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Tag: sxsw

  • Did You Think Making Money Blogging Would Be Easy?

    Ever since blogging became popular, people have been trying to make a living at it. A few have been successful, but many eventually give up, or if they actually do continue to blog, they aren’t making anything. In a session I attended about blogging at SXSW last month, one of the panelists asked the question, "how many of you have a blog?" Nearly everyone in the room raised their hands. Next, they asked, "how many of you are earning with your blog?" Very few people raised their hands.

    That does not mean it can’t be done. It’s just going to take some work. We talked to Darren Rowse, one of the most famous people in the Blogosphere for making blogging profitable (he runs ProBlogger), who shared some tips on how to do it.

    Have you been able to make your blog profitable? Tell us about it.

    It’s Going to Take a While

    As Rowse notes, a lot of people jump into blogging thinking they’re going to start earning quickly. That is very likely not the case. He says it’s about finding a good niche – something you’re passionate about. Ask yourself what your interests are, and if your topics are things you can see yourself writing about regularly for years.

    When looking for a niche to take on, Rowse suggests doing  some  research on how many people are searching for that type of content. Use tools like Google Trends. Look at how many people are advertising on this type of content. Is there enough content to write about on the topic or will you eventually run out of things to say?

    Frequency

    As Rowse says, there’s no rule for how often you should blog. People have been successful writing a post a week or less. Still, your chances of growing success are increased along with your frequency. Think about it.

    "Every post you write is a doorway into your site," says Rowse. "If you’re only writing 52 posts a year, that’s 52 places people can connect with you through Google or through Twitter. If you’re writing 365 (one a day), then you’ve exponentially increased the amount of places that people can find you."

    Despite the beliefs of some, blogging is not dead, and it’s not dying by the hands of social media. Social media can be the blogger’s best friend for sharing content, and attracting more readers.

    Guy Gonzalez of F+W Media made a pretty good point in that session at SXSW: "Anyone who thinks Twitter is a substitute for a blog probably wasn’t a good blogger to begin with."

    Last year, we looked at some polls that Rowse conducted, finding that more people preferred to have more blog readers, as opposed to more Twitter followers. Granted, Twitter use has grown significantly since then, but I don’t know that the outcome would be much different now. A lot of bloggers are using Twitter simply to drive traffic to their blog posts.

    Either way, when it comes to content, it shouldn’t be about the format (blogging vs. Twitter). It should be about what you have to say, and whether you can convey that to the right audience. More on that here.

    Share your own tips for an effective blogging strategy.

  • Increasing Conversions Doesn’t Come From Slowing Things Down

    I probably don’t have to tell you that time is valuable, but is this something you are considering when it comes to your customers’ time?

    If you run an e-commerce business, you have to consider that consumers want to spend as little time on your site as possible. That’s not to say that they don’t want to buy from you. They just want to be able to do so quickly, and the more time you make them spend on the buying process, the less likely they are to actually buy from you (remember – the competition may only be a click away).

    WebPronews spoke with Brandon Eley, Interactive Director for Kelsey Advertising & Design at SXSW last month, who talked about how forms can slow users down on a site. He says a lot of people think they need all of this information about a user, but you really only need a couple things.

    Note: The above clip is from our raw live coverage of the event, and includes 3 interviews. Eley’s is the final one, and it begins at about 18 minutes in.

    He says, "For instance, if you have an email form and you’re collecting email addresses to put them on your email newsletter, you may ask their name, their interests, their email address, have some checkboxes – where did you hear about us…thinking that that’s just a normal field, but when someone looks at it, they say, ‘I don’t really want to spend the time to fill that out.’"

    "Reducing the number of form fields that you put on a form dramatically increases the number of people who will actually fill it out," he adds. "So only ask for the information that you really need. The same goes for a check-out process or a registration process. Make it as simple and concise as you can, and you’ll really increase those conversions."

    Eley, who wrote the book Online Marketing Inside Out, also says that in an e-commerce business he runs, they ran a promotion offering users free shipping: putting a coupon code on the site, and getting conversions. Years later, they did some user testing, and found that most users had problems even finding the coupon code and entering it. As a result, they made a change to their shopping cart system to automatically calculate free shipping/flat-rate shipping based on the order amount. Over night, he says, they saw a 50% increase in conversions.

    "It was an amazing change that ended up being a huge impact on the bottom line," he says.

    That is something to consider yourself. It also speeds the buying process up when consumers don’t have to hunt for coupon codes. While consumers love free shipping, you may want to do some testing of your own to see if you are getting it to them in the most effective way possible.

  • Reputation Management Isn’t Just About Playing Defense

    Pushing your brand’s message through social media as proven to be an effective strategy for plenty of businesses. That said, it has also proven to be a way for disgruntled customers to voice their disdain for brands and products, and spread that disdain virally throughout their social circles. Businesses are often quick to step in and defend their turf (at least businesses with interest in online reputation management), and respond to criticism.

    In a recent interview with WebProNews, Sam Ford of Peppercom made some good points about brand social media use:

    As Ford notes, a lot of brands think all they have to do for negative commentary is to respond to that commentary. It’s better to listen to what is being said, and if there is any merit to that, it may be better to actually effect change than just try to conserve your online reputation. If you can change things that need to be changed about your business, your reputation is bound to improve anyway. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a never-ending defensive battle.

    While reputation management is important to maintaining a respectable brand, don’t think of social media just as a way to monitor your reputation, or even just as a marketing tool. Think about it as an open door to feedback, and a way to gain ideas, perspective from users about what they want, and ultimately a way to better your business/product, which should hopefully lead to more stablility for your business in the long run.

    Social media may be on its way to becoming more convenient, if open standards allow for more cross-network communication. This should make it easier to listen. As Google’ Chris Messina suggested, it may become "a way to host distributed conversations across the web — rather than in several disconnected contexts." That means convenience for providing feedback will also be there for customers.

    A couple other points I’ll tie in here are that it’s easy to get caught up in the "next big thing" in social media, but it doesn’t matter what channel you’re using if you’re not listening to what the users are saying about your brand, and forums are probably one of the best places you can go to listen to what users are saying, particularly in specific niches.

  • Social Media Changes Event Planning

    Social Media Changes Event Planning

    It used to be you spent five minutes registering for an event, and then showed up on the big day, went to a few workshops, drank two free Coronas, and went home.

    Social media changes all of that, enabling events and their planners to have long-term, nuanced, shifting interactions with attendees.

    I gave a speech last week in suburban Cincinnati to the Mid-American chapter of Meeting Planners International, titled “7 Ways to Use Social Media to Create Buzz-Worthy Events”.

    My recommendations are based on my work with MarketingProfs and ExactTarget to add social frosting to their already fabulous events, and my experiences speaking at several dozen conferences annually.

    There’s a total of 39 specific suggestions in the slides, but here are the highlights.

    7 Ways To Use Social Media To Create Buzz Worthy Events

    View more presentations from Jay Baer.

    1. Engage

    Get your potential attendees interacting with you early on by enabling some measure of feedback or crowd sourcing on the conference programming. South by Southwest has always led in this area, with its “panel picker” process that turns over 30% of the programming selection to potential attendees.

    An easier way to do this would be to utilize something like Crowd Campaign, which gives participants a way to suggest content, and for others to vote on it. Or, you could go even simpler, and use Tweetpoll or PollDaddy (As I did when I asked you for feedback on potential new designs for this blog).

    2. Intrigue

    Almost all events have an official Web site. But very few (except for the geek events) take full advantage of all the free event listing and event management opportunities. At a minimum, you should create event pages on:

    – Facebook Events
    – Eventbrite (where you can also sell tickets, if you’re so inclined)
    – Upcoming
    – Linkedin (if it’s a business event)

    Sure, its a bit of a hassle to oversee all of these event pages, but your attendees swim in different ponds. Plus, every conference has the same MVP attendee: some guy named Google. Why would you pass up a chance to double, triple, quadruple your search engine listings?

    3. Invigorate

    As the event draws closer, you have to pull potential attendees off of the fence with content hors d’ouerves

    Start a Twitter contest. Online Marketing Summit does this well, awarding free registration to the conference for people that can correctly answer marketing trivia via their Twitter feed.

