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Brand stories are no longer limited to blobs of text on "About Us" pages. Social media has given brands a platform to relay their story in multiple ways and to various audiences. At a recent South By Southwest Interactive Festival Panel, Becky Johns, CC Chapman, Charlie Wollborg and Karl Gude, spoke to educate the audience on how to build a visual storyboard that benefits their brands; in essence, how to not just tell a story, but how to tell a good story. Here are several tips to communicate your story and connect with your audience using photos, videos and design.

Social media is earning an increasing share of the global consumer's media time. Be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or any of the other platforms popular around the world, consumers are spending more time in these spaces. Brands need to be here. But before you start updating your brand status, tweeting or posting videos, you also need to work out just what you hope to gain.

hough they're not specifically branded as such, services such as Apple's Siri , the Wolfram Alpha answer engine, and Google's new Knowledge Graph all use semantics under the hood. The Semantic Web is a movement that aims to add value and utility to online information by structuring data in a way that both computers and humans can understand. The goal: computer systems that can understand and infer meaning - for instance, a computer system that knows the difference between an "organ" that is a musical instrument, and an "organ" that lives inside your body.

"Co-Creation allows companies to take the innovation process and turn it on its head. This methodology allows brands to take advantage of the growth of participatory culture and consumer influencers to navigate new market landscapes"

"Story telling such as of brand is analogous to chemical reactions. The presentation covers five lessons from this analogy"

In the world of technology companies, the "labs" concept and nomenclature found a friendly home. Microsoft Research has FUSE Labs, there's HP Labs, and Mozilla Labs, and let's not forget the once-mighty Google Labs (R.I.P.), among many others. Digging into the history of big tech "labs" would be the subject worthy of a book, of course, but in the context of this narrow post, it's worth briefly noting that for those that make things and are builders, every big company needed to have something like this for branding, recruiting, and to keep the innovation engine humming as their corporate parents grew larger and more bureaucratic.  Perhaps each one wasn't referred to as a "lab" explicitly in name, as Amazon has A9 and Google now has Google X. No matter the name, there's something powerful in the word that reminds us of the old chem lab and that spirit of experimentation.

Wikipedia defines a learning management system (LMS) as: "A software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, and reporting of training programs, classroom and online events, e-learning programs, and training content." What that means is that the right learning management system can help you better reach your training/education goals whether they are focused on continuing education, eLearning availability, synchronous or asynchronous learning, mobile learning, certification programs, or even eCommerce and more, learning management systems are designed to provide the features you need to make sure your unique learning goals are met and a positive ROI is achieved. An LMS is a branded, secure extension of your organization's training/education effort to deliver content and materials in an easy, professional, managed and accessible manner - for users and administrators. 

Social ads are increasingly assuming mainstream status, as brands focus on devising newer ways to engage user attention. While traditional advertisers focus on targeting users with contextual ads wherein ads are served on the basis of content, in social advertising factors such as peer and social influences as well as recommendations are taken into consideration for targeting users. Rapid increase in social media activities in the recent years has driven advertisers to take up social ads.

The crowning achievement of the semantc Web is the simple use of URIs to identify data. Further, if the URI identifier can resolve to a representation of that data, it now becomes an integral part of the HTTP access protocol of the Web while providing a unique identifier for the data. These innovations provide the basis for distributed data at global scale, all accessible via Web devices such as browsers and smartphones that are now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Yet, despite these profound and simple innovations, the semantic Web's designers and early practitioners and advocates have been mired in a muddled, metaphysical argument of at least a decade over what these URIs mean, what they reference, and what their actual true identity is. These muddles about naming and identity, it might be argued, are due to computer scientists and programmers trying to grapple with issues more properly the domain of philosophers and linguists. But that would be unfair. For philosophers and linguists themselves have for centuries also grappled with these same conundrums [1]. As I argue in this piece, part of the muddle results from attempting to do too much with URIs while another part results from not doing enough. I am also not trying to directly enter the fray of current standards deliberations. (Despite a decade of controversy, I optimistically believe that the messy process of argument and consensus building will work itself out [2].) What I am trying to do in this piece, however, is to look to one of America's pre-eminent philosophers and logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"), to inform how these controversies of naming, identity and meaning may be dissected and resolved.

"We are no longer a general purpose search engine," Kavanaugh tells us. Instead, Ask.com uses proprietary, semantic search technology to deliver answers from its own content banks, community, experts, and from all over the web.