Cultural (and Technological) Remnants: Ideas that feed, and failed, Technology

Posted on February 2, 2012 by MAYA

Human have generated many ideas over the course of our history. Some rightfully crumbled over time. Others endure, regardless of their merit. Our imaginations are captured by stories and legends, often more strongly then science or philosophy. The Maya have ensured ours long before their language was decoded. And we learned of their mastery of astronomy, complex calendars, and their passion for ballgames (how they would have hated the NBA lockout!) Yes, despite their achievements, this civilization withered a faded in to the jungle.

Technology mediates how we interact and engage in life. And it constantly changes. That new “idea” yesterday (Windows 95, AOL and MSN, and Prodigy), will be obsolete tomorrow. From a marketing standpoint, many businesses cling to yesterday’s hot tools for messaging: newspapers, television, and radio. And while radio has been able to cross the digital divide, most traditions media are still looking for a bridge. Only social media has a solid foothold in the new digital era. As more and more of these tradition outlets fade like the Maya, I am left wondering how they could have weathered this transformation better. How can those of us remaining heed the warning call from Brian Solis: “Adapt or Die.”

Google + : Google worked with its base of early adopters to build its growing social network. It learn from its other social media failures (Google Wave and Buzz) to create a social media platform that has the potential to compete with Facebook and Twitter by simplifying the “social engagement process.”

In today’s tech-savvy world, only those willing to adapt will survive. Others, like the 60 former Ogilvy and Mathers employees let go because they lacked the digital chops, will not.

Snark Fail

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Bonnie Lee

Social media gurus like to boast about how few email they receive. Limiting email, they claim increases productivity and social media clout. It demonstrates how engaged they are. Wanting to follow in their lead, I have been trying to reduce my email load and opting out of subscriptions that only serve to distract me from my task at-hand. Think of it as my digital resolution for 2012.

So imagine my surprise when I receive an email notification that, in addition to acknowledging my request to unsubscribe, insults me. Continue reading →

Aztecs vs. Mayans: Tamales Edition

Posted on December 23, 2011 by DyanaRodriguez

Honduran Tamale

Mexican Tamale

Tamales are sacred in my family. I come from a Mexican and Honduran background and both sides of the family compete every year to see whose tamales are best. Just another battle between the Aztecs and the Mayans in my family. No one ever wins of course, because the Mexican’s will choose the Mexican tamales and the same goes for the Hondurans’ and their tamales. My siblings and I stay neutral for we do not want to get mixed up in the bloodshed. Regardless, the making of tamales is a tradition I personally look forward to every year. It is a very long painstaking process that will usually begin at six in the morning and finish by no sooner than 11 at night.

There is a very distinct difference between Mexican tamales and Honduran. Mexican tamales are made with masa (starchy corn-based dough), chicken broth, pork lard, and then wrapped in a dry corn husk. Honduran tamales are made with potato, cooked rice, pork stew meat, and then wrapped in a banana leaf. By the end of it, there will be enough tamales to last us until Easter and there is masa on everyone and everything. In the battle of Mexican vs. Honduran tamales, I win because I get the best of both worlds.

What is A Year of Maya?

Posted on December 21, 2011 by MAYA

Last Monday, MAYA launched “A Year of Maya” as a year long campaign that celebrates the cultural and historical contributions of a civilization that most only learn about through history books and social studies classes. The project will show the extensive reach of the word “Maya” has across the globe. It will also show our the diversity at MAYA grows as we reconnect with our roots professional and culturally.

On 12.21.12 the Maya calendar will reset. This event has piqued the imaginations of many. Some predicting apocalyptic events, others embracing themes of renewal and rebirth to kindle fires within new age mysticism.

MAYA is taking a different approach. We are using this excitement about MAYA to learn and to provide insights about this ancient civilization and other cultures with a connection to Maya.

This project is a work in progress. As the MAYA team uncovers more about the roots of its President, Luis Vasquez-Ajmac, and others, we will enrich our multicultural thinking about today’s world. And, learn a thing or two along the way.

A Year of Maya: Cycling through time

Posted on December 12, 2011 by MAYA

Cycling through time

Clocks and calendars are interesting, and essential, little tools that help each of us structure our time. As 2011 winds down, many of us are getting our 2012 agendas. Others are watching our mailboxes for that the free calendar from the Humane Society as we cross off another day in December. And we do this all this without fear or panic that the end of time is near. So why are people fearing the worst as the Maya calendar closes on one of its Great Cycles?

Yes, next December, the 13^th baktun closes. A baktun is a unit in the one of the three primary Maya calendars that we call the Long Count. There are 13 baktuns (or a cycle of 144,000 days) in a the Long Count calendar, a period of about 5,125.36 years that some call the Great Cycle. The current cycle ends around December 21, 2012.

