I’m going to explore this issue a bit more fully in future posts, but I wanted to share this very sharp explanation in a music-video-nutshell of why your brand IS your business. And if you think by “business” I don’t mean nonprofits, think again. How stakeholders experience you—through your communication efforts, fund raising, interactions with staff and volunteers, special events, programs and service delivery, etc.—absolutely defines your brand in their minds. More on this very soon.

It may seem in today’s tilt-a-whirl environment that great ideas arrive fast and furious, coming out of nowhere and fully formed. But that isn’t the case, according to Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Technology may provide the connective tissue that speeds up innovation, but that next big idea will probably come out of slow hunches, accidental innovation and collaboration rather than any “Eureka!” moment.

(Thanks to Katya Andresen for turning me on to this great video synopsis of Johnson’s thinking on the subject. Gotta love well-done explanatory visual communication.)

2010 Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards from GettingAttention.org on Vimeo.

Time again for Getting Attention’s annual nonprofit tagline awards. Check out the video for some great reasons why nonprofits should invest the time and creativity to developing a tagline and to see this year’s winners. This year a record 1,700 nonprofits entered 2,700 taglines in the competition.

Check out this new video from Network for Good. It’s a play on Microsoft’s Advertiser vs. Consumer video that came out several years ago. It’s a funny, pointed commentary on the state of donor/nonprofit relations that’s all too true for many organizations.

I suppose if you were given the task of shooting a promotional video about the college library, you could do long shots of the book-filled stacks with vaguely uplifting music playing in the background, students studying, uh, studiously at those big oak library tables, maybe throw in some professorial type voiceovering about the laser-sharp focus you achieve studying in the library vs. your distraction-filled dorm room.

Or you could do this.

There are no rules I’m aware of that say you can’t have a little fun in promoting your cause. I’m just sayin’…

Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” series makes great use of simple video animation to create concise little stories around issues like the environmental impacts of bottled water. Here’s eight minutes that should clarify why buying bottled water is a boneheaded idea on many levels.

You can check out other videos in the series including Leonard’s latest, “The Story of Cosmetics,” here.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web–the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Webfather Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned this so-called “semantic web” more than a decade ago. Given the astonishing speed at which we’ve seen the internet evolve over the last several years, you’d think we would have arrived by now.

Unfortunately, “our ability to create information has far exceeded our ability to manage it,” according to BBN Technologies’ John Hebeler, just one of the many scary-smart people interviewed by NYU student Kate Ray for her fascinating new documentary on Web 3.0.

With the billions (and soon trillions) of pages now available to us, a thinking, analytical web that understands and fulfills our requests for information while minimizing the need for human intervention—and thinking, for that matter—may be as far removed from Google as the search engine is from the card catalog. This doc is a pointed reminder that we really have no clue what’s coming next. Exciting and scary as hell, right?

Have you had a chance yet to check out the winners of the 4th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards? This year’s contest, a collaboration between See3 Communications and YouTube, awarded a total of $10,000 in grants (funded by the Case Foundation) to the best videos of 2009 found in the YouTube Nonprofit Program. Winners also received prizes from Flip Video and the Nonprofit Technology Network.

“Darius Goes West—A DVD in Every School” (above) was the winner in the Best Small Org category. Below are the winners in the best medium and large org categories, as well as Best Innovation in Video. Be sure to check them all out.

As much as I enjoyed these excellent examples of how nonprofits are using video to forward the mission, I have to admit that this PSA for seatbelt safety is still the most compelling thing I’ve seen on video this year. It continues to push my buttons every time I watch it.

Many thanks to Ann Handley for pointing out this sad example of how magazine publishers apparently plan to defend their turf: by irritating us into subscribing again.

Once again we’re reminded that radio didn’t kill theater. Movies didn’t kill radio. TV didn’t kill movies. The VCR didn’t kill TV. Etc. New technologies don’t kill previous technologies to make room for themselves, the wise suits inform us. We foolish mortals obviously don’t understand how media works. (Or work. I always get them mixed up.)

You see, people find room in their lives for the new medium alongside the old media they love. Isn’t that nice?

In other words, there’s room in my life for my digital media and my print magazines and newspapers. My digitally streamed and iPod-contained music. My Netflix-delivered movies and TV shows on CD and my movies and TV on demand via cable and delivered through Hulu. And of course my VCR, my LPs, my cassettes, my—oh wait, maybe there are platforms that get snuffed.

I hate to be mister obvious, but CDs did kill the VCR, digital delivery is killing music CDs, and the internet is kicking the newspaper industry’s ass. TV and theater audiences aren’t nearly what they once were, and a growing number of magazines have been put down by the very companies represented in this quaint little cheerleading video.

But I digress. Let’s stick to magazines for a moment. In a previous life I owned a bookstore that carried more than 5,000 magazines. I’d wager we were one of the largest and most diverse newsstands in the country, so I know a little something about the incredibly inefficient system that is newsstand distribution.

Print is expensive to produce and to distribute. It’s incredibly wasteful—somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirds of all those magazines you see on newsstands and in bookstores end up being destroyed when they don’t sell. And as much as I love them, magazines aren’t nearly as compelling a format as one that engages you by sight and sound, providing you with countless opportunities to dive deeper and deeper into the story if it interests you.

I think magazines will find their place in this new media environment, but it won’t be a return to the glory days of Look, Life and The Saturday Evening Post. Watching a group of aging New York execs extol the virtues of their medium while failing to acknowledge the huge paradigm shift that is occurring as they pontificate is just pathetic.

Too bad they couldn’t dig up some digital-savvy magazine folk to talk up the opportunities that the new media environment offers magazine publishers. Or how magazine brands might seize on digital platforms to deliver their content to audiences in new and innovative ways.

No, instead we’re reminded that magazines are doing quite well, thank you very much. And rumors of their imminent demise are greatly exaggerated.

It may not be apparent, but I love magazines. I love the look and feel. The portability. The sense that, as a subscriber, I’ve plugged into something special. (As an example, check out Garden and Gun.)

But as much as I love magazines and pray they find their place among the new media currently eating print’s lunch, I’m afraid we’ll look back on this video in another decade or so and laugh at the wrongheadedness of it.