> See: The
Conversational
Inauguration
I might be a little insane, but there’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now than here in Washington, D.C., for Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities. Yes, it’s bone cold, terrifically crowded, expensive and a little crazy, but I needed to experience this piece of history in the flesh, not just on CNN. As my new friend (we spent two hours together on the shuttle yesterday) “Fur Coat Lady” says, “I wanted to be a part of the mix.”
My goddaughter and her parents have joined me from the UK for the events. (When I figure out how to load video, I’ll show you their video explaining why they made the long trek.) We’ve succumbed to the rampant consumerism and bought several commemorative items (my dad NEEDS that plate) and even paid $5 to take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Obama (capitalism is still alive and well). We also toured the newly renovated American History Museum and saw the Star-Spangled Banner and Dorothy’s ruby slippers. The Smithsonian museums all have extended hours…and clean bathrooms.
The highlight of the day was the “We Are One” inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial featuring Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar, Garth Brooks, James Taylor and John Legend among others. Stevie Wonder did a fun number, and Beyonce did a nice job with “America the Beautiful,” but why Jack Black was a speaker, I have no idea. U2’s rousing “City of Blinding Lights” and Obama’s speech brought the biggest cheers. Ok, so maybe I wasn’t that close and had to see the whole thing on the JumboTron, but there was something electric about being there among the diverse, shivering, hopeful crowd.
If you’re curious, the Metro has been running efficiently so far. The workers have been infinitely patient with all the out-of-towners, helping us buy tickets and steering us the right way. Still, Sunday’s crowd–while mind-boggling–is apparently nothing compared to Tuesday’s test.
So, I’m off to conquer the city for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. President-elect Obama, in his Renew America initiative, is urging everyone to join a service project today. Find an event in your area here.
> See: The
Conversational
Inauguration
I survived—and loved every minute of it! (Sometimes I exaggerate, but maybe you can forgive me today.)
Despite the staggering crowds and frostbitten toes and fingers, I feel incredibly lucky that I could be an eyewitness to President Obama’s inauguration, such an amazing day in our nation’s capitol. It won’t be long before I’ve completely forgotten the travel hiccups and stressful moments when walls of people pushed against barricades; instead, I know I’ll more likely remember my mental slideshow of streets and ledges and walls and grass packed with excited, expectant faces.
Because of the numbers expected, media were cautioning that we should probably choose between watching the inauguration or the parade. We decided to head to the official inauguration festivities, hoping that an early start would at least get us in a decent view of the Capitol. We didn’t have tickets to the reserved sections, but we did make it as close as we could, snapped a few pictures, then turned back to camp out at a space on the mall near the Museum of American History. As the time ticked down to the oath of office and Obama’s speech, personal space went out the window and we all got a bit more neighborly. I’ve lived in NYC, but I’ve never seen that many people in such a concentrated space. (New Year’s Eve in Times Square is the only thing I’ve ever witnessed that might be comparable, and that’s only several hundred thousand people.) But no one seemed to mind the lack of elbow room as we waved our flags (provided by the cute lil’ Boy Scouts) and laughed and huddled and chanted and cheered.
Since my invitation to the ball was apparently lost in the mail, I’m headed for an early light’s out. This entire journey has been an amazing, festive party, but I—and all of us, so says our new president—have a lot of work to do!
We’ve shared with you five social media resolutions for this year, and now here are three follow-up questions every association executive should consider, whether your association is new to social media or you’re a Web 2.0 veteran:
1. How will you incorporate social media into association events?
Events provide associations a perfect opportunity to leverage the power and excitement of social media. There are so many ways an association can engage its members before, during and after an event with social media tools.
We recently received an award for the event work we did for our client the National Federation of Independent Business on their 2008 National Small Business Summit website. We used tools like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter to engage the Summit attendees and non-attendees through the creation of a dynamic site. We took unique advantage of social media and also provided a central place for all event-related content.