The Three Calendars of the Maya: Tzolk’in, Haab’, and the Long Count

The Maya measured time. They were meticulous about it, too. To have three calendars to help measure out days, lifespans, and civilizations suggests that the Maya had a complex relationship with time. A relationship that went deeper than, say John Donne’s obsession with his own mortality. The Maya had a sense of history that extended well beyond any individual’s place in time.

The three calendars had three roles.

The Tzolk’in calendar is a 260-day, 13-month calendar that aligns with the ritual year. It is the inner ring in the Calendar Round. The Haab’ calendar, 360 days plus the five lost days, form the solar calendar that probably guided agriculture and day-to-day existence. This calendar forms the outer layer of the Calendar Round. Combined, the two mark 18,890 unique days.

The Long Count Calendar was a tool to help contemporary historians chronicle Mayan history for future generations. If you think of this calendar as the geological record of the Maya civilization, it becomes the “official” calendar for that which is bigger than any individual or community. It is the story of Maya.

The Calendar Round

The Long Count Calendar is also too big for us. That is why we are keeping our focus on the Calendar Round in 2012 and our day-to-day lives of those. of us at MAYA and those who are connect to Maya. And starting today, we are going to share what we learn about the Maya and other cultures that have a maya in their histories.

With “A Year of Maya” we are taking a Mayan view of history to help us stay positive and focused on the stuff of everyday.

Want to learn more about Maya’s calendar? Check out these sites:

“How the Mayan Calendar Works.” Provides a nice explanation of the three calendars and how they may have been used.

“2012: Six End-of-the-World Myths Debunked.” National Geographic News. 6 November 2009.

“The Mayan Calendar Portal” explains all three of the calendar tools the MAYA used to structure their spiritual life, their solar year, and their eons.

SEO/SMO: What’s wrong with just optimization?

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Bonnie Lee

Last Friday, I spent over one hundred and fifty minutes participating in a webinar training session about e-marketing to learn new tricks and review the basics of digital marketing. CARAT (California Resources and Training) hosted this free session as part of a program to reduce the technical divide that keeps many small businesses small.

The session focused mostly on websites and e-newsletters, with another 20 minutes for search engine optimization (SEO) and only a bit on social media. I was hoping to learn more about social media, since I wanted to find new ways to participate in ongoing conversations. But the focus on SEO did get me thinking about content, key words, indexing, and optimization.

The tyranny of key words

Helping our clients and customers find us using SEO makes sense. However, writing content specifically to maximize references to key words risks reducing the quality of our content and, more significantly, reducing our connection to our audience.

Search engines are tools that help us find relevant content. And yes, we want our content/brand/product/message to stand above the fray. But shaping our messages and identities to perform for a search engine means we give the tool more power to control our brand and our message. Suddenly the packaging becomes more important than the very real act of communication. The result: A dilution of our brand, or worse, a perceived lack of sincerity with our audience as the same key words keep popping up.

I am not alone in my concerns about SEO. Lee Odden recently blogged about SEO as just one part of digital optimization. There is, he adds, a need to optimize websites and blogs for social media optimization (SMO), too. With SMO (or social SEO), marketers are using social media tools to encourage people to increase traffic to a site by sharing. Sharing a link, a photo, a video, an article.

It makes sense. With SMO, businesses can do more than market a brand, good or service. They can monitor reputations, identify new staff, and take advantage of emerging trends simply by getting your content to travel. How?

Create content people want to share
Make it easy to share that content
Build incentives that encourage sharing
Let your content live the way you want your children to live, freely.

But then we risk building content that can be summarized in one word that follows a hashtag: #dominationoftheword.

How optimized should my static and dynamic communications be?

Simple. Remember why you are blogging, sharing, and communicating. If you keep your readers in mind, then the line should be easy to see.

MAYA sails on Lady Washington

Posted on December 2, 2011 by MAYA

Yesterday the MAYA LA team boarded the Lady Washington, a 20th century replica of the original merchant ship. You might recognize the ship from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

The 5-hour voyage was a poignant look at the life of sailors and the value of teamwork. Everyone had their own part, no role was too small. When someone needed help, there was always a helping hand. Any business or organization operates on teamwork. Departments need to function seamlessly and be willing to pick up the slack if needed, which the crew displayed commendably.

Overall, it was a fun day to enjoy the gorgeous December weather in Southern California and pristine waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Calm seas

Pictures after the jump.