    Get your speakers to produce teaser content. A simple video would be ideal. However, some speakers (either full of attitude or devoid of tech savvy) can’t handle the video creation process. In that case, set up a blog on Tumblr (for free, in about 10 minutes) and have your speakers call the toll-free number and leave a voicemail. It will be automatically transcribed, and posted to the official event blog.

    Speaking of blogs, consider setting up a Netvibes.com page for the event, and creating a centralized repository for all blog posts by speakers. Netvibes.com is free, and all you need to do is pick a layout, and then subscribe to the RSS feeds of each speaker’s blog.

    Use Pitchengine to create multi-media enabled press releases, and send the URL for the release to any and all “maybes” on your list.

    Gather social information from all registrants. Create a Twitter list of all attendees, and update it each time a new person registers.

    4. Integrate

    Now we’re talking about the on-site experience, which is where social media can really add impact and get people talking.

    Pick a hash tag for your event, so attendees and remote watchers can monitor on Twitter. Shorter the better, please. Then, start your conference with an unofficial Tweet-up. It gets your likely content creators motivated and excited.

    I’m not a big fan of the geek conference staple of having a live, streaming Twitter wall behind speakers while they speak. Too distracting. But, I love having a big Twitter wall in a central conference location. This requires very little effort now, using something like Tweetwally.

    Create an event within the event by running contests on Twitter during the conference. My friend Dawn DeVirgilio at ExactTarget is great at this, with multiple small prizes per day.

    In this one, she hid gift cards around the conference, and took pictures of the locations. Whomever found it first, won.

    Here, she drove people to the Expo Hall, and awarding an unexpected, memorable prize – an upgrade to a hotel suite.

    5. Inform

    I’m a big fan of voting via text message, and I’d like to see more events more toward session evaluations through that same interface. Do we really need to be killing trees for written speaker evaluation forms, not to mention the environmental impact of hundreds of golf pencils.

    I also believe QR codes have huge potential at events, and SXSW put them on every name tag this year. Alas, until standards are adopted and the software is built in to smartphones, we won’t see widespread adoption. But, it will happen by 2012 for certain.

    6. Propagate

    Create your own media during the event.

    Via Ustream (and its amazing iphone app) you can stream live video of your event for free. Why wouldn’t you?

    Set up an official Flickr gallery for the event, and encourage attendees to take photos and upload them. Give prizes for Photo of the Day.

    Make a daily post-show podcast, interviewing speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Or, atomize that audio even more, and create tweets with sound using Twaud.io

    7. Aggregate

    Take the conference content and spread it as widely as possible. Your goal is to get the doubters that didn’t come this year to view that content and decide to go the next year.

    Take every conference presentation, and instead of just putting them on your Web site or emailing links to attendees, release them on SlideShare (one per day for maximum impact)

    Provide Twitter transcripts to attendees, and also post it to your various event pages. Backupify has a super cool new, free service called Session Tweets where you can automatically make a PDF of all tweets using your event hashtag.

    Reward good content. MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley staged a contest last year for their B2B Forum where attendees that created blog posts, video posts, photo galleries, etc and submitted them to the MarketingProfs blog were entered to win a prize – a free registration to next year’s event.

    Why couldn’t you do that? Why can’t you do all of this?

    Comments

     

  • Tips For Conference Attendees

    Tips For Conference Attendees

    Every year in March I make my annual trek to Austin to be part of the South By Southwest Interactive show, one of the biggest gatherings of people working in all aspects of the web in the world. For those who have been, they might describe the event as a simultaneous assault of information, networking and back to back parties. It has become the Everest of social media events, and in my fourth year of attending I realized that there are techniques for surviving a large event that I have been using and adding to each year. Here’s my list of the top 5 lessons that I would share to help anyone survive SXSW or any other large conference they may find themselves attending:

    1. High-res Photo Note Taking – One of the tough things about a big event (aside from choosing which sessions to attend) is how to best take notes to bring information back to your internal colleagues who didn’t attend the event, or publish your own take on the sessions. A technique I have started using is taking high-res photos of key slides from presenters. It takes just a second, and it’s the easiest form of note taking as the slide becomes a reminder of a key point to write about later. To augment, sometimes I will also think of taking notes in terms of Twitter posts (140 character max). That format forces you to just focus on the key points of a session instead of just trying to capture everything a speaker says.
    2. Brochure Collecting – At an event like SXSW, there are lots of sites and new innovations that are interesting and worth looking at … but time is limited at the event. Instead of trying to write down every URL, I collect their brochures or postcards and save them. That way I have a visual reminder to check out a particular site later when I am back in the office and have a free moment. Last year after SXSW, it took me a few months to get through looking at all the sites I found interesting – but I had a constant reminder of those sites through the stack of postcards and brochures and it helped me to stay organized.
    3. Plan B Sessions – Your time is valuable and at a large conference usually you will be drawn in multiple directions. At SXSW a common complaint is that for every timeslot there are several sessions that you might be interested in seeing. Ultimately, you need to pick one, but my long time advice for attendees of a conference like this has been that if you find a session is not useful after the first 10 or 15 minutes, you should feel empowered to leave and go to your "plan B session." For every time you go to a session, you should always have a second option – just in case. That way you can maximize your time and what you learn from the event, and be flexible enough to correct a mistake without wasting an entire hour (or more).
    4. Influencer Tracking – When you are not necessarily connected to every event or happening at an event, it can be tough to know what you might be missing. One useful way to track the events that you may want to be part of is by creating your own short list of people who you know will be attending all the best events. If they are active social media users (as they tend to be at an event like SXSW), you can see where they are headed and mirror some of your own choices of where to go based on this information. Even if they are not active with social media, this technique can work by talking to them or others to see where they will going.
    5. Eating Left Handed – As promised in the title of this post, the last tip is about eating left handed. Chances are, you just spent a good part of the day shaking people’s hands and accumulating some kind of unwanted germs (no offense to the people you met, but facts are facts). We should all get more diligent about using that hand sanitizing stuff – but if you are like me and usually forget to do it, a good technique to teach yourself is to always eat left handed (ie – with your "non-shaking hand").

    For those big event or SXSW veterans, feel free to suggest some other tips to help someone survive at a large conference in the comments … they might help me survive the last day of SXSW too!

    Comments

     

  • Why MapQuest Should Be Considered in Your Local Marketing Mix

    I don’t think too many people will dispute the fact that location is buzz topic of 2010 so far within the online marketing industry. Big players in this space include Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Facebook (soon), and of course Google.

    As reported earlier this week, Google noted that a third of its searches via the mobile web pertain to some aspect of the searcher’s local environment, and that they think of location as a "hugely important signal".

    As smartphone usage continues to increase rapidly, users are finding more and more options to find what they are looking for from their devices, with regard to their locations. As RateitAll President Lawrence Coburn recently discussed with WebProNews, consumer location-sharing has become a new kind of query.

    We’re seeing this becoming a much bigger part of local search and mobile map apps. Yesterday, Microsoft announced a Foursquare app for Bing Maps. At SXSW, MapQuest launched some location-sharing (via Facebook) features (as discussed in the following clip):

    Last month, we discussed driving traffic with MapQuest and its new search engine. While MapQuest doesn’t receive as much media attention these days as some of its competitors, the AOL-owned property is showing some ways that it is staying relevant, and as a result of mobile, that relevance may be on the way up.

    As MapQuest’s David Cole tells WebProNews, "We’re one of the most downloaded applications on the iPhone, despite the fact that other options are built in."

    If businesses aren’t considering MapQuest as a factor in their local search marketing, there are reasons to reconsider.

  • Blogging vs. Twitter: It Shouldn’t Be About the Format

    In case you were wondering, Twitter is not killing blogging. No matter how many times this is said, there is still this notion out there that blogs aren’t needed when you can simply express what you’re feeling to the audience who is interested through Twitter (or Facebook or other social networks). The fact of the matter is, yes – you can do this with Twitter or Facebook, but blogs exist just the same, and the blogs and social networks frequently complement one another.

    Social networks drive traffic to blogs. Blogs drive followers to social profiles. If a reader is interested enough to read your blog on a regular basis, there is a good chance they are interested enough to follow you on Twitter, and likewise if they care enough to follow you on Twitter, they may be interested in what you have to say on your blog.

