Month: July 2010

Love this piece about the relationship between doing improv and doing digital advertising, creatively speaking. A while back I wrote about taking an improv class myself and how it changed my thinking. Sean Kernan writes often about how improv and other theatre techniques help his creativity and its teaching. And I think it still is one of the best things you can do for your own creativity.

It’ll also get you over any fear of public speaking in about 30 seconds. And it won’t hurt a bit.

Anyway, in this piece from Creativity, the emphasis on the “yes…and” exercise is well placed. When you shift your approach from defensive (no…but) to collaborative (yes…and) the entire dynamic of the discourse changes. The relationship shifts. Friendships are built and possibilities get explored. There is really no downside to doing this, except that it goes against many (most?) people’s nature…at least at first.

There are many groups teaching improv now. I encourage all of you to try it. You never have to go any further–you don’t have to give a performance or the like, just let go and try something that will liberate parts of your mind and reduce your fear overall.

And like I’ve written over and over, fear is one of your biggest obstacles to success.

I posted on my Facebook Page about this new partnership (see last post on this blog, too) and, on FB, photographer Luke Copping posted a comment pointing out something important I want to share with you here. When you upload “projects” to Behance, there are several pages of information you need to provide (like key words, etc.). One of those pages deals with copyright and, sadly, Behance makes CC the default. Worse still, they make it sound like if you choose otherwise, you are doing something bad for your business.

This is not true. In fact, the opposite is true (CC is very bad for creative professionals–see previous posts on Lessig and CC, etc.).

The good news is that you can (and MUST) de-select CC as your copyright/licensing choice. I took a screen-shot of the page in question and all you have to do is select the choice marked with the big arrow I added (click the pic for larger version):

Luke went on to say that once you have made this selection, Behance is respectful of it. When they want to share your project with a third party site (or whatever) they simply ask permission.

Gee, that’s not so hard now is it Behance? After all, you (Behance) have your copyright notice all over the Behance-related sites and all your materials so you understand that copyright protections are important (see #11 of your own Terms of Service). For creative professionals, preserving copyright (including not diluting it through CC use) is vital, so why not change that default? Kthxbye.

LinkedIn has been a good tool for people who are trying to connect with corporate targets. It’s never been very creative-friendly, however. Until now. Behance network has partnered with LinkedIn to display creative portfolios, directly on LinkedIn. Now you can reach the corporate targets with your work.

Moreover, I think this will help shift people out of feeling like they have to post on Facebook (not a good idea to post your work there because, well, for a whole bunch of reasons). Now, you can used LinkedIn more. When combined with AgencyScoop, the social media world may have just shifted for creatives a bit.

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By the way, I’d like to apologize for not posting much lately. I’ve been in the last push of editing my Business Basics book (2nd edition) and it’s taken up a lot of my time. I’m sorry. I’ll be better. 🙂