State your problems first. Then it might turn out social media is not what you need. And if it is. The do something unique made to work. Don’t just treat it like another channel where you can dump your offline activities.

A sloppy little drawing I did this morning inspired by the works of Al Baik.

Oh…like when you do traditional advertising you actually need money. It’s not free to reach success. And oh nr 2 – online communication is about creating equity over time. Campaigns might work every now and then but overall you should strive to build a socially distributed content driven platform over time. Then you might get fans. Might…

While spending some time reading up on what the ‘fine art’ video photographer Vincent Lafore was up to I ran into a campaign by Canon placed on the video site Vimeo.

The concept called ‘The Story Beyond The Still’ is a perfect example on how brands could look into creating digital events rather than necessarily trying to pull traffic to their own sites.

Swedish brands as well as most brands seem preoccupied with trying to figure out how to get traffic to their campaign (often built in flash…) and brand sites. This is of course the number one strategy for any brand with an online business. But so far most brands do not have their business online so brand building and advertising is still what it’s all about. In the new landscape of trust brands should rather think about how to provide the community they wanna serve with products and services with something that adds value.

This project from Canon is a great example of this. Much like Nikons “We gave then a D80 and what they came back with was stunning” project back in 2004 performs a perfect lunar landing on the right spot. Vimeo is quickly turning out to be the first spot for people exploring moving art. Equipped with the right keywords you’ll find tons of inspiration in high quality.

The Story Beyond The Still: The Cabbie from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

The Canon 5D and especially the 7D is definitely transferring Hollywood movie quality into the hands of the masses and Canons HD competition is bringing out the best for us to see.

Another thing this concept brings to mind is the fact that online branding is slowly moving away from design and graphical execution to rather directing people into joining conversations. Anyone can design and build technology today. It’s more about picking the right technology and putting together the right ideas!

We can you set down your lunar lander?

Today I’m browsing for mood images. My search has led me to tons of newspaper blogs. Then suddenly as I noticed this comic strip below my heart stop for a brief second.

This piece of communication is so simple yet so strong. If this would have a been an ad that ended with ‘Send Money to The Earthquake Victims in China’ I’d have my wallet turned upside down.

I can’t think of a better, stronger and more emotional way to portrait this story. Thank you Visual Journalism for bringing it too me!

Thomas Traxler has got his shit together. Powered by nothing but sunlight and some threads, Thomas Traxler‘s “The idea of a tree project” shows us how objects can grow during the course of a day. His project more or less mimics the way a tree grows and changes shape due to weather conditions. Amazing.

Thomas got exactly the characteristic you need in order to create future communication. The competence of combining art, technology and while caring for the nature into ideas that get noticed.

infosthetics pointed the laser on it!

It’s Sunday evening and I’m spending some time browsing my feeds and maybe finding some last minute stuff for this coming week presentations. Pink Tentacle, one of my favorite blogs that always surprise me with something quirky introduce me to Mr Shohei Otomo – a Japanese manga artist. Shohei’s ballpoint drawings rock!

A Geisha playing Ping Pong with sunglasses makes me go wow

This guy knows how to tweak something into wow by dropping different cultures into the blender and pushing the button. Out comes innovative, provocative yet wonderful pieces of Manga. I’ve posted two more of my favorites below.

Doesn’t look all that healthy. But it’s a rockin’ piece of art

A Geisha with sunglasses and suddenly you turn peoples head around

If you’re into this kinda art you should get your but over to Shohei’s and check out his gallery. It’s in Japanese but if you press that mouse of yours a couple of times you’ll find your way!

In Paris, France there’s a guy named Aïssa Logerot. He makes all sorts of cool industrial design objects. The thing that got me hooked though was this outstanding LED spray can called halo. The photo says it all. I want one. For what I don’t know but that’s generally how I feel about cool objects – ‘Buy first think later’.

Thanks Coolhunting and Notcot for enlightening me today!

On Sergels Torg in central Stockholm yesterday. Swedish street dance company Bounce tribute Michael Jackson with this flash mob to Beat It.

Found the beauty over at The Girls of Florida.

Spotted this wonderful video showcasing a series of round balls that generate different sounds as the audience bounce them around.

It’s a great ‘stunt’ performed by Intellijel in collaboration with Danjel Van Tijn at the Siggraph 2009. Give people something fun and innovative to interact with and they’ll do just that. Listen to the audience laughing – they love it!