    Scott RosenbergAt SXSW recently Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters said when he told people he was writing about the history of blogging, he got two very different responses. One was along the lines of "Blogging is dead. Why do you want to write about that?" The other was more like, "A history of blogging? How can you write a history of it when it is still so new?" Rosenberg’s anecdote represents the diversity of perspectives around blogging.

    Another perspective is that blogs and Twitter are like different kinds of paper. Asking, "Should I use a blog or use Twitter?" is like asking "What kind of paper should I use in my book?" said tech blogger Josh Fruhlinger on that same panel, who also made the most reasonable point on the subject: the idea that that there’s someone out there thinking, ‘should I be a blogger or a Twitterer or a Facebooker’ "makes me cranky," he said. In other words, don’t focus on the format rather than the content. 

    Guy Gonzalez of F+W Media made another great point: "Anyone who thinks Twitter is a substitute for a blog probably wasn’t a good blogger to begin with."

    Last year, we looked at some polls that ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse conducted, finding that more people preferred to have more blog readers, as opposed to more Twitter followers. Granted, Twitter use has grown significantly since then, but I don’t know that the outcome would be much different now. A lot of bloggers are using Twitter simply to drive traffic to their blog posts.

    As WebProNews recently discussed with Google’s Matt Cutts, people often seem to be fixated on the idea that some new service or technology always has to kill another service or technology, and in most cases, it just doesn’t happen that way. Blogging vs. Twitter has been debated for several years now. They’re both still living together in harmony.

  • Marketing Like Bing: The Farmville Example

    Marketing Like Bing: The Farmville Example

    There are many ways to market your business through Facebook. Some are obvious, and others not so much. One thing you can pretty much count on is that there are incredible masses of people on the social network that you can potentially reach, and in ways that will allow them not only to engage with your brand in a comfortable setting, but with other Facebook ecosystems they are already engaging with.

    A perfect example of this was recently demonstrated by Microsoft in one of the company’s many marketing strategies for its "decision engine" Bing. I sat in on a Bing panel this week at SXSW, where some of Bing’s marketers talked about a variety of ways they have used social media to gain users. One of these ways was through none other than Farmville (if you’re a Facebook user, and don’t live under a rock, you’ve at least heard of it).

    More people use Farmville than Twitter, according to Bing, and People are sharing all kinds of activities within Farmville itself. That’s why the company saw a great opportunity to experiment. What they did was offer a special offer inside of Farmville, that would give users free "farm cash" if they became a fan of Bing on Facebook, which would encourage continued user interaction with Bing. As a result:

    – Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
    – 59,000 people published the story to their news feed
    – Over 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds
    – In 24hours, Bing had over 400,000 new fans to keep

    Bing Says Farmville Bigger than Twitter

    Microsoft said its goals for engagement and social media efforts have been to:

    – Add or create relevant value (stuff that’s not even necessarily a Microsoft property)

    – Add depth to Bing’s personality

    – Lead someone to a relevant engagement with Bing or each other.

    – Yield passionate or emotional response from people

    – Be intimate and/or scalable (can we be both)?

    Bing’s Farmville experiment achieved all of these. However, the point of this is not that you should go out and immediately start a campaign through Farmville (although maybe it’s worth looking into if you think it’s a fit). The point is that there are more ways to harness a massive social network user-base (Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. for the week), according to Experian Hitwise). That’s a pretty impressive feat. Also consider that consumers favor brands who are on Facebook and Twitter, according to a recent study.

    Really, it’s not even about Facebook or Twitter. It’s about getting out there wherever people are, and this is where they happen to be at the moment. That may change by this time next year, or the year after, but the principle will not. We’re at a point in history where it’s never been so easy for consumers and brands to engage with one another. Perhaps even better for brands, is that it has never been easier to reach customers in places they choose to entertain themselves, and I don’t mean just get in their faces, but actually reach them and get that engagement from them.

  • A Look Back at SXSW 2010

    A Look Back at SXSW 2010

    As usual, this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference was a blur. Between the people, the parties, and purveyors of all things bacon, it was a twenty ring circus of the sublime and bizarre.

    There was no shatteringly impactful takeaway from SXSW 2010, as it seems we’ve entered a (sure to be brief) innovation lull. But, I absorbed many smaller lessons that will help guide my thinking about the conference, technology, and social business in the coming months.

    1. There is More Than One SXSW
    As the conference continues to grow (interactive registrations up 40% over 2009, to more than 15,000 total), attendee segmentation follows apace. There seems to be a distinct collection of sessions, parties, and hang-outs for the social media crowd, and then a completely separate collection for developers, entrepreneurs (and of course film attendees). Several people I know who live in the developer or entrepreneur world frequently checked in on Gowalla at panels and parties that I had never heard of, and were completely off my radar. The feeling of community, and “we’re all in this together” is slipping away.

    2. Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better
    If registration climbs again, SXSW organizers will have a real dilemma. This year, nearly every session had a line to get in, forcing attendees to arrive meaningfully early to find a seat. Thus, if the session was a disappointment (see below), it was impossible to jump into another session. Further, it was unlikely you’d be able to attend back-to-back sessions unless they were in the same room. Realistically, you can only catch a session in every other time slot, and that’s a problem. Even with more and more sessions being staged outside the convention center in adjacent hotels, SXSW cannot get much bigger without serious impact to the attendee experience.

    3. The Conference Isn’t That Good
    Whether it was their fourth time or first, every person I spoke to within my social media bubble (and I asked about 50) said the same thing – “I was surprised by how bad some of the sessions were.” More so than any other event I attend, SXSW is conference roulette. Evan Williams’ (co-founder, Twitter) keynote was so disastrous that an anecdotally estimated 80% of those in the room left before conclusion. South by Southwest is distinct in its programming methodology, letting attendees vote (in part) for which sessions will be staged, which unfortunately makes for a lot of extra-pithy titles with weak content.

    SXSW needs a much better vetting process if it’s going to retain even a modicum of educational value.

    4. The Periphery Exceeds the Core
    The best parts of this year’s SXSW largely took place outside the framework of the actual conference. The best parties are always those that are purposely kept quiet, and this year was no exception, with David Armano and Dell’s Richard Binhammer reprising the daytime All Hat party for social media types.

    But now, even the best content is beyond the official SXSW boundaries. The best sessions I saw this year were at Get Ready to Live, a one day “shadow conference” put on by BazaarVoice, BlueClover, and Chris Brogan. I suspect we’ll start seeing much more of this parallel programming to meet the needs of advanced practitioners.

    5. Location, Location, Location
    The biggest story of the event was the widespread usage of presence services foursquare and Gowalla. Check-ins were plentiful (as evidenced by the many thousands of people noting that they had been at the airport), and sessions describing how businesses can take advantage of local social were numerous. While the privacy issues continue to be a stumbling block for some, the ability of these services to enhance your experiences in real-time by showing you who’s nearby, and insider tips for each location is enticing. Both companies (as well as a second tier of contenders) are working on new features and ramping up their business development teams. foursquare has a very interesting new dashboard that shows business owners data about how and when people have checked-in. I’ll write about that soon.

    6. Twitter is so 2008
    The buzz about location came largely at the expense of Twitter, as most of the social media brigade updated their Twitter status infrequently, if at all. As I wrote about yesterday in “7 Reasons Not to Put All Your Eggs in the Twitter Basket” as your number of Twitter followers grows, the percentage of those followers that care about your current activity plummets. Thus, to avoid boring their followers with #sxsw tweet barrages, many people bypassed Twitter in favor of foursquare or Gowalla.

    7. Scan Me? Not Yet
    I had high hopes for the emergence of QR codes (the newfangled bar codes that allow you to instantly access a Web site or rich media). At SXSW, each attendee had their unique QR code printed on their name badge. Smart phone-toting attendees could snap a photo of each others’ code, and instantly follow one another within the my.SXSW social network. Largely, it didn’t happen.

    Whether it was the darkness of the bars, the dorkiness of pointing your camera at someone’s chest, or the limited shelf-life of following someone on an event-based social network, most folks at SXSW snapped a couple of codes, and then shrugged.

    I maintain that QR codes will eventually be as huge in the U.S. as they are in Asia, just not yet. Start-up Sticky Bits exhibited at the conference, and their version of QR with custom content, integrated statistics, and crowd-sourced notes may have real promise.

