Trust in vision, trust in process, and trust in inspiration – trust builds great opportunity and a better product. It also makes the process quick, efficient and cost-effective. The mean timeline on these individual shoots, from concept development to execution and delivery takes just a couple of hours, tops. We know what we are doing.

Client – “Should we be focusing on facebook or twitter or our SEO? It’s all moving so fast – it’s hard to keep up. What’s Instagram? Do I need to know about it?”
Me – “Yes”

That’s a glib answer to a complex question – the heart of the question is the anxiety that we all feel about the speed of change that technology has created. This is nothing new – you can go back to read about this same anxiety during the Victorian era when trains hit the scene like the dot.com bubble of the millenium. Change is hard, change is good. We want all the great new connections and possibilities but we’re challenged by the choices and the learning curve.

So…. here’s the problem. It’s getting worse. Or Better – depending on your perspective. The Internet is subject in many ways to Moore’s Law
- the observation that processing power on modern semiconductors doubles every two years – which results in a logarithmic, accelerating curve into the stratosphere. This law is what is behind the amazing computing power in your iphone – more computing power in your pocket than the entire world enjoyed a few decades ago. Guess what – that curve continues to accelerate and with it comes an explosion of possibility. Wearable computers, contact lenses that will overlay an augemented reality pulled from the internet onto your world, ubiquitous smart devices thinking ahead for you. A GPS with artificial intelligence and likely some fresh attitude.

If you are a business you don’t really get to ignore this accelerating pace of change. But you can manage it by focusing more effort on what you can do NOW as opposed to what you think you should do to be ready for the future. What do I mean by this? Simply put – make the best use of the most solid, popular and functional tools that are in the present and stop worrying about the cutting edge.

My mantra of late on web development is this – build the site today that you can launch tomorrow – not the site that takes 12 months of planning, design, coding and creation that will launch next year. That cycle is too long for most organizations and implies that the world you are building for will wait around for you. It won’t. A couple of years ago we weren’t talking about delivery to mobile devices or what would happen to your site when someone turned it sideways on their ipad. It’s only been a year or two that those issues have become standard design constraints. Facebook is the new blog – and blogs are dead (long live the blog!). Photo sharing has evolved from smugmug to flickr to pinterest to instagram to ??? – you get the idea. Use the tools in front of you today to the best of their ability. Stay nimble and flexible that the tool you love today might get changed, replaced or augmented in the next few months. Experiment with these new platforms, ideas and channels – there is little harm in doing so.

I’ve often written about the concept of internet fluency – that the internet is no longer a technology but a language and that fluency is a core competency of the 21st century. Fluency is easily obtained through experimentation and play, as well as a healthy does of curiosity and google searches. Don’t be afraid. Dive in. You haven’t missed the train – it’s just changing before your eyes.

LENOX – Information rules. Content is king.

Phrases I’ve always lived by, so it was encouraging to hear that mantra espoused by one of the county’s leading website gurus, Kevin Sprague.

His firm, Studio Two (S2) in Lenox, is responsible for revamping and rebooting websites designed to sort out the deluge of outdoor and indoor events that showers residents and tourists as the “on-season” arrives.

Even in the off-season, a misnomer now because there’s so much activity year-round in the Berkshires, residents, visitors and nonprofit leaders have long clamored for a one-stop clearinghouse to showcase events and prevent scheduling conflicts through a constantly freshened database.

During an informal chat at the Lenox Chamber of Commerce’s “housewarming” for its spiffy new digs at the town library, Sprague demolished some myths about website design and content update. As a low-to-medium tech kind of guy (some would call me “no-tech”), I was impressed by his knowledge and his ability to explain the rules of the road for a layperson.

Sprague stressed that the key to success — accurate, up-to-the-minute data — must be combined with attractive design and presentation. A dowdy-looking site, even with rich content, can be a turnoff for visitors.

His own site is state-of-the-art, as one would expect, and it showcases his two major partnerships with the Berkshire Visitors Bureau and the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. The BVB’s is set up by event category, and seems as comprehensive as any tourism-oriented site I’ve seen. It’s also visually inviting and easy to navigate, a major asset for those of us who grew up at a time when computers were the stuff of science fiction and fantasy.

