SXSW is an extraordinary beast. Around 20,000 people attend hundreds of sessions across dozens of locations – and that’s before you factor in the networking breakfasts, late night parties and ambush marketing from guys dressed as sumo wrestlers. Oh and gigs by Jay-Z among others…
So after five days of dining at an all-you-can-eat buffet of insights, data, best practices, the future of this and the end of that, what are my top ten outtakes?
Well I’ll tell you this: if you asked 100 people in Austin that question you’d get 100 different answers, because everyone will have had a completely different experience. So this isn’t intended as a definitive list, more a personal view of what I thought was hot, with hopefully some wider relevance too.
1) Business for good is a powerful rallying cry
Without question, whenever the topic of better business and social good came up people packed in to join the discussion. This was a topic that inspired energy, from the passionate panel at Don’t just sell things: change the world who urged businesses to put doing good at the heart of what they do, to Tim O’Reilly’s call to entrepreneurs to create value in more than monetary terms. A zeitgeist theme, so expect to hear a lot more about it.
2) Google is backing Google+
There’s a schism of opinion around Google+ with some people branding it a flop, others who are big fans. Google’s head of social and SVP Vic Gundotra came to tell SXSW that rather than write it off, they needed to look at it the right way to understand what they were seeing – like a picture with an optical illusion that can be a rabbit or a duck. His point to Guy Kawasaki: judge it for what it is, not measured against Facebook (or as he called it, “the social competitor”), and use it the right way.
3) Digital health is getting bigger, fast
A whole strand of SXSW was devoted to healthcare. Much discussion focused on the US market where health insurance costs are rising, conditions like diabetes and obesity cost vast sums to treat, and where online solutions can help assist patients and doctors. Mark Bertolini, Chairman and CEO of US health insurance firm Aetna, asked why rather than treating the condition, we aren’t doing more to use apps that can stop us from getting unhealthy in the first place. In another session on the future of digital health, panellists included start-ups developing specifically for the healthcare space to meet demand from patients and doctors – so there’ll be more digital wellness coming our way.
A new media leader and a rock star come together to talk about The End of Business As Usual – Brian Solis and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins.
We are in a new age of music consumption. Napster was a watershed moment for the music business, and Corgan says record labels attacked instead of recognising need, and suffered for it. The net worth of the music industry has plummeted by tens of billions in the last ten years.
So how can artists make money now?
“You can no longer think of the thing you make as your main source of income!” Billy says. “The greatest artists are adaptable. Picasso did movies and plays. What’s wrong with that?”
We are used to seeing movies stars and pop stars selling perfume and coffee and cars. Maybe we need to start accepting that rock bands and other musicians need something “commercial” to keep producing the music we love as well.
Corgan is calling for fans to be more sophisticated, and go on a journey with the artist. Let them try new things, and sometimes mess up. The current culture of condemnation kills this; musicians would rather be picked on for lip syncing than suffer the embarrassment of being a YouTube laughingstock.
And while it might be easier to rise quickly to celebrity status via the “Bieber route,” if you don’t have the talent to back it up, you’re not going to go to the next level. Or even worse, “If your inspiration is fame, then you’re not invested in culture at all.”
Corgan is passionate and clear in his thinking, but one point he made I really disagree with. He says you can’t get people interested who aren’t interested already, and they are going to follow the herd so just let them. He’s not interested in pandering, thanking people for listening to or buying his music, which is fair enough. But I think to completely ignore a section of society because they haven’t heard of you or don’t listen to stations that would play your music is really underestimating people.
We love to be acknowledged, our time is precious, and if you go to the effort of reaching out to us on a personal level, we will give you a lot more attention than someone who doesn’t. There are so many channels and duties and marketing messages flying at us on a daily basis, we need to shut some of it out, don’t judge us. And hey, maybe we’ll like it.
We are Generation Connected, so why not take advantage? Just no spamming. We hate that.
What is the solution?
Corgan is clear – the solution is to create content that goes behind the recording, but this is not the Behind the Scenes video. Five thousand people care about that, but a million don’t. That’s not going to cut it against cat videos.
Spotify is a step in the right direction but it is a “transitional technology,” says Corgan. “Artists need to create their own worlds,” and it needs to be visual and self-sustaining.
The only thing that endures is quality.
I found one thing blatantly missing in this year’s #SXSW. I saw tools, I saw applications, I saw platforms, I saw demos. I heard lots of people speak, about applications, the future, robots, Nano technology, measurement, ROI, Angry Birds, 3D TV, homeless people, the weather, the U.S. elections, world peace and global warming.