    8. Social Data Firehosing
    In contrast to the conference at large, I was delighted by the exhibition this year. Larger space, more interesting companies, and better production overall. Several companies I visited are working in the field of social data collection and analysis, an area where we need to make much progress to fulfill the promise of universal social media adoption.

    9. Social Integration
    Maybe I just heard what I wanted to hear/preach, but there seemed to be a lot of chatter among returning attendees and experienced social media types about integrating social media with other marketing and/or customer service elements. Again, this is an incredibly positive sign, as we can’t treat social media as a unicorn when it’s really just a horse. Good news for my clients at ExactTarget, who got a lot of SXSW tongues wagging with their pre-conference purchase of enterprise Twitter management company Co-Tweet (whose CEO Jesse Engle I was delighted to meet).

    10. Social Specialization
    There was much talk among the social media consultant set about the need for the industry to deconstruct social media. As David Meerman Scott acknowledged in his session Tuesday, “What does social media even mean?” It’s become a fuzzy catch all for everything from customer service, to customer experience, to customer relationship management, to content marketing, to word of mouth. This level of vagary is useless.

    We need to start getting specific about social media services and capabilities, and talk about the components of social media, not “social media” as a whole.

    11. It’s About Retention
    I was heartened to see that with a few exceptions, most of the conversations, exhibiting companies, and sessions at SXSW positioned social media as a way to engage with current customers, rather than as a way to drive awareness or first-time sales. I hope that we continue down this path, and focus more on the social, and less on the “media”. There was also a lot of talk (especially among the big brands) on operationalizing social media, and creating true best practices for how to thrive in a real-time world where every customer is a reporter.

    12. Star Power
    As the number of social media “celebrities” increases via book publishing, widespread acknowledgement of skills, or personal delusion, the difference between the good people and the assholes becomes codified. People like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are name-brand consultants and speakers because they have great ideas and articulate them well. But more importantly, both of them (and many, many more), genuinely care about people. Chris is incredibly kind and approachable. And Gary put on a mind-blowing display of people passion at his keynote, standing at the front of a cavernous ballroom, shaking hands, hugging, and thanking all of the many hundreds of attendees.

    Conversely, there were several moments of high school flashback-inducing douche baggery that are more common with the conference getting so big, that VIP sections and secret invites have become the norm. I’d say “you know who you are” but obviously, you don’t.

    13. Experience Trumps Interruption
    If nothing else, SXSW is an experiential feast. Everything about it is super-sized and intense, like Hulk Hogan + Red Bull. But despite its many shortcomings, I’ll be back. And it’s not because of the parties, or the sessions, or the corporate sponsors. It’s not about anything that’s on your calendar or in any way tied to the norm of interruption marketing.

    What makes SXSW special is the accidents. The kismet. The little things that you’ve never seen, and won’t again. Off the top of my head: Chatting with Julien Smith about the pros/cons of book co-authorship; being handed free bacon by a kid (also, free bacon soap from Sweet Soaps); being a Karaoke backup dancer; talking hockey with Marcel Lebrun; watching dueling theramins (one on fire) at the incredible Man or Astro Man reunion concert; and Mike Corak eating Habanero chili with jalapeno topping, and Jason Falls footing the bill.

    If you come to Austin expecting it to be laid out if front of you, for it all to make sense in an orderly, pain-free fashion you’ll leave disappointed. But, if you embrace the randomness and connect your own dots, you’ll learn a lot about the industry, the people in it, and maybe even yourself.

    See you next year.

    Comments

  • Spotify on the Future of Music Delivery

    I sat in on the Future of Music Delivery Keynote interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and author Eliot Van Buskirk on the last day of SXSW Interactive. Buskirk’s covered the digital media industry for ten years in various publications. This keynote was not nearly as crowded as the Evan Williams one was at the beginning, but definitely kept a lot more people hanging around through its entirety.

    The first part of the keynote was essentially a product demo for Spotify, and I can’t imagine that an hour of that would’ve kept people around (nothing against the service itself), but things got more interesting once it turned to more generalized conversation between the two on stage, about where digital music is going (if Spotify is in fact where it’s gong). 

    Spotify is quite popular in Europe, but has some licensing issues to work out before it can work here in the U.S. Ek says there could be slight changes made to Spotify for an American release if that happens. They are working on the next generation of Spotify, and pre-install deals will likely be key for the service’s continued success. Ek says right now, you can go in and pick up a smartphone, it comes preinstalled with Spotify and you can get three to six months.

    With the exception of the iPhone, most lack really good media players, says Ek. A lot of people use Spotify as a media player on Android/Nokia handsets, he says, and if you’re a BlackBerry user, you want it to work with that too. "We want to enable your library on all of these devices," says Ek. "We want to make music like water."

    Daniel Ek of Spotify at keynote at SXSW on Future of Music Delivery

    One of the more interesting parts of the keynote was when Van Buskirk took a question from someone on Twitter about Spotify’s advertising – something along the lines of if somebody listens to a lot of down-tempo music, will Spotify start filtering ads by mood?

    He says they have targeting, and they continue to learn more about users, and more and more brands are discovering Spotify. "We’ve seen a lot of promising results with advertisers who have included artists," says Ek. He says click through rates have been 3, 4, and 5%. "If you look at traditional metrics, that’s super high."

    As far as the question asked, Ek says, "that’s definitely something that we want to do."

    You can figure out brand preferences, and if people are in the same demographic (like live in same place, listen to the same kind of music), they might get a different ad if they drive a BMW vs. an Audi, he says. He also says the ad model’s "getting better every month."

    On another note, Ek thinks playlists are the new mixtape. With Spotify, among other services, they can be shared with others. Spotify users (of which there are seven million), he says, have a hundred million playlists, and about thirty percent of playlists are albums. "A lot of people say the album is dead," says Ek. "I disagree  – maybe pricing needs to be adjusted…"

    All in all, the future of music delivery, according to Spotify, appears to be that users should be able to access their music libraries from virtually any device (through the cloud), share playlists with friends, and they can subscribe and/or get highly targeted advertising.

    A lot of work remains to be done as far as making this all a universal reality, but in a nutshell (at least with Spotify), this seems to be the vision for what’s to come.

  • Google’s Aardvark and Reasons for Social Search (from SXSW)

    As you may know, Google recently acquired social search service Aardvark. I attended a panel on social search at SXSW this week, in which Max Ventilla, the service’s "Head Zookeeper" talked about not only the service, but what social search means for the industry in general.

    First off, here are a few Aardvark stats. Ventilla says 85% of questions are answered, and most in under 5 minutes.70% are rated "good" vs. "ok" or "bad". 45% of answers lead to cross-talk among users. Over 50% of users have answered a question. I’ve often wondered about that one myself. When a person uses Aardvark to get a question answered, they are also called upon to answer questions for others. I’ve been curious as to how often new answer-providers are created, considering time has become such a valuable resource these days. The average query length is nineteen words vs. less than three on Google.

    Social Search panel at SXSW (with Max Ventilla toward the right)According to Ventilla, reasons for social search include:

    – Users want personalized responses to questions

    – Most content is still locked in people’s heads

    – Each individual network is growing exponentially

    – Social intimacy makes info actionable

    – Questions about how to spend your time and money are subjective

    Ventilla says the company has learned that intimacy (more than authority) facilitates trust. In addition, social context is different than social graph, and is frequently sufficient, he says. A few other conclusions they’ve reached are that speakers want to know who they’re addressing, people don’t need artificial incentives to be helpful if there’s no friction involved, and people don’t like receiving random questions, but they don’t actually know what’s in their profiles.

    "We wanted to create not a product, but a contact," says Ventilla.

    An interesting question was brought up by an audience member – something along the lines of, what if you want to know the best place to buy an engagement ring? How can you make sure the recipient of said ring wouldn’t get that query? Ventilla expressed interest in such a system. In fact, he referred to it as "the holy grail." He also says there are other ways to find this kind of info that are "probably better than Aardvark for the time being."

  • Is Wikipedia on the Road to Becoming the Next DMOZ? (SXSW)

    There is no shortage of interesting sessions going on at SXSW Interactive in Austin, but one that was especially interesting was "Can Wikipedia Survive Popular Success and Community Decline?" – a presentation from USC Professor of Journalism Andrew Lih. The session explored factors that contribute to the declining rate of Wikipedia entry editing, although Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation told WebProNews a few months ago, that growth in editing had slowed, and the number of editors was just flat, and not declining.