2. How will you measure the effectiveness of the association’s social media marketing efforts?
It’s great your association is experimenting with social media, but how will you know if your efforts are successful or what tweaks you need to make? Are members participating? Are there certain member groups that are more receptive to social media than others? Are you providing incentives? Are you connecting with potential member groups?
Just like your other marketing and communication campaign, an association’s social media efforts must be measureable. If you haven’t already established metrics, set some now. If you need help, contact us.
3. Should you partner with an outside media company to help meet your association’s social media goals for the year?
The economic environment we are in presents many associations with numerous challenges. Some of you are struggling with limited internal resources, tight budgets and employees without social media expertise. Meanwhile, your association has lofty communication and social media goals for the year. To solve these problems, many businesses and other associations are looking to partners like Hammock who can help you meet your goals for 2009.
The dozens of awards Hammock Inc. has won over the years for its design work attest to the talent concentrated in our art department. But in what well do they find inspiration for the seemingly endless flow of fresh, invigorating designs for our print and web work? Turns out, inspiration springs from all around:
Many of us here at Hammock Inc. have known about Twitter (and have been using it) for close to two years now. When we first signed up back then, we weren’t sure what it was, what it would do or where it would go.
Nowadays, you can probably throw a rock out of your window and hit someone who knows at least that it exists; maybe your target is even using it. (But please, don’t throw rocks out of your window.)
Many of us “tweet” as individuals, and Hammock Inc. (@HammockInc) also tweets as a company. (A tweet is your 140-character-or-less answer to the question “What are you doing?” It has also become a verb for Twitter users.) Over the last couple of years, we’ve picked up a couple of tips — from followers and those we follow, and from each other — about making the best of our tweets:
Good conversation goes both ways. Try to avoid simply throwing information out there, but be sure to join in on conversations that are already happening. If someone asks what movie they should see this weekend or what they missed in the latest presidential news conference, take 20 seconds and jump into the discussion.
Follow us on Twitter and join in on the conversation, whatever it may be about today…
At the end of last year, we used a Hammock tradition, our annual Hammock T-shirt, to celebrate our passions—and yours. What do T-shirts have to do with passions? The work we do for our clients helps them connect with the passions of their customers, members and others, and so we wanted to use our T-shirt project to show how personal passions create communities. We created a community for our clients and friends to share their passions: PassionCreatesCommunity.com. We invited them to send us a link, photo or video that would help encourage readers and viewers to learn more about their passion.
[Note: This article appears in the January/February 2009 issue of American Spirit magazine. Used with permission. To see a digital version of how the article appeared in the magazine, click here or scroll to the bottom of the page.]
Three decades ago, I married into a family whose members love furniture made during the early days of America. By merely tagging along on tours of historic house museums and trips to antiques dealers, estate sales and the occasional flea market, I grew to understand the subtleties of design and craftsmanship that provide clues to the style, period and origin of a chair, table or chest. Through the years, I grew more and more curious about the craftsmen who transformed the wood from the trees they found in the New World into utilitarian objects—boxes and stands on which we sit, store items, work or eat—as well as uniquely beautiful art that has lasted centuries.
Specifically, I grew curious about the men who made and sold Windsor-style chairs. Why the Windsor? Perhaps it’s the variety and ubiquity of the style. In portraits of founding families, for example, you can often see a distinctive Windsor feature—perhaps the leg of a chair—peeking out from behind fancy attire. The Windsor style was not limited to highbrow furniture you’d find in the formal rooms of the well-to-do. Chairs in this style could be found nearly everywhere in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, from chapels and schoolhouses to taverns and barns.
My curiosity about the early chair makers grew to the point that I decided to truly understand what these craftsmen were like, I’d need to make a chair myself. I decided to concentrate on a loopback (or, as some would call it, hoopback) side chair. I knew that decision would prove challenging because, previous to that, the only experience I had in woodworking was watching episodes of “The New Yankee Workshop” on PBS.
