Hanson Hosein is the Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media at the University of Washington. He’s written Storyteller Uprising: Trust & Persuasion in the Digital Age, and the host of Four Peaks on UWTV and has advised Microsoft, CVS Caremark and MasterCard on digital media storytelling strategies.
As 2011 comes to a close, the economic situation remains bleak. Usually, graduate school applications rise during a depressed job market, but the ongoing uncertainty has discouraged some potential students from pursuing a graduate degree — MBA applications are down 10%, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Yet with the rise of social media and the rapid advance of technology — particularly mobile — there’s increased interest in more specialized graduate programs that give priority to certain skills and strategies. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2018, more than 1.2 million new science, technology, engineering and math-related jobs will open up. This will have far reaching effects on the digital media industry. Professionals must keep up with the latest developments to stay relevant. So as you reevaluate your career path, here are five key predictions for how you should focus your career strategy in 2012.
1. Get To Know Your Devices To Know the Trends
It’s all about the consumerization of tech. We’re moving “beyond the PC” as The Economist recently put it, and this will have a far-reaching impact. The enterprise (Blackberry, Windows) once drove tech usage and innovation. Now, how we use our mobile devices begins outside the office. This puts pressure on business to catch up by implementing social platforms for interpersonal communication, along with modified tablets and app stores for the workplace. So you’ve got to get digitally literate quickly. Ask yourself: What device does your family use? How are you communicating with your friends? This is especially crucial in 2012, as we’ll see digital connectivity penetrate into the deepest reaches of our personal lives, from our workout routines to our cars. As you see how these devices hit critical mass, you can think strategically and begin to predict which platforms and technologies will dominate. Picking the winner will allow you to jump ahead of your competition.
2. Go Deep Into Content
The digital age is a great democratizing opportunity: Anyone can broadcast his or her creations to the world. But this has also led to great chaos as professionals struggle to cut through the amateur din. So you will need to use the emotive link of storytelling to grab attention and build a trusted relationship. Learn to tell a powerful story — emphasizing narrative tension through a beginning, middle and end — and translate it into a digital asset through multimedia skills in video, photography, audio and animation. It’s a popular belief that every organization is a now a media organization, meaning that every employee — or potential new hire — needs to master the creation of these media, cheaply and often in-house. In 2012, it’ll be all about immersion — a way to capture the imagination of distracted individuals who need to be convinced that your ideas are worthwhile. The “Any Screen” era is upon us. Consider apps, games, 3D, and transmedia (a cohesive storyline that is segmented and distributed on a multiplicity of platforms) as you try to transport your audiences into a deeper media experience.
3. Recognize that Social Networks Transcend Facebook and Twitter
Airlines, health organizations, museums and entertainment companies are hiring many people in the digital media space — Social Media Marketer, Digital Media Manager, Mobile Manager, Learning Technologies Specialist and Social Games Strategist are a few sample job titles. The names of these positions acknowledge that the people who hold them need expertise in creating, curating and mastering media as way to engage customers, patients and users.
Those who hold these positions possess a literacy in social media platforms and strategies. Rather than getting caught up in the arms race of the latest attention-grabbing technique on Facebook, you need to instead develop a deeper understanding of how these social networks are formed, and how they work. Technology is just the enabler. Fundamentally, social media is all about human interaction. So in 2012, even as you keep experimenting with those online platforms, you’ll develop skills in network analysis (how do you determine the true influencers in a group?), and maybe even revisit Psychology 101 (what motivates human beings?). Ultimately, successful engagement is less about the “what” people are doing on social networks, and more about why they’re there, and how they’re interacting with each other.
4. Go Deep into Data and Learn How to Ask the Right Questions
If there’s one truth about the pervasiveness of digital media in our lives, it’s that our online behavior is producing increasingly massive amounts of data. But few of us know how to glean the right insights from it. The New York Times recently lamented this “digital talent gap” and concluded that “new hires are needed for a variety of tasks, including writing code, creating digital advertisements, website development and statistical analysis.”