    Either way it’s ceratinly not a money issue. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t appear to have too many problems raising money. "Every year, the number of people donating to the Wikimedia Foundation has increased, and the total dollar amount has increased too," Gardner told us. Google alone recently donated $2 million. Not that the money goes to editors (this is where it goes).

    It’s quite interesting that Wikipedia’s success has come at the price of a community decline (even if in just growth). One of the biggest reasons there has been such a drop off in new editors is that it has simply gotten harder to edit entries. That’s not just because of exclusivity reasons. It has actually become more technically difficult to edit entries over the years. There is a huge usability issue, and this is much of what Lih discussed.

    Lih talked about how the editorial language has gotten more vague over the years. Wikipedia used to flat out ask people to edit articles. Then it eventually got to where "anyone CAN edit."

    Another factor he mentioned is that of eventualism – the belief in the Wikipedia community that people will eventually fix articles. Someone else will get to it.

    Yet another factor is that there are way more rules than there used to be. It’s not that this is necessarily a bad thing. As Lih says, there is kind of more resonsiblitlity for Wikipedia to be up to quality standards now, as it has become one of the most popular sites on the web, and is often at the top of Google search results. But with more rules, comes less ease and in some cases, less enthusiasm.

    If a potential editor does want to go through with playing by the rules, they have to go through an extensive interrogation process in which Lih says they are asked twenty to thirty questions.

    Perhaps the biggest reason people don’t want to edit Wikipedia articles is that the markup on the actual edit pages has become much more complicated over the years. It used to be simple, and most people could easily figure it out, and now, as Lih explained, it looks like a SQL database. He referred to a usability study from the Wikimedia Foundation, in which every user struggled to get a basic grasp of the editing interface. Users largely failed to make edits correctly without repeated attempts and efforts. Not even the most tech-savvy participants were able to do it right.

    Lih presented the idea of looking at lessons from other communities. He focused specifically on DMOZ. "DMOZ chose to place editorial control in the hands of a small cabal of editors, and in doing so made the directory opaque, unresponsive and outdated – the editorial policy of DMOZ killed DMOZ," he said.

    Possible scenarios that could play out, as Lih suggested, include a slow, steady quality decline, flagged revisions leading to a quality increase, the inability to update in a timely manner, or the trickling in of spam, PoV/non-neutralcontent.

    There is much research being put into Wikipedia and it’s continued success. Google’s relationship with Wikipedia (whatever the extent of that may be, Lih simply calls it an interesting one and pretty much leaves it at that), appears to be helping keep Wikipedia in the forefront of search results for many, many queries. That’s now though. Things change. There are other Wiki-style information sites out there, some of which have much more user-friendly editorial processes. Is it possible that Wikipedia will go the way of DMOZ?

    It has become easier for researchers to obtain more data about Wikipedia in the last few years, and researchers are exploring a variety of ways to improve the process. Perhaps Wikipedia will be able to correct some of its issues before they snowball too much.

    Read our interview with Gardner here.

  • Liveblogging: Twitter CEO Evan Williams Keynote at SXSW

    We’re here at SXSW Interactive waiting for the keynote with Twitter CEO Evan Williams who will discuss "The Next Generation of Social Media." There has been some speculation that an announcement of Twitter’s ad platform could occur at this event, but that may or may not happen. We’ll see.

    Either way, I’ll be liveblogging the keynote below. Please forgive the inevitable typos.

    Williams will be interviewed by Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab."

    Liveblogging starts

    02:00:  Still waiting…

    02:01: Introduction beginning…

    02:03: Here we go…

    Evan Williams announces…A new platform for integrating twitter into websites: it’s called @anywhere

    Signin using twitter id, your own publications can be followed starting with amazon,huffpost youtube yahoo,….a bunch of others.

    Umair asks – if i’m at newspaper and i want to read one of fav columnits

     

    ev: @anywhere reduces friction – not strict rules lleaves alot of innovation up to devs and third parties…a lot to be done with it

    easily tweet from column itself. you may just want to follow the columlnist….straight from byline

    "one of the things we’ve found with twitter is discovery is one of the hardest challenges…"

    twitter is very easy way to keep in touch.

     

    Umair: what are key benefits to site?

    ev: give you connection back to users that you didn’t hav before – twitter drives tons of traffic, so should reslt in more followers for a site than just sending out links…

     

    hopefully result in more people who are your fans using twitter, talking about you content…

    you can bring in users’ tweets into your site, and create a sub community with it

    Umair: people and organizations build stronger relationships?

    about lowering barrier to that according to Ev.

    03:13: Ev: We’re still focused pretty much on how do we create the best experience for users and businesses…

    How do we create a business out of this? There’s tons of business users on twitter today..

    We just want to make that better, easier, and faster.

    What is Twitter? Maybe the right question is what is twitter evolving to?

    It’s always been a difficult question to answer. We think of it as an information network to help people discover what they care about (in the world)

    You can follow the flaming lips if that’s what you care about….you can be smarter and make better choices…that’s valuable…

    its like saying "what’s the internet?" it’s about who you are. what you need at the time.

    02:16. As we grow, one of the things that becomes painful is having a lot of centralized decision making and forcing poeple through slow processes, so we have teams and try to give them the resources they need…

    Role for interacting with teams?

    I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code…I personally like to get inovled in product and strategy…what we should be doing…the nitty gritty, work wth product teams. half my time. the other half think about company and right culture internally…

    been thinking a lot lately about how to scale the company and adopt the characteristics we want…how to define these characteristics..paralllel between service and the company we want to create – openness big value of twitter . transparency. a company that behaves by that as well. easy to say and harder to do as you grow…

    02:19 Openness means a lot of things. we debated whether openness or transparency is the right word. you can let people see what you’re doing, but a door lets people come in and mess with what you’re doing ..users have taken twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. ….we’ve encouraged and supported that. a core part of being open.

    Your basic assumptions are usually wrong. "Openness is a survival technique."

    We talk about nine assumptions you should have one of them is assume there are more smart people outside the compay than inside. it’s a key thing to remember as you get bigger…

      02:21:   Deals with Bing/Google first guys we shared full stream of public twitter data with. a lot of debate…people inside twitter…if there’s all this data that could be highly moentizable., does it make sense to give this data away? We came to the decision by going to the principle by how do we create the most value for the user….the reason google/bing could help that – ther’es valuable knowledge within the twitter network. there’s a lot of valuable tweeting that people don’t necessarily see…it’s a way to bring more valuable to the tweets.

    02:24: It was a tough decision to come to….big partners aren’t who they want to limit it too..announced a couple weeks ago that they would license the data to other partners…

    One of the exciting next things to happen with the ecosystem …creating core experiences that fill holes in user expereince…sharing photos, shortening links, apps, etc.

    Real businesses built off twitter – cotweet,etc. we know twitter can be used for customer support, but twitter.com interface isn’t built for that. cotweet recently got acquired who wants to focus on that more.

    We’d love to see much more focus on creating those deep experiences.
     
    "We’re pretty open." THere is some control we need to employ. if we were completly open, it could hur the users in time….it has to be managed a lot – being open and having an open api makes it much easier to build apps to spam twiter. sending cease and desists every day to spammers – using the twitter brand…

    One reason third parties are so important – a lot of people falling for these guys’ tricks…we have to assert some kind of control.

    02:29: An email i recently got…to support – someone in chile thanking twitter for helping communication…this is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important to make twitter reach the weakest signals in the world…because twitter’s so simple….sms still really important to us…

    We’re really happy we’ve been able to get sms coverage…not as easy as just providing a service on the internet.

    02:21: To me it comes back to is someone getting value out of twitter. if they’re search google and they come upon a tweet and get value out of a tweet, we consider them a user…ther is a curve for adoption. "we have a pretty wide definition of user." we’re trying to lower the barrier…at the beginning a lot of focus was on telling the world what you’re doing…now we’re getting to the point where there’s something interesting on twitter for almost everybody…mentions flaming lips again…critical that it’s a two way medium, but this could be as simple as a retweet or a reply…

    02:35 Press secretary of the white house started using twitter in an authentic way from inside the white house in a way that you wouldn’t usually see things….official channel, but they’re using it in a new way. "very fun" to see.  It’s about reducing the walls beween people who have a lot of influence and the people they influence. That’s the most profound promise of the Internet, and we’re riding the wave I started on ten years ago with blogging…"

    02:41: There’s more and more stuff every day you may want to follow and search for…our goal is not just to maximize that. We understand that people have limited time/attetion. We have no interest in increasing just the amount of time you spend on the Twitter site. "If anything, we’d like to decease it."