Continue reading →

Mutually beneficial partnerships

Posted on November 18, 2011 by RikkiGeorge

Recently, MAYA was asked by a client, “What makes a “win-win” campaign partnership?” On one level, the answer was obvious: Anything that benefits each other. Like a recent fundraiser I went to for “ Suited for Change” , a community-based job readiness education program sponsored by Dupont Circle boutique Betsy Fisher featuring NPR corespondent Michel Martin and fashion correspondent Robin Givhan on the topic of “Fashion at Work.” This had all the elements of a ”win-win”: a good cause, smart talk by journalists (donated time), a percentage of profits from the sponsoring store [Betsy Fisher] and consumers, such as me, doing something their passionate about [fashion and supporting a small business].

I’ve been thinking alot about our client’s question and wondering whether MAYA adequately answered their question, What makes a win-win? To a large part, yes, our answer was satisfactory. But after all the good things said and seen that night at Betsy Fisher’s I think what makes a “win-win” is simply human connectedness. That intangible meaningful something. Perhaps the smile you give, the sharing of stories, the moment of exchange even for a single moment of respect. Hopefully, all that translates into something sincere and the beginning of something worthwhile that you build on.

For more on the boutique Betsy Fisher, click here

To learn how to assist the low-income with their return to the workplace, visit suitedforchange.org

Poppies: Branding a call to action at a time when public trust evaporated

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Bonnie Lee

This morning, on my drive to work I saw several cars with different colour awareness “ribbons” decorating their bumpers. Pink for Breast Cancer, Red for Aids, and Yellow for military support. Yellow ribbons? What happened to the poppy?

Whether you think of 11 November as Remembrance Day or Veterans’ Day, its significance is the same: it marks the end of World War I, one of the bloodiest wars in global history. Nine million combatants died at the hands of new, more lethal technology that included chemical weapons, airplane bombings, and trench warfare.

It also changed, fundamentally, the relationship between the public and the governments that used propaganda to keep the truth about the war from them. Public trust was lost.

To remind people of the human costs of the war, veterans of the Great War would sell artificial poppies on the street. Often maimed from their experiences, these vets and the poppies they sold to support war heroes reminded the public that the cost of war is too great. Remember.

In Commonwealth nations, we wear a single blood red poppy on our lapels throughout the holiday season. We still do. And every time I see one, I remember. I remember–not the dead of that war, but those whose blood is spilt so I can live safely. I remember that leaders deceive, and that wars hurt them less than it hurts those in my community.

The poppy is a powerful visual brand for lessons learned nearly a century ago, before a pop song that can be about a returning convict or military personnel to a loved one begat ribbons. The poppy speaks for the dead and the sins that led to those deaths.

In today’s mania for tying causes to a visual brand to rally support, we have created a colorful legion of awareness ribbons and bracelets that clutter our lapels, our wrists, our cars, and our windows. Yet, when I look at these awareness triggers, my mind draws a blank.

Are these visual tropes really worth the physical and financial resources needed to produce them? Or is it time that we stop taking the easy way out and find each cause’s poppy?

Knitting stronger communities

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Bonnie Lee

Photo credit: innocent drinks via flickr

The Big Knit is an annual campaign by innocent, a British smoothie maker. The idea is to encourage people to knit tiny hats to top their smoothie bottles. innocent will donate a portion of the proceeds for any bottle purchased with a knitted hat to a charity that helps keep older adults warmer. They actually get average Brits to knit these hats and post them to the company every year.

But innocent is not alone. When a recent oil spill covered the bodies of New Zealand’s penguins in oil, Skeinz, a local yarn store, asked knitters to knit penguin sized sweaters to stop the birds from preening and dying from the oil.

Their appeal went global instantly, with coverage in the Huffington Post and on blogger sites like this and this.

Knitters are like that.

These are smart campaigns precisely because they taps into the key drivers of the knitting community. Knitters are:

Social: in my neighborhood several groups of knitters meet weekly to knit together. A knitter tired of knitting alone in Los Angeles can go online, find a group, and be surrounded by happy knitters in 15 minutes.
Online: There are several sites for knitters to share projects, research new patterns and yarns, share designs, and learn tricks and tips for sizing and shaping a project.
Opportunistic: Knitters are addicted to yarn. Loved ones of knitters, forced to wade through a knitter’s stash, know only to well that a knitters output represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most knitters need to find opportunities to deplete stash to feel justified when they but more.
Community-focused: When the call to help the poor, elderly or sick comes, knitters are often the first in line to help provide strangers with blankets, sweaters, hats, and mittens.

Each campaign also gives knitters a chance to boast about their work online, in the news and with their non-knitting friends.

The point: its not the tools that get a community engaged. It is knowing what fires them up and then using the tools to keep them burning that leads to revolution. Social marketers and behavior change experts could learn a lot by getting to know a knitter.

The Buzz at MAYA

Celebrating A Year of Maya