In that case, you’ll have to get comfortable with numbers and critical analysis. The smart use of massive date is massively important. Sure, there are tons of plug-and-play analytics tools out there, but you’ve got to get comfortable with research yourself. Learn to ask the right questions and draw informed conclusions from the data at hand. In the comical science fiction book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought spent 7.5 million years pondering “The Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?” It responded with a nonsensical “42.” In short, you won’t get the right answer if you don’t know how to ask the right question.
5. Behave Like a Media Entrepreneur, Innovator, Connector and Creator
Digital and social media are turning the professional world upside down. Fortune 100 companies, such as Ford, have merged their advertising and public relations divisions into a single entity. Professionals need to wear multiple hats to remain relevant and employable. So as you survey the media landscape, appreciate how to manage risk like an entrepreneur as you continue to experiment with innovative technologies and platforms. Your primary objective will be to take advantage of these emerging channels smartly with influencers and users, through the creation and syndication of compelling stories. By doing so, you’ll give these individuals all the motivation they need to engage with you.
Social Media Job Listings
Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
This year has lent itself to a slew of new buzzwords, and gamification is easily one of the most buzzed about in the marketing industry.
Businesses clamored this year to understand the concept of gamification and apply it to their digital and mobile products, offering badges and points galore … but how many of them actually understand the point of gamifying or if it’s even useful for their business goals?
Dustin DiTommaso, the experience design director at design studio Mad*Pow, recently spoke about designing meaningful interactions through game design thinking during his presentation at Geekend 2011, a techie conference presented by BFG Communications.
DiTommaso explained his framework for gamification and dished out seven essentials steps for approaching the subject. Read on for a thorough encounter of DiTommaso’s model for architecting more meaningful interactions and successful business goals, and let us know your thoughts on his method in the comments below.
1. Consider Why You Want to Gamify
Yes, gamification is a sexy word. No, it isn’t right for every business.
DiTommaso recommends that businesses looking to gamify their products or services ask themselves three critical questions before moving on:
What is the reason for gamifying your product or service?
How does it benefit the user?
Will they enjoy it?
If you can answer these questions with confidence, if gamification seems like a good fit for your business’ product or service and if the users enjoy it, then move on to exploring your business goals. DiTommaso recommends exploring the following three questions:
What are your business goals?
How do get the users to fulfill those business goals?
What actions do you want users to take?
If this exploratory phase yields positive feedback, your business is ready to move into user research.
2. Identify Your Users
It isn’t enough to understand your business goals when considering gamification — you also need to understand your users and what motivates them. Research your users before you begin designing your gamified product, focusing on how they use your software, what they want and what motivates them.
DiTommaso laid out a number of questions to help businesses achieve research-inspired design:
Who are your users?
What are their needs and goals? Why are they playing?
What’s holding them back from achieving their potential? Is it lack of volition (belief that completing the task at hand is valuable) or lack of faculty (ability to complete the task)?
What is their primary playing style (solo, competitive, cooperative)?
Who are they playing with?
What social actions do they find enjoyable, and why?
What metrics do they care about?
Game designers must also understand what motivates users to play their games. There are a number of motivational drivers, but DiTommaso recommends simplifying to four key factors. Decide if your users are motivated by:
Achievement of goals or enjoyment of experience
Structure and guidance or freedom to explore
Control of others or connecting with others
Self-interest in actions or social interest in actions
Knowing these details about users and their motivations will assist game designers in determining how the game should be laid out, how much autonomy to allow, what the users’ goals should be and so on. Let’s explore exactly what comes next in the designing process.
3. Frame Goals and Objectives
The user’s path to mastery should entail “a journey up, with a quick little dip for relaxation — where you have either a break or a new challenge to master, like crossing a log — and then one, final, arduous climb to the top,” says DiTommaso.
Once you understand your business goals and your users, you can begin to design goals and objectives while thinking about long-term and short-term user goals.
DiTommaso advises, “Figure out a way to make long-term and short-term goals as exciting and aspirational as possible.” Users want to be heroes — design their gaming experience so that they can achieve that.
The long-term goal must be compelling and fairly difficult to achieve, says DiTommaso. This can be framed as the mastery of a new skill or habit, or the acquisition of an achievement or title. In the end, though, it is important that the long-term goal signify a “pinnacle of personal growth,” says DiTommaso.