Fortunately, there is a small but passionate network of Windsor chairmaking enthusiasts around the country—and many have the patience and skills necessary to teach people like me how to make a beautiful chair of our own. (See “How to Make Your Own Windsor Chair” to find out where you can receive instruction on Windsor chair making.)
My seven-day—and 60-plus hour— adventure took place at the John C. Campbell Folk School in southwest North Carolina. (For more information about the school, see “Creating Your Own American Craft.”) Early one Saturday morning in July, I found myself with 12 other students standing around a pile of firewood. At least, that’s what it looked like to me. In hindsight, it seems odd that I was surprised we’d begin the chair-making process with logs from a recently felled white oak tree. But before that weekend, all of my previous Saturday morning projects had started with visits to Lowe’s or Home Depot.
I quickly learned that a key to making a long-lasting loopback Windsor is using hand-rived, or split, wood from trees that have grown on flat land. Such trees produce beautiful, long, straight grain—the secret sauce that provides amazing strength to the spindles (or “sticks” as the early chair makers called them) and “loop” of a Windsor’s chair back. Riving the wood rather than sawing it ensures long, uninterrupted grain lines. When steamed, bent and formed into the shapes of the chair back pieces—then cured and dried for an appropriate time—these delicate-appearing slivers of wood possess the strength to last centuries, if cared for properly.
Who’s Making Windsors?
The desire to make a Windsor chair knows no demographic boundaries.
Our 13-person group included—among others—a medical doctor, a State Department employee, a private investigator, educators, small-business owners, a corporate executive, a “period interpreter” at a historic house museum and a young woman who had graduated from college a few weeks earlier.
We came to the class with different skill levels, but each left with a beautiful Windsor chair. (The John C. Campbell Folk School may be called a school, but since its founding in 1925, the instruction has never been about competition or grades.) We were given the opportunity to make the chair with modern power tools (the school has state-of-the-art equipment) or with nonpowered tools traditional to the early 19th century. A few of the group went completely unplugged, except for the use of modern lathes. Early American chair makers used lathes powered by foot pedals, or, once the Industrial Revolution began making its way into 19th-century America, by waterwheel.
Even those of us who used tools such as power-drill presses to ensure correctly angled holes spent at least 30 to 40 hours of the week doing traditional hand shaving, shaping, carving and sanding on each individual piece that would be used in the assembly of our chairs.
The Chair-making Process
One of the reasons the Windsor chair proved popular—and ubiquitous—among 18th- and 19th-century Americans was its sturdiness relative to the limited amount of materials necessary for its construction. No screws or nails were needed, and the chairs could be made from a wide variety of lumber from trees growing throughout the Eastern Seaboard from New England to South Carolina.
What the chairs didn’t need in materials, however, they required in the skills of the maker. It is no small challenge to overcome the laws of physics necessary to make a delicate chair able to withstand the force applied to it daily by men, women and children through the course of decades, even centuries.
While the chair’s style originated in England, where artisans developed it into formal and ornate furniture, it became a utilitarian workhorse when it arrived around 1720 in Colonial America. Two humorous scenes in the Mel Gibson movie “The Patriot” make reference to the disparity in the quality of the Colonial Windsor and its fancy British cousin.
Before the Industrial Revolution, individual craftsmen worked alone making the chairs. If especially successful, a craftsman may have been assisted by an apprentice or journeymen chair maker. In those early days, the craftsman prepared each piece of the chair—the shaving and shaping of the spindles, the carving of the seat (or bottom) and the turning of the legs and stretchers.
In the early 1800s, Windsor chair makers began to, in a modern way of describing it, outsource some of the preparation of the stock pieces. Young assistants would prepare batches of sticks, for example. Soon, however, each step in the chair-making process began to be carried out by specialists with titles like “bodger” —- an individual who worked primarily in the forest cutting down trees and splitting logs into the wood stock, or billets, used to craft individual parts of the chair.