The one thing I did not hear was “strategy.” Though I love all the tools, applications and tutti quanti… as a communication professional, all of this is completely useless for my clients if it is not deeply embedded in rock solid integrated strategy. And strategy was what I could not locate digging through the close to 2,000 sessions of this 2012 #SXSW edition.
I think that is sad, and a missed opportunity. I can see people going home full of ideas and impressions, and projecting them directly into their working environment. As I write this, I even hear people around me talking about how they are so excited about Path and Pinterest and Heatmap that they cannot wait to present it to their clients. Presenting social communication tools out of context, and not directly linked to a solid strategy, is dead wrong, and dangerous.
I would have loved to see Harvard or Stanford or MIT professors doing sessions on integrated strategies, or seeing the strategic considerations implemented in the glossy case studies that are distributed left and right. Without solid strategies, the communication and marketing houses slowly sink in the sand. It is the basis, the very foundation.
And it was nowhere to be found…
The biggest take-away for me at #SXSW is that social media is not hip and cool anymore. There have been tons of applications, tons of new tools. But there has been nothing to really made the audience go wow. And that is a good thing. Social media is getting mature. People use it to find their way around, locate sessions, comment on content, book cars and taxis and hotels, hunt for food.
The different applications on the smart phones are used, often on daily basis. There might be fewer applications on average per phone than a couple of months ago, but the applications that make it to the phones’ homepages are truly used. Most people even forget that the app or service they are using was once called social media. It turned into the stuff they use every day: tissues, car keys, chewing gum, twitter, Facebook, Google maps.
Social media is mainstream, it is everywhere, and it slipped into people’s lives and became quietly ubiquitous. Just as people do not get excited about car keys and bottle openers any more, they do not get easily excited about social media anymore either.
Focus goes clearly on functionality: does it work, will it work better, smoother, quicker? Will it interact with my social ecosystem? Does it link to my social networks? Do I really need it? The crowd became picky, asking for proof before want. Having new is not cool anymore, having best-in-class is. That forces developers and strategists to shift down a gear, and to push the pedal to the metal: that download from the app store will from now on have to be earned. The days of cool and shallow are buried somewhere with the leftovers from #SxSW 2011.
Pinterest. It’s one of those social networks everyone loves…or loves to hate. Whichever side you’re on, one thing is certainly true: Pinterest is the talk of the town, at SXSW and beyond. Dailies, magazines and blogs can’t stop writing about it, research can’t stop reporting on its record growth and companies are jumping on the “me too” bandwagon quicker than ever.
But it was not always the case. Contrary to what many people think, Pinterest is not really a new service. It was set up in November 2009 and believe it or not, nine months in it hadn’t even reached a 10k user base. The reason why it still exists today is that its founders were too embarrassed to admit their failure. Luckily. A few months ago, the Pinterest craze just suddenly exploded. “It was weird and surreal,” said Ben Silbermann, co-founder of Pinterest, in today’s Q&A with blogger Chris Dixon.
The session was one I really enjoyed. Ben Silbermann showed a passion for his product that I haven’t seen here yet this week. An ex-Google employee, Ben always wanted to start his own tech company. A collector at heart, his personal passion for collecting stamps and coins gave him the idea for Pinterest. “Things you collect say so much about who you are,” said Ben, “and all I wanted to do was create a site that would help people discover, collect and share things they love.”
Design has always been at the core of Pinterest. It is a simple product framed around people, pins and boards. Awesome boards, because if your collections didn’t look beautiful, why would anyone spend time building them? Boards should be something users are proud of, something they want to show off to people. Users have always been important to Ben; without them the site wouldn’t exist.
Even though most think the site is all cupcakes and unicorns, there are some unexpected uses that even the founders of Pinterest did not predict. Core lifestyle activities like decorating, cooking, home and design were the obvious uses, but the site is also used by museums to share their art or by travel aficionados to create travel guides. A recent fake Mitt Romney account with yacht collections and great deals gave everyone a good laugh, too.
What’s the future? New profiles, influencer identification, better content attribution and platform expansion. It looks like Pinterest is not going anywhere. Not anytime soon.
Austin is still vibrating after Kurzweil’s talk yesterday. Enhanced humans. Man-machine connections. For many people it is a bridge too far, a century too early. But if you look closer, it shows that we’re almost there.
