Talking Digital Community Organizing with Ad Agency Planners

Mark Lewis is a very cool and interesting guy. He’s originally Belgian — though he sounds very British. He’s been in the San Francisco Bay area for many years now. He is Group Director for Brand Strategy at the San Francisco ad agency Venables Bell and Partners. (Check out their very funny and spot-on “Green Police” commercial for the Audi A3 TDI at their website — you might need to scroll through the commercials on their homepage to find it — they don’t allow posting to the individual video itself)Mark also started the Planningness conference last year. It quickly became a major hit with his fellow ad agency planners (the people who figure out what  the strategy/plan for what a company should do with their brand or message — before handing the case off to the “creative department”).Mark also taught Rassak’s Dylan Thomas in ad school… and Dylan’s been giving Planningness a little helping hand from the beginning with their website.This year Mark asked me to come out to Planningness and run a workshop on digital community organizing — a big topic for a lot of brands. The Planningness format is cool — after a talk by the speaker, the audience breaks into groups and has to solve a problem posed in the talk.I brought my little Kodak flip-like video camera and got some nice little clips of the groups in my session. You can see them below after my slide deck. My talk was on leveraging social networks to organize commnities. My assignment for the attendees was to pick a group they care about and think hey they could teach them tools so they could better organize their own communities.BTW, Mark blogs here at Planning from the Outside.