    The open exchange of info has a positive impact on the world…

    02:46: The obvious stuff will be just signing in and tweeting more stuff, but there’s another level of value created by lowering frition (@ platform)

    If the channel helps the business get better, that tha’s very powerful.

    02:49: If you live on the web, you’re used to having a relationship with companies/services you use..

    A lot of people walked out of this keynote. I’m pretty sure the guy next to me fell asleep. No joke.

     

  • How the Crowd is Changing the News (SXSW)

    How the Crowd is Changing the News (SXSW)

    Here at SXSW, we attended the session "CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?" At the end, one of the speakers asked the crowd, which they thought it was. Almost everybody responded with the former, while maybe one or two raised their hand for hype.

    I think it’s pretty clear that citizen journalism, the real topic of this discussion, is changing and has already changed the face of media. There are varying opinions on if that is for better or for worse, but the very fact that these opinions are able to be voiced is a testament to the stength of the crowd.

    On the panel were Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook, Lila King from CNN.com, Jason Rzepka from MTV, and Joseph Kingsbury of Text100 Public relations.

    Much of the conversation was centered around trust. Who can you trust? How do you know you can trust them? How do you know these citizen reporters don’t have an agenda? Things of this nature.

    Cashmore says brand still plays a role in trust, and that you should have some level of skepticism when a story comes from something like Twitter (assuming you are unfamiliar with the source). His point is accentuated by the fact that here at at SXSW, a massive Twitter hoax regarding Conan O’Brien was perpetrated from Digg’s SXSW party the other night.

    "People need to become more educated consumers of news" and "learn what you can trust and what you can’t," says Cashmore. That is probably easier said than done, and possibly asking a lot of the average person that doesn’t reside inside the news industry, but he’s right. If people don’t want to be misled or misinformed, they need to not only consider the source, but acknowledge multiple sources before totally abandoning the grain of salt.

    This actually reminds me of something Andrew Lih said in another session I attended this past weekend about Wikipedia. His advice to journalists (as well as students) was that there is "no better starting point" than Wikipedia, and "no worse ending point."

    Cashmore made a point about Wikipedia in that it is controlled by a few people, so it’s not exactly the crowd like Twitter is the crowd, or like the Blogosphere is the crowd, but I think the point runs parallel. A tweet may be a great starting point for a piece of news, but it should not be the ending point in acceptance of fact.

    The crowd is there for balance. The more viewpoints that are available, the more a reader is able to take away from a story. When points are debated, more info is revealed, and even if some of that doesn’t sit well with you, you can use your own judgment to assess where you come down on the subject at hand. This comes back to Cashmore’s statement about becoming a more educated consumer of news. Perhaps we only need to strive for a better educated public in general, and the quality of so-called citizen journalism will grow.

    That should be easy.

    For more from SXSW, check out our exclusive interviews at live.dev.webpronews.com.

  • Liveblogging: SXSW Keynote: Valerie Casey

    I’m sitting here in Exhibit Hall 1 waiting for the keynote to begin. I will be liveblogging/paraphrasing what is discussed (please excuse the inevitable typos).

    Bio from the SXSW Booklet: Valerie Casey works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services to transforming organizational processes and behaviors….She is the founder and executive director of Designers Accord.
     

    Liveblogging starts:

    2:05: Introduction begins…

    2:07: Delighted to be here…..despite the fact the interactive community has been absent in conversation about sustainability…the commuinty will take the greatest leadership role moving forward…

    Narrative

    I find that a lot of the interaction designers are fixated on narrative and story telling ….you can take any story from film/literature/politics…and plot them on the axis of good fortune/ill fortune and time from beginnign to end

    03:11: You can take any story from test to John Grishm, or Jennife Anniston…

    Shows three different graphs.

    Things you see in the news all the time – heart wrenchign pictures: child sitting in ewaste dumps

    gives stats about these stories…horrific

    Shows image of baby albatross, taken on midway where albatross mate…the finding of these babies…nothing has been done to them….the mothers were flyign out around the ocean to find food for their babies, and they mistook pieces of plastic for food and fed them to their children…grotesque…perverse to think about the effect we’re having on bio diversity…

    political corruption….

    Why does a salad cost more than a big mac (slide)

    it’s because the usda – the food triangle supports one version of a recomendatino and the government does somthing entirely different…millions of dollrs through lobbyists going to meat and dairy….out of control agricultural indsutry…

    Bizarre corruption between health and politics…

    Burn pits in Iraq/Afghanistan….set up by gov. contractors like haliburton..

    02:28: Shows picture of Haiti devastation – scientists linking natural disasters with climate change…

    Talks about more political corruption….snowballing effect of sustainability

    What are we supposed to do with all of that? "It turns out you don’t have to kill yourself."

    Designers Accord to respond to doom and gloom…

    bringing the creative community together, we can look at sustainability …bring optimism…there’s no one of us that can make real change by ourselves.we have to depend on collective wisdom.

    personal accountability to colletive accountability.

    Share my stories about not only my successes. industry ishellbent on successes….talk also about failurs nd compromises…thats what collective action is about.

    Not just  a digital network….we have town hall meetings….i want the ability to ask questions…

    Each week in case studies in fast company – tell the story of sustainaiblity…not about a checklist its about a constant struggle…

    try to educate product/interaction/communiation designers, and architects…

    School by Design initiative (open source)

    try to think about taking sustainabilit out of ghetttoized….

    639 design firm adopters, 33 educational adopters, 32 corporate adopters, 100 countries, six continents, all design disciplines

    despite fact that media still talks about sustainabiliy in very green terms…

    the truth is that the converstions become much more complex and interesting….

    someties miss the point.

    even if you’re in the interactive community…

    02:26:  We have to recognize that there’s a consequence for everything we do.

    I believe its the interactive community thats going to lead this movement next. thinking about systems problems

    A system is more than the sum of its parts.

    02:30: We cannot just focus on one part…it has to do with environmental, cultural, economic, etc.

    Feedback delays plus bounded rationality equals design traps

    Bounded rationality – i can only make decisions based on the knowledge right in front of me. barely looks at other groups or teams.. a design trap is when you design for the symptom rather than the problem – looks at dell studio hybrid. – I am a supporter of what dell is trying to do, but it’s a classic case. misses the point that we should not be designing another desktop computer…when will we stop thinking that less bad is good.

    There is no such thing as a side effect.

    Sometimes we arbitrarilly design what we’re resposnible for…global taco shed – students went to a taco truck and decided that each one of them would be responsible for tracing origin of ingredients..all for one taco had traveled over sixty four thousand miles….there’s this underlying movement that says local is better. global is bad….but what these students did is also discover that salt and cheese were local, avocados were from chile…they combatted the idea of the polarity between global and local by looking at embodied energy in each ingredient. they learned a lot when comparing them.

    02:36 Creating the right measurement of success

    The Gross National Product 

    U.S. indicator of prosperity – but that indicator has nothing to do with health and wll being  and relationships. out of sync…all sorts of inconsistencies

     02:40 Selecting the correct lever for change

    IN systems thinkng – people identify the wrong thing to change when theyr’e trying to change something.

    mythology is all about lone inventor and silver bullet – they don’t really exist….we continue that mythology and we need to change the rhetoric we use…

    Talks about Naked Pizza…

    02:44 The priority is to use the scale of concept to tackle people on their own turf…

    what is the lever we use? the counter-intuitive one ?

    Enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior…

    She says she’ll tweet references for all the stuff she’s talking about….probably a good idea to check those out if you’re interested….(to understand her points better)

    02:47 No difference between a structure and the behavior that comes from it. when a new president comes in and you have all these hopes for change, and nothign really changes…its because the structure hasn’t really changed

    02:48: Talks about HUB…

    02:49 Issue – attention cycle : degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action

    Rising of public awareness about a problem…when the public starts to get greata attention around an issue, there’s actually a point where the degree of product action is inversely correlated…

    When you get a couple of hundred thousand people interested in a topic it has a tranquilzing effect…people think i don’t need to do anything because there’s already so many people doing it…

    people believe someone else is looking after it.

