We’re stoked to be a part of Savannah’s first ever Ignite event, which is coming up this Monday evening.

We’ve been digging the Ignite format for quite some time. If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it got started a few years ago by some smart Seattle geeks who were looking for a fun way to network and share ideas. Since then, Ignite has turned into a global phenomenon with chapters in cities across the globe.

Speakers at Ignite events get five minutes and 20 slides to share an idea, a format that keeps presentations moving along and fun. No death by powerpoint!

That will be the format for Savannah’s Ignite event, which is also part of Global Ignite Week. Events like Savannah’s will be going on all over the world next week.

The Savannah event will feature nine speakers on a range of topics from how rap and country music intersect to Foursquare ethics and the future of food.

We hope you Low Country creatives will join us. Here are the event details:
What: Ignite presented by Social Media Club of Savannah and SEED Eco Lounge, with support by BFG Communications
When: Monday, March 1st, 6-8 pm
Where: SEED Eco Lounge, 39 Montgomery Street, downtown Savannah
Cost: FREE
Click here for more details.

One of the big stories in social media last week was Clerk’s director Kevin Smith’s Twitter tirade after being bounced from a Southwest Airlines flight allegedly for being too fat to fly. As you might expect, there’s a lot of he said/she said insofar as the details of the actual incident are concerned. (If you are unfamiliar with this story, check out the related links at the bottom of this post.)

The goal of this post isn’t to take a side concerning whether Kevin Smith is too fat or not too fat to fly, nor is it to debate the fairness of Southwest Airlines’ policy concerning its personal space allocation for each passenger. This post is about the empowerment of the individual consumer due largely to social media and the aggregate power of internet search.

A Brief History Lesson

A little more than a decade ago, if an individual consumer had an issue with the way they were treated by a company their options were relatively limited: speak to a supervisor, write a letter, or call a customer relations hotline. And if the consumer was unsatisfied with the company’s response, they had little recourse beyond telling their family, friends, and co-workers about their negative experience.

Historically, companies have not had to worry much about bad word of mouth from individual consumers because the average consumer is limited largely by geography in his/her ability to exert mass influence. And although a disgruntled customer could phone or email others about their negative experience, the average person’s circle of influence remained relatively small; limited mostly to the people with whom they physically interact. In other words, in days gone by the price of pissing off the average consumer was relatively small.

Power to the People

Today, thanks to the power of the internet, it is relatively easy for the average consumer to acquire a much larger circle of influence. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the like have placed the power to reach the masses into the hands of the people, and the aggregate power of internet search has brought all those people together. It’s like having a thousand voices together in one room, whereas before they were like a thousand voices in a thousand separate rooms. Individually those voices may seem quiet and insignificant, but together they can be deafening.

Which brings us back to the Kevin Smith-Southwest Airlines debacle.

The Age of Accountability

Some have suggested that Kevin Smith abused his “social power” by continuing to trash Southwest Airlines online even after they apologized. As one blogger commented:

We EXPECT, DEMAND, WANT big and small from companies online – but when it comes to us, the consumer, we apparently get a free pass when it comes to RESPECT, UNDERSTANDING and RESPONSIBILITY online.

Unfortunately, I think this is a cop out. Not only is it too easy to vilify the foul-mouthed famous fat guy in this story, but it completely misses the point. This is a story about a consumer who had bad experience with a company. He was initially polite and went through all the traditional channels in an attempt to receive a satisfactory explanation for what had happened to him.

Ultimately, the traditional channels broke down and the consumer was left feeling wronged. So rather than take things lying down, Smith leveraged the means at his disposal to hold Southwest Airlines accountable. He refused to be marginalized.

Kevin Smith is not the first consumer to leverage the power of social media after being wronged by an airline (he just happens to be the first celebrity, which is why it made national news). Last year, musician Dave Carroll became a YouTube viral sensation after writing two songs about his experience with United Airlines (they broke his $3500 guitar and then refused to replace it). Certainly it can be argued that Carroll’s online approach was more “socially responsible” than Smith’s, however, despite millions of views on YouTube, Carroll’s plight never received much attention from national media.

Apology vs. Repentance

The last takeaway here is the difference between an apology and repentance. Apologies, for the most part, are worth very little. Apologies have become part of well-crafted PR campaigns. When a company or a celebrity royally screws up, issuing the obligatory mea culpa is part of what they do to make the situation go away. It’s what they do so that they can get back to doing what it is they were doing before the scandal.

Repentance, on the other hand, is a different animal. Webster’s defines repenting as turning from sin and dedicating oneself to the amendment of one’s life; to change one’s mind. That’s not the same as apologizing.

I submit that the reason Kevin Smith continued to berate Southwest Airlines online even after they apologized was that he wasn’t interested in an apology; he wanted repentance. And in today’s culture of Mel Gibsons and Tiger Woods and politicians of the week, can you blame him?

The implications for companies should be clear: talk is cheap. Don’t just say you’re sorry; demonstrate what you are changing to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Because if you don’t change anything, then you aren’t really sorry.

At the end of the day, this is my hope for the power of social media: that it gives power to individual voices; that it holds companies accountable for their actions. No one should be marginalized.

———————-

Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines links:

• Kevin Smith’s Smodcast #106 - Talks about the incident shortly after it happened. (Warning: F-bomb fest.)
• Kevin Smith’s Blog - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
• Southwest Airlines Blog - Part 1 and Part 2
• If you want to know anything else, Google it.