Sprague, under contract to the Chamber, is about to unveil a redesigned lenox.org site that holds great promise as a gateway to all things Lenoxian. The town has been struggling to figure out a Web presence with “search optimization” (a high rank when folks launch a Google search for area activities) and with up-to-date events listings.

Keeping a site freshened day by day is a much simpler, less expensive project than many people realize, according to Sprague. Given his expertise, I don’t doubt it.

Studio Two’s long client list of nonprofits and businesses encompasses The Mount, Shakespeare and Company, Guido’s Marketplace, the Berkshire Natural Resources Council, the Berkshire International Film Festival, the Norman Rockwell Museum, Hancock Shaker Village, and now the Lenox Chamber, among others.

“Imagine Yourself in the Berkshires” is one of the slogans found on studiotwo.com, which promises “strategic branding and creative thinking for dynamic organizations.”

While I have no skin in this game, it seems obvious that if you promise compelling events to visitors and residents and then deliver, the only “marketing” needed is getting the word out to as many people as possible.

To accomplish that, everything in the digital toolbox needs to be used effectively. It gives people a bad impression, obviously, to showcase a long-past event on a website designed to promote a town and its offerings.

Give people a bad experience, online or in real life, and they won’t return. Give them a well-functioning, one-stop website with a rich trove of information and a cool-looking design, and you’ll reel them in.

When it comes to promoting the Berkshires through the Web, social media, mobile apps and all the rest, there’s first-rank talent to be found right in our figurative backyard. Hiring local isn’t knee-jerk parochialism. It’s basic logic and common sense.

Dear Fred

Thanks for the note. I have reviewed your comprehensive document.

Here’s the skinny. Fundamentally what you seek to do (technically) is pretty simple – it’s a blog – there are many examples of very successful, monetized blogs out there (boingboing.net, huffington post, salon.com, etc) – All of these entities have found a voice and an audience within their sphere of interest that is substantial enough to generate revenue from an advertising-driven model. All of them also got traction in the earliest blush of the internet. Today’s web is a different story.

We don’t currently manage a lot of ad-driven sites – our focus is primarily on the role that the web has to drive our client’s brands and the overall strategic approach to integrating evolving social media and public tools towards generating traffic and creating customers. The sites we build measure success in hundreds or thousands of visitors. In order to begin to monetize a site like you describe requires 100′s of thousands to millions of visitors monthly. In this day and age of the web, aggregating those kinds of eyeballs requires intense technical and creative engagement, as well as significant capital investment. I often tell people to imagine what it would cost to open a national chain of retail stores and use that $$ financial model to understand that the web is little different. It’s a pay-to-play environment now to a large degree.

We would be happy to help you with this but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that the best thing you can do is fire up a wordpress blog tomorrow, a facebook page and a twitter account and start doing the work of publishing and broadcasting content. Design is mostly irrelevant in this space. Choose a template that works for you and go – the doing is all. No advertiser or sponsor will touch you until you have some metrics to show them – anayltics results, facebook fans, twitter followers, etc. Working with a web developer at this point is actually likely the worst thing you can do – you will need to have native fluency in the tools – which frankly is easy to come by – a couple of days of frustration and you can master all of these. Without core fluency, a developer or agency will just be taking your money.

I am sure you will encounter many experts who tell you otherwise, and that you should focus on developing your brand, your design, and getting everything perfect before “launch”. They are wrong. The web is about you publishing today, not 6 months from now, and discovering that everything you want to do in your business plan is literally a couple of clicks away.

We’re the wrong agency to work with on this – you need to look at federated media properties – the people behind the largest independent ad-driven sites in the world: http://www.federatedmedia.net/

Take a look at their stable of publications and you will see what state of the art is – blogging like your life depends on it every hour of every day.

Thanks for the inquiry.
Kevin

via travel.nytimes.com

Here’s a great article about the berkhsires!

Posted via email from Kevin Sprague

Take a Ride on a Jet Plane

Here at Studio Two we’re contemplating a big step into a new, urban market – potentially opening a satellite office for starters, seeking out new clients and ideas, and forming relationships with talented people. Its a big undertaking that presents a host of challenges as well as opportunities – and we’re doing this during a major expansion in our business here in the Berkshires region, the outgrowth of a long planning and development process we started nearly two years ago.