Connecting With Early Craftsmen
Using the same tools as the Colonial craftsmen—two-handled drawknives and spokeshaves—our class sat at traditional shaving-horse workbenches carving, shaping and sanding the pieces of wood that we would fit together days later. After several hours of shaving, your hands and shoulders begin to ache, but some time later, the pain goes away. The repetitive movement of shaving down wood is hypnotic, but it requires enough concentration to prevent you from drifting off into a daydream. In the same way Eastern religions suggest that stress can be controlled by being “in the moment,” much of woodworking’s repetitive tasks can be simultaneously physically taxing and mentally relaxing.
It is during these moments that you are transported to an earlier time. The chair becomes more than the sum of its pieces—it becomes a time machine. As I whittled, shaved, carved and sanded, I had the same sensation you have when climbing to the crest of a mountain and viewing a majestic vista. I got it. I could understand the labor, the hard work and brute effort that the Colonial-era craftsman exerted. But I could also feel the gentle way in which each artisan applied his unique touch to a hundred different places on each chair.
With an inch-deep layer of white oak shavings at my feet and sweat pouring into my eyes, it was finally easy to comprehend the craftsman’s pleasure at discovering this most practical piece of furniture is a work of art that will carry on his legacy. I felt that way about my chair, too.
Among the hundreds of funny stories that our close-knit group of chair makers shared was one about a student in a similar class years ago. Tommy Boyd, our instructor, recalled that on the second day of the class, the student said, “I could sell this chair for $700.” On the third day, he said, “I could sell it for $1,000.” The next day, the man said, “No way am I ever selling this chair.” And on the last day: “No one is ever going to sit in this chair.”
Making my own Windsor chair was like that. I can put a price tag on what the chair may be worth in the marketplace. But in its value for making me appreciate the craftsmen who first made it in Colonial America, my chair is priceless.
Sidebars:
How to Make Your Own Windsor Chair
While attending a weeklong folk school course is one way to learn how to make period furniture or other woodcrafts, you can also find a place near your home that offers courses in beginning Windsor chair making. Craftsmen, schools and woodworking retail stores provide a wide array of instructional options.
For a beginner, making a Windsor chair can take up to 50 or more hours, depending on the materials used and the techniques followed. Some courses take place during the evenings; others on weekends. There are even options for one-on-one instructional and mentoring programs.
A good place to start looking is the online directory found at www.google.com/Top/Arts/Crafts/WoodcraftWoodworking/Schools_and_Instruction.
Independent and chain woodworking retail stores also offer instructions. Woodcraft , one of the largest such chains, offers Windsor chair courses in nearly every one of its locations coast-to-coast.
These stores have learned it’s a good marketing approach to follow an old adage that goes something like this: Give a man a chair, and he’ll have a place to sit. Teach a man to make a chair, and he’ll be buying power tools for the rest of his life.
Folk Art Schools: Creating Your Own American Craft
Long a tradition in Europe—especially Denmark—”folk schools” began as a way to preserve traditional means of artistic, agricultural, musical and culinary arts. Today, the schools not only serve individuals in the immediate region, but they also attract visitors throughout the nation who participate in short- and long-term programs.
More than 830 different weeklong and weekend classes are offered year-round at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C. The school is named after the educator Campbell, who surveyed the people of the Southern Appalachians around the turn of the 20th century. Together with his wife, Olive, he worked to preserve the history of the mountain people and share the intricate crafts of the region. With a heavy emphasis on traditional regional crafts, music, dance and food, the school, founded in 1925, appeals to hobbyists, professional artists and craftspeople. The school makes it easy for anyone to immerse themselves in learning new skills and sharing old ones in the context of the rural, foothills setting.
The school’s Web site offers a complete listing of upcoming classes and programs, including several related to woodworking.
[Copyright 2009 Hammock Inc. Used with permission. Reprinted from the January/February 2009 issue of American Spirit magazine.]