Savannah, GA–Award winning graphic designer DJ Stout is coming to Savannah from his base in Austin, Texas, to share his creative insights at the third installment of the Creative Seed Initiative, which is focused on bringing the brightest creative talent to Savannah to enlighten and encourage growth and discussion among students and Savannah’s “creative class.”

The Creative Seed lecture series is proudly presented in tandem by BFG Communications and The Savannah College of Art and Design and will take place at SCAD’s Trustees Theater, located at 216 East Broughton Street on February 25, 2010, at 7:30 pm. Admission is free and open to the public.

DJ Stout made a name for himself starting in the late ‘80s as the art director for Texas Monthly magazine, which was nominated for 10 National Magazine Awards and won three times during under his creative watch.

In early 2000, DJ Stout joined the nationally recognized design firm Pentagram as a partner. Since then, he has continued to push the boundaries of design in the creation of magazines, books, websites, and catalogs.

While at the art director’s helm at Texas Monthly he was recognized as one of the most important people in the world of photography as well, due to his outstanding eye in promoting the best photography and photographers in the pages of the magazine.

His work is in the permanent collections at a variety of museums and archives such as Cooper-Hewitt, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Library of Congress.

DJ Stout is a much sought after speaker and judge at design conferences around the world.

The Museum of Modern Tweets is the brainchild of artist Odessa Begay who takes a celebrity tweet and creates a piece of interpretive artwork around it. Celebrity tweetage, in Begay’s eyes, is an absurdly strange, colorful world full of unicorns, money, monkeys and spacey weirdness. As celebrities flock to Twitter and share their inner most thoughts with the twitterverse, it’s nice to see their navel gazing ramblings re-imagined in almost the same way as literal music videos: the imagery just seems to fit with the words in ways that the originators never imagined.

When I first saw Old Spice’s Super Bowl spot, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”, my first reaction was so… it’s The Most Interesting Man in the World (Dos Equis) meets Axe Body Wash? I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either. And since its debut I’ve actually come to appreciate the commercial’s sense of humor.

Whether you like the spot or not, what is truly impressive is how the spot was produced. Are you ready for this? The whole thing was done in one shot. Given the fact that the guy is in the shower, then on a boat, and finally on a horse, it’s truly an impressive feat from a production standpoint. Check out this video where the two writers, from Wieden + Kennedy, explain how the spot was engineered. Well done, gentlemen. Well done.

If you’re the kind of person who gets great ideas while in the bathroom, you have something in common with Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne. What you probably don’t have in common is a bathroom that complements such ideation sessions.

Design Milk describes the reason for this trippy, pod-like bathroom.

Wayne Coyne’s imagination is constantly running wild and this space definitely does not try to stop it. As Wayne says, he can get up in the morning and go from his “strange, artistic bedroom” and into his “strange, futuristic bathroom.” His dreaming doesn’t have to end when he gets out of bed.

From the vibrant colors to the whimsical feel, the design by FitzSimmons Architects is what I would expect for the man who crowdsurfs in a giant bubble and can wax on about what it means to live a truly happy and inspired life.

Don’t you wish your old concert t-shirts could live forever? Forever is tall order, but thanks to Hello Rewind, those old Motley Crue tees get the chance to embark on a nostalgia infused farewell tour. Hello Rewind recycles old t-shirts and makes them into cozy laptop sleeves. You send them your old t-shirt; they send you back a custom laptop sleeve.

The best part is not just that Hello Rewind takes something old and makes something new, but they also work with Restore NYC to teach job skills to survivors of the sex trafficking trade, many of whom emerge with no marketable skills. In fact, many of the laptop sleeves made by Hello Rewind are hand-crafted by sex trafficking survivors.

Looks like it’s time to go through the t-shirt drawer. I’m sure there’s an old Def Leppard t-shirt in there somewhere.

Well folks, the papers are signed and the divorce is final. “Music Television” will no longer appear in MTV’s logo, which was recently given an aesthetic overhaul.

Via the NY Daily News:

“We were really thinking about it in terms of having the brand and our talent living in the same space together,” Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and multiplatform creative projects, told The News. “If you watch the channel, you’ve seen that it’s definitely going in a new direction. We really wanted to see the logo featured in a new way, and this was really meant to be able to house all the great things that are happening at MTV at any given time.”

Those “great things” include non-music-based reality shows like “Jersey Shore,” “The Hills” and “Teen Mom.” So MTV should at least get some points for honesty in advertising.

The jury’s still out on what the “M” now stands for. Any suggestions?

It should come as no surprise that I’m a sucker for clean, functional design. I also love to cook. So since coming across this Gizmodo post, I’ve developed a serious case of kitchen envy.

This slick kitchen brings storage together with actual cooking space. Plus it provides things for the organic cooking geek in me: a compost area, spots to sort recyclables, and places to plant seeds.

Here’s another fun video and one that designers will especially enjoy in the ongoing Ignite series of five minute speed presentations that highlight the best of geek culture.

The Global Ignite Week is coming up the first week of March and we’ve definitely climbed on board around here. If you are in Savannah on March 1st then drop by Seed Eco Lounge at 39 Montgomery Street in downtown Savannah at 6pm for the first ever Savannah Ignite sponsored by Social Media Club of Savannah (the Savannah chapter was started by a few BFG’ers in order to get more people excited about the endless possibilities of social media and to bring like minded folks together for drinks once a month).

Keep it speedy.