The Hebe Hit List: Corey Latif Williams

Photo: Julian Essink Fotografie

In this new series of posts, we are featuring the people we are going to try and work with in the next year. We made a 'hit list' list last year, but kept it secret inside Hebe. We managed to tick off a lot of people on the 'Year 1 List' such as Hyper Island, Heineken, LeLook and IED Barcelona. Now we focus on the 'Year 2 List' and first up is one of our favourite RnB artists: Corey Latif Williams. 

I first started checking out 'Latif's' stuff in 2006, most noteably the tracks Who's Lovin Her Now and the brilliant U Think U Know. I could tell immediately Latif was something special and after further digging I discovered he had non-other then the absolute legend that is Teddy Pendergrass as a mentor. Around this time (2006-2007) I was really into Latif, Johnta Austin (thanks to Turn It Up) and Ryan Leslie (thanks to Used 2 Be) . These guys were bringing something fresh at that time and regular collaborations between them usually resulted in some quality stuff. (I will try to dig out some of my live mixes from this time and post)

Since then the Grammy Award Nominated Latif has been in the studio working on new material and also getting his writing on for a number of other artists such as Chris Brown, The Roots and Musiq Soulchild. He has also put out a number of tracks online such as I Love U, Promise Me and No Mystery. 

U Think U Know feat. Ryan Leslie by Corey Latif 

Hebe x Latif 

In our past few music events we have featured stuff from house music legends like the Back to Basics gang and up and coming Punk / Dub band ICS. We definitely want to do something with RnB in the coming months and Latif fits the bill perfectly: He is young, mega-talented and we can see some amazing potential for collaboration with some of our peeps here in the UK. Remixes, live-performances, creative collaborations with fashion designers and artists, the possabilities are endless.

We are planning Creative Encounters with cities in America next year and we will definitely be exploring the possibility of hooking up with Latif and getting him involved. After all he did provide the soundtrack for some of the music and fashion projects that eventually led to the creation of Hebe Media so it would be amazing for us to make that contact five years after we were introduced to Latif and get him involved with some of our projects.

Watch this space over the coming months and hopefully we will report back good news! In the meantime check out his new track below :)

24 hours in Stockholm

Stockholm is one of the coolest cities in the world, and is home to a number of our friends and collaborators. Lee and I headed over in August 2011 to start planning for a big creative clash between cool kids from the UK and Sweden.

We've added a new gallery charting our 24 hour trip.

We also took the opportunity to hook up with our buddies at Hyper Island, and to spend a few hours planning our next bit of work with them, which we will announce this week! They're in a temporary space at the minute, whilst their HQ is being updated, and it was a bit of a mission to find our way to the inner sanctum. It was well worth the effort though, and seriously inspiring to be immersed in the buzz of awesomeness emanating from crowds of digibods, all sharing ideas about ways to solve problems handed down to them by the likes of Google, Nokia and Oxfam. A talk was underway as we left and the last thing I saw were projected words, thrown onto the wall in front of 200 students: "disruption doesn't ask permission".

Team Léve did us the full tour of Stockholm city, and we did our own bit of disruptive thinking over a few beers. The agenda (once we'd got over Marcus's new face friend - beards seem to be having a major revival in Sweden right now) was all about our Creative Encounter between our networks from Stockholm, Leeds and Manchester. More to follow on this one very soon... we'll give you a moment of two to get strapped in first!

Look back at August

August was a bit of a crazy month here at Hebe! Watching and making films, partying / drowning at festivals, kick-ass presentations, cool events, photo-shoots, funny interviews, intriguing meetings, Stockholm, Manchester, London and much more. 

We have been working behind the scenes on a number of new projects including Creative Encounters in Stockholm, Taipei and Hangzhou. We have also agreed two new partnerships which we will be annoucing officially in the next week or so.

LOL! Leeds Online has made great strides in the past month and the Facebook Page alone is about to pass 47,000 members. We are also developing ideas for further platforms and content for the project which should start to go live during September.

UK Observing Diary is still kicking ass and attracting millions of views every month. The girls are in the final stages of writing their eagerly awaited first book. Clair is now blogging for Vogue Taiwan so big congratulations to her on that! Shang Ting is leading our charge in Asia and we are putting peices in place for some amazing Hebe events and experiences over there including a Taipei x London x Leeds Creative Encounter!

Looking back at the blog during August, we have been mainly taking pictures! Shang Ting's Street Style, Stacey's Week in Pics and an update and new gallery from Simon on his residency at Whitechapel Gallery in London. We also posted some of the (publishable) pictures from our Barca Crew Reunion including partying with Howard Marks and Louise Rennison. 