The average phone that the average #SXSW visitor uses packs enough power to shame the most avid chess player, it is a billion billion times faster than the machines that decoded the German Enigma code in World War II. And it is readily available at your fingertips.
Phones are like Swiss Army knives. Through our phones, we outsource our memory to the Cloud: our contacts, our pictures, our music, our social calendars, our CVs. It’s all virtually stored on a faraway server, accessible to 3- or 4G connections and WiFi. Our phones give us directions while driving, tell us where our friends are, and where we can find food. They are quickly becoming the number one gateway to the Internet. More and more calls on Google, map and Wikipedia searches and scouring of other information libraries are done on a mobile phone.
I’ve seen people giving presentations at #SXSW with their phones directly linked to a beamer, and people who travel without a laptop or iPad, and rely solely on the processing and connection power of their smart phones.
Phones are voice-controlled, location savvy and can connect to a multitude of external devices, from Nike Run, over Bluetooth sensor devices, to cars and home entertainment systems. The few people you see at SXSW who have lost their phones are bewildered: it makes them feel thrown back in time, exposed, and vulnerable. Phones have more impact on our daily lives than we care to imagine.
For brands and their agencies, the phone has become the target for the years to come. Here is the opportunity to link with your target audience at the very point of decision, the very point of purchase. The ability to connect to people wherever they are, and use the phone as a two-way gateway is priceless. Contextual information, peer-driven opinion, profile and location-linked behavior - it opens a ton of exciting possibilities, and a grim can of worms.
Use it wisely…
The good thing about SXSW is the opportunity to meet lots of interesting people from various industries. The festival mixes interactive, music and film audiences in quite a unique way. During your endless walks from session to session at the festival, you encounter people whose interests or jobs are somehow intertwined.
And so it was that I met Beverly W. Jackson, director of marketing, strategic alliances and social media for The Recording Academy, which organizes the GRAMMY Awards. This year’s GRAMMY Awards were hugely successful. According to the ratings, almost 40 million U.S. viewers watched them. Beverly has a tough job managing social media globally, but as she puts it, if you focus your efforts across multiple platforms and work toward engaging audiences on several screens – TV, tablets and mobile – the results can be surprising. But it’s a 24/7 shift.
Beverly speaks about the “secret” formula behind the success of this year’s GRAMMY Awards:
Here at #SxSW, books are big. Books are shiny. Books are heavy. If you want to get some attention, you need to have a book, or be on a book cover. A bit bizarre for a conference that screams “Interactive” all over the internet is the fact that all books I’ve seen are totally made out of dead trees. Plain paper. No huge online crowd sourced project, no big multi-channel social media endeavors, nothing excitingly interactive. Plain paper.
Interestingly, most of the people I speak to in the Samsung Blogger Lounge gave up reading paper stuff ages ago. If they cannot pop it onto their iPad, it does not exist. With more than 100 people in the room, the 50 free signed copies that are being giving away each day are more than enough for the people who want one. Knowledge is heavy. Flying knowledge home costs a ton.
It seems that the best way to promote your social media knowledge and experience is by using a technology that was old 500 years ago. But then again, nothing wrong with old technology. Looking more closely – apart from the weight – there is not a lot of difference between the Social Media Book and the iPad: watch!
As a designer at Porter Novelli, I create a lot of ads, mostly in digital form. This could explain why I was curious about the talk, “We Made This, and It’s Not an Ad,” here at SXSW Interactive. Robbie Whiting, director of creative technology & production at Draftfcb in San Francisco, emphasized the importance of employees taking time out to do work they’re passionate about. He also spoke about the power of bringing together people from different disciplines. Having the opportunity to work with your hands and interact with co-workers from different areas of the agency allows you to expand your realm of creative possibilities.
DeepLocal is one of many agencies that have been successful with this model. “Through play, we learn how to creatively combine seemingly disparate objects to create compelling interactions. Sometimes we share these experiments online and sometimes we keep them to ourselves for the next exciting client project!” Their process is pictured here.
It is essential today for employees to have interests outside of the workplace. This will lead to greater cross-collaboration within the agency, and stronger creative concepts. Consumers are demanding more from brands and brands are looking for more from their agencies. By practicing a variety of exercises, our minds become our greatest tool. It is less about sharing on the hottest social media platform of the day, and more about the content and choosing the appropriate channel for that. This is where we can offer the most value. As leaders in PR, we should take the progressive ideas and experiments of our colleagues and clients and make them a reality. By creating campaigns that are real, easy, social and local, we can win both culturally and politically and make a true impact.