    A system is a collection of elements and interconnections that ar e highly organized to achieve an overall goal or purpose

    if you change the purpose of a system you can effect change….

    the interactive community is the one to do it we are architects and product designers and communicators all wrapped into one.

    How can we change the narrative? What would happe if your purpose was oriented toward cultural sustainability instead of commerce? 

    What if social media was actually about social impact?

    The interactive community is the connecting tissue…

  • SXSW: Some Options for Making Money From Your Online Videos

    At SXSW, Rob Millis and Will Coghlan of the newly launched Dynamo Player talked about different routes online video producers can take to try and make a buck. While the discussion ultimately led up to the duo’s demo of its new product, it was not above representing some different options fairly. The two talked about some of the pros and cons of advertising, such as:

    Pros

    – Fosters dramatic growth (financed first forty years of TV and last 15 years of Internet content)

    – Blip.tv and YouTube define a stable market

    – Reliable high quality programs…

    Cons

    – High value advertising demands high value programming (production). Costs a lot up front – higher costs to return

    – Content can be unreliable, too hot to handle, or simply unappealing to advertisers. Short films, docs, r-rated or controversial content can’t get high value CPM.

    – Advertisers can’t depend on a certain number of viewers

    – Random advertising can damage brand while paying little to nothing

    – Must have very, very large audience

    – Can put a plane crash next to an ad for Delta or something to this effect

    So the question is, will people pay for video online? They talked about how a lot of people are already doing just that through services like iTunes, which the pair say "changed the marketplace."

    When deciding whether you want to ask people to pay for your content, you should ask yourself the following questions, according to Millis and Cohlan:

    – What content do you pay for now?

    – Have you ever quit halfway through a payment or subscription process arrangement?

    – How often do you click away because of pre-roll ads?

    – Are you willing to download software?

    "Asking your audience to pay for your content is about eliminating these ‘why bother’ factors," they say.

    Then ask yourself:

    – How do you want to sell your content?

    – Does it need to happen now or are you willing to wait for  approval?

    – How much do you need to charge, and how soon do you need to get paid?

    – How much info do you want to ask your viewers for?

    – How technically savvy are you?

    – How important is image quality?

    – Do you want your viewers to go to your site to watch or somewhere else?

    – Do you want to be able to embed your video?

    – Do you want to allow your viewers to share?

    – What kind of content do you have – serial, one off, short format, feature length?

    – How much publicity do you want/need?

    "Ask these questions before you commit to a solution," they say.

    One option is what they refer to as the Ze Frank model. This is a show that used drop.io to package shows that are otherwise free, and sell them together, so viewers can take them and easily watch them on their iPods.

    Another option is to work with a partner like re:frame or NewVideo, which will work with you on getting stuff into iTunes or Hulu.

    Then there are sites like MyContent.com and IndieFlix. With MyContent.com, you get choices like free streaming, rental streaming, and selling through the site as a paid download. They are your partner, and they only pay you after costs are covered. They have a revenue share deal. MyContent.com will take 35% after costs, and they charge a small monthly processing fee, according to the Dynamo guys.

    With Indieflix, you can upload content through them, and sell it as a DVD or make it available as a paid stream, but they’re fairly selective about their content.

    Another option they discussed was Amazon’s Create Space. Advantages of this, they say, are that Amazon’s a leader in cloud computing – they can store and serve content more efficiently, and at a lower cost, they are a well-recognized brand, and they’re connected to a lot of TVs and living rooms. They’ll list films on IMDB for you, and stream stuff to the XBox. However, they take 50% of royalties, and you can only suggest a price for your video.

    Then there are YouTube rentals, a system Google introduced not too long ago, at Sundance. They let content creators set the price and viewing window, and they have the obvious huge advantage of social media for promotion. It doesn’t hurt that YouTube is also the second largest search engine, behind Google itself.

    YouTube lets you use Google Checkout, which is easy enough, and content streams quickly. You need to use an AdSense account, and as you may know, Google is not up front about how much revenue sharing they do, although it’s supposed to be "the majority".

    You can read about Dynamo’s own option here.

  • Microsoft Talks Google’s Privacy “Fails” at SXSW

    At the keynote today at SXSW, Microsoft‘s Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google’s privacy "fails" with Buzz. The topic of the keynote was the relationship between privacy and publicity, and she certainly covered much more territory and social media in general, but it was interesting that Google Buzz was essentially the first thing talked about.

    A lot of people will love Buzz, and will use it, but that doesn‘t mean Google didn‘t mess up in terms of privacy, she said. She says that the company did nothing wrong technologically (there were multiple ways to opt out), but that Google managed to find the social equivalent of the "uncanny valley".

    Danah Boyd Keynote at SXSWi

    Google got in trouble by integrating a public facing system inside of one of the most intimate (Gmail), she said, adding that a lot of users believed Google was exposing their private email, even though this was never actually the case.

    Google also assumed that people would opt out if they didn‘t want to participate, she said. She said she gives the company the benefit of the doubt, but she can’t help but notice that more companies are starting to think it’s ok to expose people and then back pedal once people flip out.

    She said she kept meeting users who thought if they opted out, it would cancel their Gmail account.

    With regard to Google’s handling of the situation, Boyd says they "foolishly" told users what they wanted to hear rather than asking them what they wanted to hear.

    Make no mistake, the point of the keynote was much larger than pointing out Google’s failure, and it was quite a thought-provoking talk. Still, one can’t help but notice the excessive amount of jabs at Microsoft’s main rival, and emphasis placed on a very young product (the remainder of the speech’s focus was mostly placed upon Facebook and Twitter, with a little bit of Chat Roulette).

     

  • Liveblogging: Danah Boyd (Micosoft Research) SXSW Keynote

    Liveblogging: Danah Boyd (Micosoft Research) SXSW Keynote

    I’m sitting here in the exhibit hall at SXSW getting ready for the opening remarks keynote, which is getting ready to get underway. It will be delivered by Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research

    Her SXSW Bio: One of the world’s foremost authorities on social networks, boyd works at Microsoft Research New England and also serves as a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

    Note: Please forgive he typos that are sure to occur in this liveblog. Also keep in mind that this is paraphrased.

    Liveblogging starts:

    02: 08 She takes the stage.

    2:09 Humbled to be here.

    SXSW first and foremost about the people…passionate about what they’re doing. there’s a lot of trouble that goes on but that’s part of the joy.

    2:10: Have a good time, but avoid the tequila….

    I’m a social media researcher….spend most of my time trying to understand how people use social media in their daily lives. reflecting how to make that material public. blogging for 13 years. believe in being an activist.

    What keeps me up at night is how social media transforms society.

    Goal: sit back and think about a specfic set of puzzles. All of you are seeing how these tools are shaping society….

    Intersection of privacy and publicity.

    2:12:  privacy isn’t dead. people very much care about it online and off. what privacy means may not be what you think. it’s about control…understanding a social setting. and context. how to behave. understanding what the architecture will let you do….

    people feel they don’thave control and they feel violated.

    Recent privacy fail: Google Buzz

    A lot of people will lvoe buzz and use it, but it doesn’t mean that google didn’t mess up in terms of privacy.

    They’re aking a hit.

    2:14: Gives background of how buzz works….

    2:15: NOthing the buzz team was technologically wrong. there were all sorts of opt outs….shows a slide referencing "F— you Google" …

    Deconstruct what acutally happened:

    2:19: Talking about engineers looking at "ASL" in chat rooms…there’s something radically different than responding than going into their profile and looking.

    Ask users to share with their friends….It’s not the idea of getting that info. it’s the ritual of letting them know how the info will be acquired.

    Google managed to find the social equivalent of the uncanny valley…

    Personal networks are when you talk to people about what they spend time with

    Personal – listing contacts, etc.

    Behavioral – networks with people in the same room.

    What Google did was collapsed these…

    Just because people put material in public doesnt mean it was all meant to come together and be aggregated.