We are launching a couple of new features on the blog during September that we are pretty excited about. Plus after around 18 months of trying to figure out our 'about' page, we think we have finally figured it out (but dont hold us to it!)

Peace out for now!

Whitechapel Residency update

The information as material residency at the Whitechapel Gallery is now well underway, with a number of events completed and two free-to-take poster poems by emerging poets and writers now out in the world (you can pick yours up from from the Gallery if you are in London - we're looking for somewhere in Leeds too).

The last event, The Summer School for Literary Perverts, took place at the end of July with a group of around 25 people participating in a programme of activity led by artists, Simon Morris and Nick Thurston, over the course of three days. Guests at the School included Paris-based writer and translator Kate Briggs and Canadian poet Christian Bok. The programme led up to a public event on the last night, with a crow packed into the Gallery to explore the "immersive textual environment" created by participants, and to hear Bok talk about his Xenotext Experiment, through which he is attempting to genetically engineer a living poem.

Upcoming events include:

• a Big Ideas discussion with poet / writer and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith (you can see his recent performance at the White House here) and writer / critic Craig Dworkin, about their recently published anthology of conceptual writing, Against Expression.
• a series of events and publication launches as part of the London Book Art Bookfair. iam's founding  editor, Simon Morris, has written an extraordinary forward to the fair's catalogue, entitled Do or DIY, and Nick Thurston has designed a limited edition bag.

Planning for the Autumnal School for Digital Perverts is underway, and will be led by Christine Morris and I. We'll be exploring how the Internet and digital and social media are challenging and opening up the possibilities for writing and publishing. Watch this space for more information.

LOL! Leeds Online

For the past two and a half years we have been working on a special project: LOL! Leeds Online. This is a massive online network for the city of Leeds. The network is about to pass the 50,000 'member' mark and we thought now was the right time to share some of the history behind the project, some of it's achievements so far and to share our plans for the future.

History

Leeds Online was created around two and a half years ago. It started life as a network for the Hebe team and our friends in the city. Back then we had lots of different groups on Facebook, related to the various events and projects we were involved with. For example, we had groups for small geographic locations in Leeds (Villages, city centre groups etc) and other groups created for taste / lifestyle (club nights, music genres, sports). We noticed a lot of these groups were not well connected with one another despite the fact their members were talking about very similar things. We decided it would be really interesting to try and create some kind of super-network on Facebook of our friends and subsequently, their friends. 

We created a 'Fan Page', or so it was called at the time. We wanted to leave it as open and accessible as possible so we stayed simple and called it 'Leeds'. After inviting our friends the page quickly swelled to around 1,000 members and the plan was working; some of the conversations we had been having in seperate groups moved onto the page, which was really exciting for us. As we reached the 1,000 'fan' point the growth slowed, except for a couple of weeks when we grew by around 100 or so members. This project was never about the numbers though, it was about creating something really interesting; something with lots of interaction and discussion so we just kept going doing what we were doing. Slowly the numbers grew and after around 6-8 weeks we hit 2,000 mark. 

At this point the conversations were mainly 'light' - things along the lines of 'Did anyone see the game last night, what do we reckon?" and "What a nice sunny day, what is everyone up to?" but I think that is what people liked (and still like now). Most other groups and pages were just spamming the hell out of their members with offers and invites to events. We were not about that, we were trying to create the Facebook version of the 'chat down the pub'. 

Over the first year and a half the numbers swelled to around the 30,000 mark. The content was still very simple. We started to add in photos and other simple visual content to stimulate conversation and debate. For the first time we also started linking out to other content. This was a risky move as we had always stayed away from linking out of Facebook. But some of the things we wanted to talk about were explained deeply on other sites (such as Leeds Arena / Trinity / What if Leeds?) and we would ask a question based on the article / blog post we linked to.

The network was starting to become an influential voice around the city. People knew the network and were often surprised when they found out we were behind it. LOL! Leeds Online is definitely different to the Hebe blog that most people know us by. It is much more neutral and asks questions, where as on the blog we are much more opinionated and focused on what we want to achieve and say. With LOL! Leeds Online the idea is to give a voice and platform to the members of the network rather then push our own.

Photo from LOL! City Centre albumPhoto from LOL! Roundhay Park album

What has happened?

"If you could have one thing in Leeds City Centre, what would it be?"