Once you figure out a long-term mission for users, break it up into small milestones that take users along a path to success. These “discrete and satisfying challenges” should motivate users to continue on and help them improve along the way.
4. Identify Necessary Skills and Actions
Make a list of all of the abilities that are necessary to win your game. DiTommaso breaks these skills into three categories for easy brainstorming:
Physical Skills: walking typing, using a chef’s knife
Social Skills: presentation, conversation, meeting new people
DiTommaso advises that game designers choose skills that take time to master, can be developed over time and can be broken into smaller “skill-chains.”
It is important to determine if and how the skills you are considering can be measured, so that you can track a user’s advancement. Determine whether there is existing technology that can help you monitor and track progress of certain essential skills.
5. Consider Various Lenses of Interest
In “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses,” Jesse Schell outlines the psychological lenses that are key to making top-notch games. Lenses help game designers view their games from many different perspectives, or lenses.
While Schell’s book identifies 100 lenses, DiTommaso pointed out 10 particular lenses to focus on for starters:
1. Competition Type: Player vs. player, player vs. system, self-directed
2. Time Pressure: Relaxed, exploratory play or brash-tactics-get-things-done play
3. Scarcity: Scarcity can add a level of challenge and strategic gameplay
4. Puzzles: Puzzles are problems that promise the existence of a solution
5. Novelty: Change presents a new set of challenges and patterns to master
6. Levels: Graph progress, ability and access and provide a roadmap of progress
7. Social Pressure / Proof: Show users how others are excelling in the system — via a leaderboard, for example
8. Teamwork: Teamwork can also act as resistance when users need to work with others
9. Currency: Anything that can be exchanged for something of value will be sought
10. Renewals and Power-Ups: Renewals and power-ups help “unstick” players and redirect them from dead-ends
Framing problems, core objectives and actions in your games using these tenets will often yield a better gaming experience for users.
6. Outline Desired Outcomes
Think about the types of rewards and punishments that will result from a user’s actions — this should create a feedback loop that motivates users to improve.
Positive feedback could include rewards, such as moving up a level, unlocking a badge or earning points — and negative feedback might entail starting a challenge over, for example.
“Outcomes can be contingent or schedules,” says DiTommaso. “Players can trigger an outcome based on specific actions they take or based on a time frame within the game.”
No matter the time frame, though, players should always see their progress towards the “ultimate objective,” which DiTommaso also calls the “Epic Win!” Incremental success and failure will guide them along.
7. Play and Polish
“Platforms are never done,” says DiTommaso. Once you have the game build, test and polish it. Here is a framework DiTommaso suggests for analyzing the game:
What’s working and what isn’t?
What have you not considered?
Is the game personal enough for your users?
Do they feel that it’s tailored to their own unique personality and desires?
Are you tapping into the player experience needs of competence, autonomy and mastery?
What’s going to keep it interesting in 10 weeks? In 8 months?
When player reaches the Epic Win!, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
DiTommaso recommends that game developers not spend too much time testing games, though. “Get it out there and let your users be the testers,” he says. Users expect iterations and software updates, so don’t be afraid to release and iterate, he says.
This seven-step framework for approaching gamification is a very thorough resource from Dustin DiTommaso. If you still have questions, though, view DiTommaso’s entire Geekend presentation slideshow embedded below and ask further questions in the comments below.
DirecTV began quietly seeding its HDUI to customers back in November, but judging by our tips inbox it has recently picked up the pace of the rollout. It's live in many areas already where you're probably enjoying the sweet, sweet new guide with its 16x9 graphics and speedier interface, but if you don't yet have it, check out the thread at DBSTalk with estimated rollout dates for many areas. Also by way of the forum comes word of 12 new channels including AMC, Velocity and HD Net that were just added to DirecTV's live TV streaming iPad app. Of course, the update still won't play nicely with jailbroken iPads, so a cracked version will be required in those cases. Check out the list of channels after the break, if you're not seeing them in the app try hitting the "edit" button at the top right, finding them in the list and clicking the green plus symbol to add them manually.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Have you ever been reading a post about, say, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and caught yourself thinking "What were those dimensions again?" Or, maybe it's something about the iPad 2 and you can't recall the thing's release date, or exactly how many different variations Apple has on offer? How about which of those two devices is heavier? You could go digging back for their respective reviews and find out, but now we have a better solution: the gdgt databox! It's a comprehensive, clickable, interactive database containing all the specs for all the devices we cover on here. Its contents are pulled from the massive library of hardware and software maintained over at gdgt, tirelessly updated and maintained around the clock. With a few clicks you'll have all the info you need and, should you desire more, you can quickly ask a question to someone who actually owns one. Check out a few example devices in the box below -- or just keep on reading. You'll be seeing a lot of it around these parts.