Which has me thinking about the nature of goal setting and vision. One of the things we have been working on is visualizing our future – really seeing it down to a detailed level and holding those images in our heads and sharing them. As designers, we imagine what we then create – which is an act of goal setting – but we don’t normally apply that model of creativity to ourselves and our own “design” – our futures. A great luxury of that process is that you are free of limitations – if you can imagine it you can describe it, if even only to yourself.

Much like the strongest design product, it takes bold thinking and focused vision to create innovative new ideas and expressions. Bold thinking takes a kind of courage – a leap of faith and a belief in your intuition and experience. One of the challenges of being a creative organization is keeping the thinking bold – finding a routine or process that doesn’t dull the sharp edge but instead lets it cut through the noise to the big idea. It also takes reduction – an editing process of finding the minimal way to a pure ideal. This reduction is often the most challenging aspect for clients to understand about our work – our job is to whittle away the many different ideas and images and cut down to the single idea, the single image.

So I am starting to see that this reduction and creative visioning process about our expansion needs to be brought into the same kind of thinking – we need to find our way through many competing ideas, visions, and assumptions to a purer image of the future – and then we need to hold onto that and pursue it with energy and intention. Stay Tuned.

What Kevin Sprague does not possess are the equivocal traits of the Shakesperean protagonist Hamlet, characteristics that may make for gripping drama but ultimately leave those who are able to order the world around them through bold actions frustrated.

It’s perhaps not coincidental that Mr. Sprague has found a principal and longtime client in Shakespeare & Company, the gem of a theater troupe whose ascension has roughly paralleled that of the creative thinker the troupe engaged to help build its brand and present it to the world through visually arresting images.

Largely for lack of fear, or equivocation, Mr. Sprague turned an unlikely start after college into a process that resulted in sculpting himself into “a strategic marketing consultant who works with organizations to create compelling methods of communicating, defining, and expressing their core values and products.”

His business, Studio Two, continues to grow and prosper, and in July it stretched out and relocated to a stylish space on Church Street in Lenox, Mass., above the equally stylish Café Zinc. Again, there is no coincidence, as the European-feeling café received Mr. Sprague’s branding touch even before it opened.

Other clients of Studio Two include a Berkshires best of the best in varying categories: Berkshire Mountain Distillers, Berkshire Natural Resources Council, SoCo Creamery, Berkshire International Film Festival, The Mount, the Normal Rockwell Museum, Guido’s Fresh Marketplace and couture knitter Catherine Lowe, among others.

While Mr. Sprague and his team—Heather Rose, a native of the Berkshires, Christine Cooney, the senior Web designer, Amanda Bettis and Kaitlyn Squires—have managed to thrive in a place known to bury many shops and businesses after a couple or few mean seasons (winter), he is hardly content to stop there.

As a result, he becomes difficult to define, to pin down. If that seems ironic, given that Studio Two’s mission is to present clients in a rich but simple and clear way, the opposite is true. It becomes clear over the course of a leisurely and delicious lunch at Café Zinc that Mr. Sprague fares so well at branding and marketing because he refuses to compartmentalize.

Instead, he brings the fullness of his life experience to each project, and he passionately broadens his experience through creative projects that are deeply personal but also sometimes marry his professional and personal pursuits.

One of the results is a book on his work for Shakespeare & Company, the leading regional theater for which he began working in 1994, when it offered a roughly six-week festival. Today, Shakespeare & Co. is a year-round operation that has a full-time staff of 40, a multi-million dollar budget and audiences that reach 40,000 a year.

In chronicling the experience on his Web site, Mr. Sprague is not trying to take undue credit for the growth. Yet, in an industry in which photographs and packaging don’t always do much to sell a show, Mr. Sprague’s imagery for Shakespeare & Co. packs a punch that seems unrivaled.

It also led to one of his ancillary projects, the book “Imaging Shakespeare,” which collects many of those images and offers a peek into the creative process. The book itself is another example of Mr. Sprague’s inventiveness and refusal to be bound by established protocol.

Instead of taking his concept and following the traditional agent-publisher model, Mr. Sprague turned to one of the publishing-on-demand models he admires for breaking down a hierarchy that divides the world into insiders and outsiders, often with no defensible explanation of who is on which side of the line—except the potential to bring in money, of course.

