinking through the lens of how to make these digital properties talk to each other when deploying campaigns, but more of the relationship between these two audience giants when it comes to digital content marketing.
I have had many people ask me, what does it mean to be strategic? I think it is an interesting question, one that emerges when those whom I mentor want more strategic positions.
I have spent my years serving in roles that were very tactical, executing very tactical concepts using technology where the job was dependent upon the precision of that technology. I have also learned how to shift that very tactical thinking into broader applications, preparing for long-term strategic opportunities.
During the time I was working on a large portion of my graduate research, I began to study the principles of techne and praxis.