The social media workhop at Wonderful Copenhagen HQ went really well. It was really satisfying to see that all the workhop contenders was so enthusiastic! Thank you very much for that!
Especially the GoogleMaps session gave us some really valuable feedback. The next couple of months we will be busy making the report on how WoCo can use social media strategies in their daily work. See you at the next workhop guys, we’re looking forward to it.

I proclaimed some time ago that I would spend a few months on catching up on a lot of literature that I have been wanting to read for a long time. My challenge was to read a book every week until my head was too full of information.

As we are very busy in our daily work and I am spending quite a few hours teaching every week I realized that use audio-books to retrieve my goal. After the first five or six books I lost count but today I did a little review and found out that I managed to read 12 books in 9 weeks.

I still have a few titles waiting on “the shelves” but I think that future goal is a book a month from now on. I might even read a good novel if somebody has a suggestion.

This is the list of books I have read so far:

Unleashing The Ideavirus - Seth Godin
The Circle Of Innovation - Tom Peters
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Creating Customer Evangelists - Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
The Ten Faces Of Innovation - Tom Kelly
Made To Stick - Chip Heath and Dan Heath
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
Wikinomics - Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
Small Is The New Big - Seth Godin
All Marketers Are Liars - Seth Godin
Waiting For Your Cat To Bark? - Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg

Hooray! We’ve mooved! You are always welcome to come and pay us a visit. There’s always burning hot coffee on the machine, and ice cold champagne in the fridge.

narrow
Nansensgade 92, 1th
1366 København K

Map on findvej.dk

It’s been a while without an update, this is what Narrow has been up to for the last couple of weeks:

46H

Together with our good friend and collegue Mette Ohlendorff, Thomas has been deeply involved in the reframing / rebranding of the New Media education “Multimediedesigneruddannelsen” in Køge. Thomas has been acting as a Concept developer and New Media Designer on the project. Thomas is also teaching New media design on the school. See 46H photos on Flickr

From Mette Ohlendorff’s blog:
“The name, 46h, is based on the geographical location of the school: Køge – the area code being 4600. Numbers are great because they put you on the top of lists and are easy to remember ;o). The visual identity is a manifestation of the physical framework and the educations core area: digital media. The logo consists of squares, which both illustrate the pixel, which is the corner stone of digital, visual communication. And represent the individual students desks that like lego can be put together in infinite, creative combinations.” Read the whole post on Mette’s blog

DSU
We’ve had a couple of really good meetings with the good people from DSU (Danish Social democratic Youth Party). Hopefully we will make a killer Web 2.0 production together over the summer. to help us with this, we’ve teamed up with Copenhagen’s nr. 1 Rock n’ Roll Drupla designer Morten.dk. He is the the one half of web design oldschoolers nogetmedild.dk. We don’t know Morten’s last name, but that doesn’t really matter, he’s just morten.dk to us.

Wonderfull Copenhagen
Hopefully we will soon get started writing the Social Software report to WoCo. We are really up for it! We have the final budget meeting with Woco in a couple of days, so hopefully it won’t be long.

Mads Reinholt
Mads is a cool Social democratic guy from Frederiksberg who is trying to make his way into “Folketinget”. We are helping Mads making some really cool guerilla marketing stunts and events over the next half a year. We will also make him a MySpace page, a Wordpress blog and a bunch of print materials.

As I am spending some of my time teaching and supervising media students I get a lot of questions about branding. The funny thing is that the word “branding” never makes sense to anyone and I have decided that from today the word “branding” is no longer a part of my vocabulary - It has been replaced by “emotional relation building”.

We have started a little podcast about things that we are passionate about. The first episode is conversation with Martin Buhl about SCRUM (an agile method for project management). The podcast is in danish - Enjoy.

Our podcast site

Listen to the podcast - Podcast #01 - SCRUM (mp3)

I’m speachless. I thought that the music industry in general, and the small Indie labels in particular finally understood how music marketing works nowadays, but no. Last night we were demanded to remove the link to the new “The National” single from DoCopenhagen.dk. Apparently we linked to a non official release.

This is a perfect example of a label who just don’t get it. I can’t possibly see, how the link on DoCopenhagen.dk can affect sales of the forthcomming album in a negative way. DoCopenhagen.dk has approximately 70.000 dedicated Indie music visitors per week. People loved the single, and because of the sneak peak, I personally, couldn’t wait to buy the whole album. I guess it’s needless to say, that I’m not putting a dime in the label’s jar after this experience. It’s a shame that a fabulous Indie band like The National is represented by such an old school media company. It just doesn’t fit.

We will really soon release Narrow’s 10 commandments on “Succesfull digital music marketing”. Stay tuned.

• Keep It Simple, Stupid!

• 21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch

• Top Marketing Blogs

• Better Sales From Faster Download Speeds

I am spending my day preparing a presentation on new marketing that have to be ready on monday. I was looking around the web for inspiration for the perfect presentation and found a few good ones. I then tried to remember which presentation, online as well as offline, I could remember. For some reason (maybe because I am a bit tired today) I could only remember about five that made a real impression on me.

For some reason the first that came to mind was Malcom Gladwell’s presentation from TED2004 where he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. He uses the 18 minutes to prove a very important point by telling a funny and interesting story without the use of PowerPoint or any other visuals. So if you are sitting infront of your computer and need a little entertainment or want to know how spaghetti sauce changed the business world - enjoy.

Malcom Gladwell - The Freaking Point (mp3)

With the current employment situation in Denmark where great employees are hard to find I often wonder how little effort is put in to recruiting new people for important positions.

I once spoke with a sales manager who told me that the difference between an average sales-person and a great sales-person is 20 to 1. If this is true, there should be no boundaries on how much you are willing to spend on having a great sales-person on your team as supposed to having an average or even good person on your team.

The gaming company Red 5 has made a recruitment campaign that is likely to have a near 100% response rate (at least in as far as getting in touch, if not necessarily accepting the position).

Red 5 figured out that if they had to steal the best gaming developers from their competition they had to a little more than to put the average job description on monster.com

They FedExed boxes to the people that they wanted to hire. Inside the box was… a smaller box and inside that box was a smaller box… and so on. If you put all the boxes together the puzzle would say:

not the end
a beginning
a new beginning
not a new world
but an old world
made new
no change is peaceful
and though life struggles
it also strives
to forge a new path
through the darkness
to rise to the call of glory
not the end
a new beginning
with new eyes to greet it.

Inside box number five (which was red) is a tiny iPod shuffle, nestled in more protective foam, with a name engraved on it; the name of the intended recipient. Printed on the inside flap of the box is an invitation to listen to a pre-recorded track on the iPod itself.

“You’ve got a passion for detail and a flair for gameplay that we admire very much,” Mark says, addressing the person by name. “At Red 5, we’re assembling a team of incredibly talented individuals dedicated to pushing the envelope.” He then suggests this person may be just what Red 5 is looking for and describes how they may go about logging on to the company website to learn more.

I can imagine that pile of high quality resumes are piling up on the desk at Red 5 and my guess is that they are more worth than a pile of iPod shuffles.

A blogpost from a guy who recieved the box
Red 5 explains why they did it
An other blogpost from someone who recieved the box