If you are an association or corporate marketer who has decided that 2009 will be your organization’s year to join in the conversation taking place on the web, we suggest putting your toe in the water before diving into the deep end. But definitely get wet. Here are five resolutions to get you started:
1. If you haven’t already, set up accounts on these services: YouTube.com, Flickr, Twitter, GMail, FaceBook and LinkedIn. In later posts, we’ll be discussing each one in-depth, but for now, just make sure you have registered a username that is consistent across all of those services. Also, in later posts, we’ll provide you with about 15 other services to register on.
2. Purchase a digital camera small enough for a pocket or a bag: We’ll get very specific in a later post about which cameras to consider. But for now, just make sure you have a small digital camera that is always within arm’s reach. We have a saying here: “The best camera is the one you have when the picture appears.” The more bulky a camera is, the less likely you are to have it with you. Notice we didn’t say, “take some photos and upload them to Flickr.” At first, just resolve to carry a camera around with you.
3. Discover a wiki other than Wikipedia: We love Wikipedia, but unfortunately, it is so popular that many people think the term “wiki” means Wikipedia and therefore they miss out on the tens of thousands of other collaborative resources developed on a wiki format. Most wikis share some things in common, but they can differ drastically as well. Here are a couple of fun ones to explore: WikiHow, a collection of how-to articles and videos, and our favorite, SmallBusiness.com.
4. Write a review on Amazon.com: At some point, you’ve got to start viewing the web as something you don’t just read, but write to as well. We could suggest commenting on a blog or posting a “tweet” to Twitter, but around here, we believe the most meaningful content comes from your passions. If you love a book or song, write a few sentences why. You’ll feel like a champion when you hit that submit button. Promise.
5. Learn to search the World Live Web: One of the major challenges of explaining conversational media and the tools of social media is the notion that the Web is a “place” where people live and not a “medium” that people read and watch. We’ll be posting at length about “listening” to the web, but here are a couple of suggestions:
Subscribe to this blog, or visit often, as we’ll be sharing with you ways in which you can most effectively add your voice to the conversation.
Apparently (it’s all fuzzy now), a while back I added a comment on a story on Foliomag.com in which I said glibly, “This is the craziest time ever to launch a magazine, except for all the other times.” If you’ll notice, there were some big-time publishers featured in the actual story — and all I did was add that little comment.
I was just flipping through the current issue of the Folio: magazine and was surprised to see the first sentence in the cover story was that comment.
I’ve seen my comments, blog post quotes and even Twitter “tweets” end up in magazine and newspaper articles. I’m always happy when a reporter, writer or another blogger thinks what I have to say is worth picking up and passing along.
When I make presentations related to conversational media and the different ways in which individuals can now express themselves online, I’m typically asked how someone can get started. I always say: “Comment.” Commenting is easy and instant. And you don’t have to come up with a brand new topic to write about (although that’s not nearly as difficult as you think). Commenting is merely your personal reaction to, or clarification of, what someone else says. In other words, it’s what you do in “off-line” conversations.
So here’s the deal: Commenting on a blog post is quick and easy and it’s the simplist way for you to join in the conversation of conversational media.
[Note: A version of this post appeared on Rex’s RexBlog.com]
In just a few days, we’ll celebrate Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, an event that has always ushered in new leadership with great pomp and circumstance. We thought it fitting that American Spirit‘s January/February cover story chart the history of this event that is one part solemn occasion and one part big, festive party.
It’s interesting to note that President-elect Obama will be sworn in on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used. This issue also celebrates Honest Abe’s upcoming 200th birthday as we check in on the numerous historic sites planning commemorative events and look back on his legacy as a leader.
Furniture lovers–and wannabe craftsmen–will also enjoy this issue’s story on crafting a Colonial-era Windsor chair. Our very own Rex Hammock spent more than 60 hours building one during his week at the John C. Campbell Folk School in southwest North Carolina. Although the experience didn’t make for the most relaxing vacation, the process of creating something beautiful from raw wood proved to be an inspiring journey. Take a look at Rex’s full story, or view a slide show and some video of him building the chair.