This question created the most interesting responses we have had to-date. We asked it because the 'What if Leeds' consultation was happening at the time and we thought it would be useful to get an alternative view to those being expressed by strong voices of Leeds people and brands on Twitter. The answers we had back were both entertaining, enlightening and also highlighted a gap in what people knew about the city, something we had previously taken for granted. We had lots of people talking about needing an arena, something that had already been confirmed to happen. The news about the arena had been put out in the local press and other platforms but a lot of people were not aware. Another rather funny answer was the need for a KFC in the city centre. I am not going into the rights and wrongs of this but what is funny is that after all these years of not having one in the centre, there is going to be a KFC in the centre now, coincidence? Perhaps ;)

Overall some of the reactions on the page have been great. Leeds United and Leeds Rhinos related posts are always popular, attracting 100s of interactions. Photos are also very popular with the audience. Over the last couple of years we have posted lots of different status updates, pictures and links and it is fascinating to see the level of interest they attract. Things you would think would be popular may not be and things you think may be trivial or less important can attract a huge response. 

The page is also proving to be really popular with people visiting Leeds or people who have left the city. We have lots of people coming on asking questions about the city and what they can do here. We also have lots of people who used to live in Leeds reminiscing about the photos we post and talking about their own personal history with the city. Lots of people post their own content on the group too, including their own pictures and memories (Around 170 member photos uploaded so far). This is a big part of our plan for the future and it is great to see people contributing the page in their own way.

Recently we have begun to extended the network to other platforms. LOL! Leeds Online is now also on Twitter and Linked-in. These two platforms are quite different from but complimentary to Facebook. The Twitter profile started out as a a simple feed from Facebook but is now developing it's own personality and network. Linked-in is very different but we want to take the principles and aims of LOL! over to Linked-in and get a different view on the subjects we want to talk about. These platforms are young in terms of their development but we think they will turn into really interesting projects themselves. 

In terms of numbers the project has grown significantly and today stands at 46,290+ Fans on Facebook, 1790+ followers on Twitter and 280+ members on Linked-in. The Facebook page has around 600,000+ views a month and 2500+ interactions, which we think is amazing. 

The demographic of the group makes interesting reading too. The members are pretty much a split 50/50 between male and female. The age of the group is pretty young overall, but the older age groups are growing all time. The biggest age bracket in the group is 18-24 year olds who make up 37% of the members. You can see the complete breakdown below:

Views and interactions for June 2011Breakdown of the LOL! Leeds Online audience

The Future

We have always intended to keep developing LOL! Leeds Online and over the past month or so the project has moved onto the next level. 

We have created a visual brand that people can recognise and identify with. Previously the only branding was a picture of the city centre that was used as our Facebook and Twitter profile picture. The project has a new strap line - The city, talking. We do not want to push this branding too hard as that would be a massive shift, but we feel that it's the right time to start developing a visual identity. 

Content-wise, we have a really clear plan in place for the next 6 months and the first parts of this have already happened. We have added new themed photo albums which have already attracted loads of interest and sparked new conversations. There are plans to create lots of different albums of different areas around the city. We will also cover events and special projects that we feel are going to be of interest to the network. 

We are also excited about our plan to develop video content for the network. This is a big challenge but one we are ready to take on. The videos will be special features on various things going on in the city. We plan to interview interesting Leeds people and businesses, and cover important events. This content will then be featured on a new 'LOL! Video' tab on the Facebook page.

We have developed a number of partnerships on the page. Initially we had a news partnership with the Guardian Leeds but following the decision by the Guardian to stop the project, this is currently under review. Another media partner is the Leeds Guide, who we will be doing lots of interesting things with over the coming months. We are currently talking with other media organisations about how they can get involved with the project and add value to what we are doing and we welcome interest from any other organisations.

We are also bringing on board a number of partners for the page. These are businesses and organisations who support the project and its aims. We are interested in featuring businesses in the city who have strong links to Leeds and allowing them to showcase to a massive audience. We have already confirmed the first of these - Virtual FD, who have been involved in a number of projects in Leeds over the last year, including sponsoring Leeds Fashion Show.

We are also looking at ways to feature Leeds music. This is something we are hugely interested in and are currently exploring our options. LOL! Leeds Online should be used for promoting Leeds creative talent and the Leeds music scene is something we have a big interest in. 

Team Hebe is really excited about the future of this project. We feel it is unlike anything else in the city in terms of structure and content. It has taken a long time to develop LOL! Leeds Online to the level it is at today. Our next big challenge is to keep the project fresh, interesting and to add new elements without losing the aims and vibe that made the network as popular as it is today. As with any big online project there are going to be all kinds of risks, but we are confident LOL! Leeds Online is going to continue going from strength or strength in the second half of 2011.

If you want to get in touch about the project your first stop should be our Leeds Online boss, Stacey Hicken. Click here to send Stacey an email.