Posture problems are rampant, especially among those of us who work hunched over our keyboards all day. If you're not sure if your posture needs fixing or are sure and want some help, this guide from Men's Health is for you. More »
Primed goes in-depth on the technobabble you hear on Engadget every day -- we dig deep into each topic's history and how it benefits our lives. You can follow the series here. Looking to suggest a piece of technology for us to break down? Drop us a line at primed *at* engadget *dawt* com.
For many among us, what goes on behind and along the sides of a high-definition television is almost as compelling as what's displayed on that big, beautiful flat screen. Of course, we're talking connectors, with their attendant chaos of cords. A high-def TV is only as good as its connection to a high-def signal. The same holds true for the array of disc players, game consoles and other peripherals we cluster around our sets. So it may seem quaint, then, that we still often confront more analog ports than digital ones on our high-end TVs. You'd think with advances in wireless technology, we'd have done away with the spider web of wires entirely. Alas, like flying cars and fembots, we're just not there yet.
In this installment of Primed, we'll examine the best and the bogus when it comes to TV connectors, and spend some time tracing the arc of how we got to where we are in this particular moment of television evolution. The narrative on television and home entertainment remains a work in progress. But we'll endeavor to get you caught up to date, and as an added bonus offer a glimpse of what the future of your TV's backside will likely look like.
Hear that, MPAA / RIAA? That's the sound of Louis CK's audience chuckling. Not at one of his jokes, mind you, but at the notion of strapping DRM onto everything you possibly can in order to "make people buy it." In an effort to see if this crazy idea was true or not, the famed comedian decided to sell his Live at the Beacon Theater for just $5. Procuring it was dead simple -- you could either surf over to his website and plop down a PayPal payment, or you could pirate it. Either way, no DRM was affixed. Turns out, people actually are fans of paying money for things that they see as both fair and worthwhile, as evidenced by the $1 million that currently sits in Louis CK's PayPal account. Of course, we've never advise anyone to hold anywhere near that much cash in an account that could be frozen on you at a moment's notice (not that we have experience or anything), but at least he's going to do awesome things with the proceeds. We'll let you hit the source link to find out precisely what that is. Kudos, Louis.
If you haven't heard, the ethically questionable web host known as GoDaddy is supporting SOPA. In addition to their terrible customer service and elephant-killing CEO, GoDaddy is backing the bill that wants to cripple your internet as if it's some sort of moral obligation. That means you can't expect GoDaddy to have your back if SOPA passes. They'll just shut you down for a potential violation. (Although apparently they're already doing that.) If you didn't get around to ditching them already, there's no time like a present. Here's how you can do it an even save some money in the process. More »
The fine folks at Verizon's Innovation Labs in Waltham, Massachusetts have posted a couple of videos of their efforts that include their vision of how Verizon plans to deliver TV to all the devices in your home, over both wired and wireless networks in HD, served off of a centralized media server. In addition to tablets, game consoles and computers, the media server will also serve content to smaller, more energy efficient thin clients at the other HDTVs in your home. Besides the obvious benefits of more content in more places, a centralized approach like this also offers the promise of being more user friendly by making the experience consistent across every screen -- no more walking to another room to schedule recordings. We're told the media server is expected to roll out late next year, but sadly, FiOS TV isn't exactly known for delivering new technologies when promised.
The best airline rewards program or frequent flyer program for you is a combination of which airlines are near you and a gazillion (more or less) other criteria, like how easy it is to rack up the miles. Location aside, this matrix from The Points Guy can help you choose the right program to join. More »