Armed with his vision for the book about Shakespeare & Company, he sourced a feasible printing estimate and ran a Kickstarter campaign that raised $15,000 in 90 days; people were essentially pre-buying their copy of the book. In the end, a couple thousand copies were printed.

A series of artistic works came together in a different way. Mr. Sprague had been photographing dried flowers for a local botanical garden, and then the self-professed computer geek began marrying those photos with images and text on antique postcards, envelopes and other elements. The haunting images that result, he wrote in a blog entry, “evoke for me a kind of memory, or fragment of time.”

Memories, fragments of time and qualities of the immortal combine in another, more ambitious project of Mr. Sprague’s. It’s another published-on-demand book, this one enclosed in an unmarked black cover, which opens to a title page that says “Muse” in tiny type in one corner.

The photographic novel is his most personal project, and the multi-media narrative tells the tale of an immortal muse. At the end of the story, she gets released from the cycle to become the artist.

One of the images near the end of the book depicts a woman in white floating in brackish water. Mr. Sprague’s back-story indicates how intensively he approaches everything.

There’s a pond in Kennedy Park in Lenox that Mr. Sprague called “kind of a surreal place.” For years, he said, he had an image in his mind of someone floating in the pond amid the autumn leaves.

Finally, he approached actress Catherine Taylor-Williams, the producing artistic director of The Wharton Salon, about being his model. “She was always a very willing subject,” Mr. Sprague said. “Showing up and bringing energy is what a muse is about.”

The water in the pond was cold and the lily pads were like tentacles. Ms. Taylor-Williams swam out to the middle and got tangled in the weeds. Mr. Sprague recalled a momentary flicker of wondering whether he should keep shooting or jump in and help her.

Fortunately, no help was need. “She got out, got dressed and that was it,” Mr. Sprague said.

In all, he printed 50 copies of “Muse,” which he sold to friends and family. Prints from the project have been exhibited at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass.

“It’s always good to have a project just to recharge your creative batteries,” Mr. Sprague said.

When he’s not helping others or pursuing his own muse, Mr. Sprague is working for the greater good of the Berkshires. He attended Berkshire Country Day School as a boy, as do his sons. His wife, Kristine, is an architect. To give back, Mr. Sprague is on the private school’s board.

He is a co-chair of Berkshire Creative, which not only provides an online clearinghouse site for job listings, news, resources and more but actively works to stimulate new job growth in the region as well.

It’s a full and varied portfolio for someone who was an English major at Cornell and had his heart set on publishing a novel.

The segue into Studio Two, which launched in 1994, was one of those happy accidents with an improbable beginning. After college, in a “sympathy hire,” Mr. Sprague’s grandfather, who ran an engineering company focusing on wastewater treatment, brought him on to create some marketing materials.

He wrote script, hired a cameraman and an actor and made sales videos. A friend of his, meanwhile, had acquired a broadcast video-editing suite. Mr. Sprague re-wired the whole system and taught himself how to use it.

It was kind of an epiphany. He had been a hobbyist photographer and hadn’t experienced editing video. “The idea of using frames to make a story was compelling,” he said.

Then his grandfather fired him, which was the tradition with such sympathy hires. He did some industrial videos for other people, and then the “computer geek by birth” anticipated that video was going digital and bought a Mac.

That led to his learning Photoshop and Quark, and around 1994 he was working on a brochure for a company his father started. “It was a complete train wreck. I was not a graphic designer,” he recalled.

Mary Garnish, his neighbor, offered to help and Studio Two was born. Ms. Garnish and Mr. Sprague worked together for a decade before she moved on to other pursuits, and he continued building the business.

“People hire us because they hope their business will expand and grow,” Mr. Sprague said in summing things up simply, and Studio Two’s longtime clients have all grown significantly.

To learn more, see the Web sites at www.studiotwo.com and http://kevinsprague.com. The Web site for Berkshire Creative is http://berkshirecreative.org, and the site for Berkshire Country Day School is http://berkshirecountryday.org.

Douglas Clement did a nice job of capturing my history in this interview – and thanks to Laurie Gaboardi for a nice photo as well.

Posted via email from Kevin Sprague

Go. Get your tickets here. Do not make excuses.

Posted via email from Kevin Sprague