     

    What they did wrong:

    1. Google got in trouble by integrating a public facing system inside of one of the most intimate (gmail)….juxtaposing private with public…a lot of users believed google was exposing their private email..this was never technically the case, but it created confusion. people flipped out. google had to spend a lot of time and pr…

    2. GOogle assumed that people would opt out if they didnt’ want to participate. gives google benefit of the doubt, but cant help but notice that more companies think its ok to expose tremendously and then back pedal…

    Easier for users to flip out rather than to actually go and undo things…

    I kept meeting users who thtought if they opted out, it would cancel their gmail account.

    You need to ease them in. give them a way to understand…

    THey "foolishly" told users what they wanted to hear rather than asking them what they wanted to hear.

    Just because people want something publicly accessible doesn’t mean they want it publicized.

    Shows slide of Onion article mocking Google

    2:23: We see gossip being spread in all sorts of ways. We don’t always navigate privacy with people so well…we hold the architcture around us accountable. The Walls have ears. there is always the possiblity of eavesdroppers.

    Talks about being in a cafe…public place, but you expect certain types of people to show up. you expect people from the community but not your high school cheerleading team. When people asses a situation, they develop menal models…they need to know so they know how to "best behave".

    online environments are not nearly as stablized…we’re still trying to work through what we can trust in terms of architecture and people.

    02:27: Digital architecture doesn’t just have ears. also has a mouth. people aren’t good at managing when the system changes the rules on them.

    Recent privacy fail number 2: facebook’s privacy changes in december

    Gives a rundown of all of that.

    02:28: Asking non techy users: tell me what you privacy settings are? I have yet to find a single person who actually knows. That’s not Good knows. Facebook is known for privacy.

    Tells story of teen with abusive father…set up facebook account…found out that her content was made public. is her fear of what might have gone wrong acceptable? 

    Big difference between publicly available data and publicized data. I worry about this and who will get caught in the crossfire.

    PII vs. PEI PII – personally identifiable information vs. personally embarassing information

    02:32: When tech comes along and changes rules, it’s a huge fail

    Conversations that happen in social media are public by default, private by effort.

    What we see with teens is that they’re thiking through this. THey make conscious decisions.

    Critical to realize effected by age, life role, etc.

    People make material publicly accesssible, but they dont’ want the world to see it. there are poeple that they specifically don’t want to see it.

    02:36 "Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy."

    People can adjust to change, but you have to think about those who get in trouble during the process.

    Compares to paparazzi. Shows slides of britney, lindsay lohan and Princess Diana.

    Publicity: Twitter has become a space for celebs, micro-celebs, fans of all sorts. 

    FB is about communicating with the people you already know, Twitter started out this way, but it’s evolved to follow people who have audiences…

    02:39: Issues of intimacy good and bad…cause of trouble for some  celebs. Talks about Miley Cyrus quitting Twitter. Quotes from her rap about it.

    Twitter isn’t just for celebs and followers. People all over the globe engage with it as specific kind of public space.

    two kinds of trending topics: those that start because of external factors, and those that are generated on the site.

    02:41: Trending topics also highlight that not all users are who you think they are. Shows Justin Bieber…in trending topics for 18 solid days. For all the conversations of teens not tweeting….all of his followers not all that old.

    Lot of racism and classism on Twitter. Shows slides of white people using the N word…

    Many have benefited from speaking in public on social media. It’s easy to take things for granted: the right to challenge authority, the right to be heard, seen, the right to go into public without losing my rights, etc. seek pub of own accord…not what everybody gets. Imagine you just left an abusive relationship, but you’re biggest fear is that you ex will find you….how public are you willing to be?

    People kicked out of jobs, military…

    Your kid’s teacher: how public is she allowed to be online? Religious? Drinking? ALlowed to be a lover and a friend in a public setting? What we see over and over agin is that we expect the teacher to always be the teacher, but that’s a lot to ask from people.

    02:46: Public by default: not the great democratizer. 

    Seeking attention, part of what makes engaging online fun. Quotes Jon Stewart The internet’s like Meixcan food. every sites’ got the same ingredients, just different combinations…talks about chat roulette.

    02:49: Why do people engage on this site? What you’ll find is heartwarming and heartbreaking. Many there for entertainment, boredom, find pesonal connections, etc. THere are others hoping they might find a celeb.

    It’s an odd combo of privacy and publicity…situated in private spaces (bedrooms, offices), but becomes publc. People are having fun geo-locating people who are participating.

    CR may be a fad, but the idea of pub andprivacy getting mixed up is not. New rules will complicate the boundaries…

    Tech will continue to make a mess of both.

    You need to know that there is now magical formula for understanding privacy and publicity.

    If you expose people, you may lose you reputation…

    For marketers, its an exciting time of publicility, but just because you can see somebody, doesn’t mean they want to be seen by you. And just because you think you’ve interpreted something, doesn’t mean you’ve done it right.

    Wants to see more policy grounded in what’s going on. A lot of numbers can be misinterpreted. What we’re measuring isn’t peoples’ sense of privacy. Wanting privacy isn’t about having something to hide. It’s about wanting control…

    There are good reasons to engage in privacy and good ones to engage in publicity.

    A lot of people are sharing more publicly to maintain other stuff privately.

    Think about people’s intentions and what it means to invade their privacy. Make sure you’re creating the future that you want to live in.

  • Possible Scenarios for Google in China @ SXSW

    After a long morning of travel and SXSW preperation, WebProNews popped in on an interesting talk from writer and tech watcher, Kaiser Kuo (here’s his bio) about what might happen with the whole Google/China situation, which has essentially remained at a stand-still for the past two months, since Google made its famous announcement about a "new approach to China."

    Kuo said right out that he doesn’t have the "inside dope" about what’s happening within Google, but he did give a fascinating history of Google’s efforts in China, as well as a look at some possible scenarios that could play out. Some he listed specifically, include:

    Worst Case Scenarios

    – Blow up: Google decamps in atmosphere of acrimony
    – Google.com blocked, possibly even Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Buzz, etc.
    – All google products exit from China (partnerships with mobile companies end)

    Moderate (and according to Kuo, most likely) Scenarios

    – Google.cn shuttered
    – Google.com, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. unblocked
    – Google research and development and sales continue to operate in China
    – Google continues mobile partnerships

    Best Case (and not very likely, but not entirely far-fetched) Scenario

    – Google.cn stops censoring and still stays in china
    – Pigs fly over a frozen hell scape

    The session was not without a sense of humor, but that’s not to say Kuo doesn’t take the situation very seriously. In fact, he appears to be putting much more time into looking at the big picture than anyone I’ve seen (at least those outside of Google itself and the Chinese government).

    Kaiser Kuo Talks Internet Censorship in China and Google's future in the country Perhaps the most interesting part of Kuo’s talk was about how  the wetern media’s attention focuses more on one of two kinds of censorship going on – the "Great Firewall" censorship, where many sites are blocked at the ISP level. He says it’s fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop" the Great Firewall through proxies and VPNs. The other kind of censorship going on in China, according to Kuo, is the kind that really matters. This is "self discipline", which is carried out by Internet companies themselves.

    If companies don’t follow through with this kind of censorship, they face the risk of being shut down, having servers seized, etc. Some have been shut down permanently in the past, and others have been shut down long enough that they lost most of their users anway.

    "Sad story indeed," Kuo calls it.

    As far as the Google situation, "Google is going to have to shit or get off the pot," says Kuo. "The ball is very much in Google’s court right now." Bejing realizes it has nothing to gain by pushing Google on the issue or being openly hostile towards the company, he says.

    This week, Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong reportedly had this to say: "I hope that Google will abide and respect the Chinese government’s laws and regulations. But, if you betray Chinese laws and regulations, it means that you are unfriendly, irresponsible, and you will have to pay the consequences." He also said, "What needs to be shut down will be shut down, what needs to be blocked will be blocked."

    Kuo says this is just more of the same stuff we’ve been hearing from China for the last 2 months.

    Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said, "Something will happen soon." Days ago, Google gave a congressional testimony saying they still intend to stop censoring results, but as Kuo notes, shutting down Google.cn would be a very involved process with large logistical challenges.

    Update: The Financial Times is reporting:

    Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.

    Stay tuned to WebProNews.com for more SXSW Interactive coverage as the event continues into next week. Watch for live streaming interviews with industry professionals at live.dev.webpronews.com.