The Matsu’s wine triology, ‘El Pícaro’, ‘El Recio’ and ‘El Viejo’

Today on TheDieline I ran into the company ‘Vintae Luxury Wine Specialists’. Vintae is Spanish based company that specialize in top of the range and luxury wines.

Not only do they have a great wine portfolio. Together with Spanish agency Moruba, they’ve designed some wonderful bottles to stack in your cellar.

The Winery Arts collection revolves around the number 9, considered by many cultures as the supreme number of knowledge

When a company understands the value of differentiation, simplicity and creativity like Vintae, I can’t do anything but run to the wine shop and empty my savings account. This is the shit you wanna put on your table!

Ok, so you’re an artist studying at an art school. It’s time to graduate and you really wan’t some publicity. What do you do?

In Sweden a student named Anna Odell, studying at Konstfack decided to shine a light on how the society handles people that are physical disabled. In her piece of art ‘Okänd, kvinna 2009–349701’ (Swedish) – she staged a repetition of her own psychosis 10 years earlier. When pretending to take here life she got taken care of by the police and placed into compulsory institutional care. What they didn’t know was the fact that she covered the whole thing with a hidden camera for her graduation project. I haven’t really made up my mind if I like the piece of art or not. The fact that she’s been having a real psychosis before makes me think it’s all revenge.

In Amsterdam, Sander Veenhof had another idea for his graduation from the Gerrit Rietveld art academy in Amsterdam. Sander designed an interactive greenhouse in which a bouquet of ‘graduation flowers’ is growing.

Cool project, but get that damn camera fixed!

What’s pretty cool with this project is the fact that the plant need social media attention in order to grow. A greenhouse control system converts all online publicity into plant growth by switching on the grow-lights when someone gives the project some digital attention. Basically – the more people mention his project, blog about it, bookmark it or in any other way influence it’s Google rank – the more the plant grows. So, right now I’m gardening the damn thing but I think Sander and his flower is worth it. Tweet this post and you’ll be making art too.

People tend to share a lot of information online and not the least on Twitter. All that information is possible to access by using the Twitter API. Jer Thorp, digital artist, thought about that for a while and then he decided to extract and visualize travel information from people’s public Twitter streams by searching for the term ‘Just landed in…’.

This was the result and it’s stunning.

As we publish more bits of conversations online the data we leave behind produce some freakin’ cool building blocks for people with ideas. So far most of it is used for good. But sooner or later we’ll end up seeing a lot of bad stuff.

Stay righteous and you’ll be ok. Move over to the dark side and expect bad mojo. Something for brands to think about.

Infostethics delivered the information in style as always.

Me interacting with Mr Dolphin, his friends and family.

I have spent the last 6 days on Lanai, Hawaii together with a good friend. We’ve been down here attending Tibco’s yearly conference. He as an employee and me as a guest. The optimum setup for me as I’ve focused more on exploring the island than business.

Apart from getting to know Vivek Ranadivé, Tibco founder and technology innovator, and learning about his thoughts on the future I also got the chance to chat quite a lot with Roger Craig, who (who by the way also blogs) considered one of the worlds best American football players. Roger is working with marketing at Tibco (smart move) and we found common grounds. There is so much to learn from people like this. If you ever meet one of them, don’t stay on the bench. Get up and interact.

My best appointment however was meeting Mr Dolphin with friends and family. Every day we headed down to the ocean to snorkel with these guys. I’ve been diving and surfing with dolphins before. Back in the 80s and early 90s when I was snowboarding professionally I traveled every year to Ireland to surf and sometimes we ended up surfing with these wonderful animals. But the last couple of days on Lanai has been crazy. I got my camera out and snapped some shots.

Every day about 50-70 dolphins has visited the bay where we stayed. A little bit further out 10 Humpback whales watched us. They were too far out to swim to (I tried) but their presence in the background was out of this world.

I’m using a small Olympus 725SW that is not optimum when it comes to shooting underwater. But, much inspired by Wayne Levin, a photographer actually living on Hawaii I got the images into Photoshop and turned them into black and white ones. What a difference.

What before was a regular, quite bad shot of the dolphins instead turn into something out of this world. I’ll at least frame 2 or 3 of them once I get back home.

In color, quite ordinary and bad in quality

In black & white, transformed into timeless and dream-like art

It is amazing to see that sometimes a simplistic change in the character of a photo totally turns it into something timeless and dreamlike. Changing focus and looking the other way usually do, remember that when you’re creating communication. Don’t just look in front of you…the solution might be hiding somewhere else. And suddenly you’ve created art!