Evan Williams SXSW Keynote

Here’s a few quick clips from the Evan Williams Keynote conversation…

SXSW: Bizness, brews, and bonding

Sunday at SXSW in Pictures

Just few shots from today, incuding the ScreenBurn at SXSW Arcade and the Women Love Tech Meetup.

Privacy, publicity, and micro-blogging in the dark.

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 the Internet and Society.

In a very large, very dark ballroom at the Austin Convention Center, I micro-blogged keynote highlights on Twitter. Here’s a link to posts from the event:

South by Southwest Interactive Keynote: Privacy and Publicity with Danah Boyd.

Saturday at SXSW in Photos

Here’s the Saturday photo gallery…

Booze and Blogging

Presenters: @livethelushlife, @bebellanti, @johnwise, @titosvodka, @thrillist

It’s 5 pm on Saturday, so I’m “off the clock.”  That’s why my last SXSW session was this one.  BONUS: This one involved trying booze while I was blogging this (see the picture here).

First, I learned that the first “viral drink” is the “Pickelback” (seen here) which involves taking a shot of Jamison Whisky and then a shot of pickel juice.  The pickel juice completely eliminates the whisky flavor and leaves a little warm spot in your belly.  It became a “viral drink” after it was reported that Pickles were more popular than Canadian rockers Nickelback on Facebook.

Tito’s Vodka has become a “word of mouth” brand here in Austin and has spread.  It started to spread locally, but took off with the introduction of Twitter.  Now they’ve moved to Facebook and try to enable others to “share the Tito’s love.”  They’ve started doing a newsletter and videos on Twitter.   There’s more to it than just vodka, Tito has a real story and according to the presenter, he’s a “love bomb.”  His video outakes are “YouTube gold.”  There is a man behind the brand and their marketing team makes efforts to be personable and show that there are real people behind the brand.

It’s not all fun and drinking.  Bloggers/marketers in this area have to follow liquor laws and regulations and are held to the same marketing measurement standards as any other group.  However, social media is social and it is particularly effective in this industry.

Organizational Pitfalls on the Path to Multichannel Experience

Discussion lead: Zachary Jean Paradis, from Sapient

Despite the complex title, it was really about the challenges of making sure your marketing message is consistent across a lot of different media outlets. The primary challenges involved “traditional” organization structures which focus on siloed bits of information or roles. Even with the best communication, it is quite a struggle to get these messages spread from the top-down. Adding to the challenge are the use of multiple agencies and multiple countries/locations.

In the realm of changing organization structure, someone from Walmart mentioned that they had recently combined all of their e-commerce efforts under a “global e-commerce” area to ensure they were consistent. Several groups talked about fluid environments – involving folks from many different areas – and creating “execution teams” or groups charged with implementing a particular campaign/messaging effort. These groups are incentivised based on their success at accomplishing a common goal, which, in theory, creates a multi-channel effort. While focusing on the overall success of the communications goal, it is still tremendously important to focus on channel revenue attribution (a fancy way of saying, “take a look at how much each media contributes to sales”). By doing this, you’ll be able to track how successful each channel is and provide the best ROI for your efforts. It’s important to keep the customer service/front line folks in the loop, as they’ll be key to letting you know what is really working – even helping to measure by asking the simple, “how did you hear about us,” or “what made you call.”

There were several groups – both on the agency side and the brand side – which talked a trend toward “customer experience” consultants.  Folks from Mother and Naked Communications,talked about a focus on understanding the needs of the customer and delivering a story and promise no matter what form this may take.  Someone from USAA reinforced this point, stating that they didn’t set forth to build the first iPhone app that lets customers deposit checks simply by taking a picture of it, but it came out of ideas to make the customer experience easier (How do they let military men/women who move around alot and may have limited access to the internet while on duty do business easier/better).  Brands need to closely monitor customer needs and deliver on their brand promise.  New tools, like Twitter, Yelp, etc. make it easier to find our what their frustrations are and where your brand may not be delivering consistently on its promise.

Finally, there’s a fine line between delivering your message across multiple channels and “spam.”  Be sure you’re not saturating the market with your message.

You don’t need a Twitter account to follow SXSW sessions.

SXSW Scene: In downtown Austin today.

Check out what was going at the Austin Convention Center.

SXSW Flashback: Remember three things, Koz.

Bringing it the Best We Can

We’re extremely excited to be bringing you news, events, and happenings “as it happens” at SXSW Interactive next week. However, as you may have experienced at a large event or gathering, cell phone service and WIFI connections aren’t always the most reliable. You’ve got hundreds or thousands of people all trying to connect at the same time, which is an obvious problem. Apparently AT&T got knocked last year for not anticipating all of the iPhones which would be at SXSW Interactive. That’s why this year, they’ve assured us it should be up and running. AT&T told the Austin Statesman that they’ve installed a cellular antenna system in the Austin Convention Center to handle the anticipated cell phone traffic.  In addition, the local cellular towers have been enhanced and a series of temporary cellular on wheels (COW) portable transmission sites will be set up around the region to handle the rest of the traffic. There will be faster backhaul links present to keep bandwidth from getting too congested, and AT&T’s own network of Starbucks-hosted Wi-Fi hot spots have reportedly been enhanced to better meet the needs of attendees.

We’re hoping everything runs smoothly, but you never know what could happen when you’ve got over 5,000 people attending a tech conference with iPhones, and laptops, and Androids (Oh my!).  As the title says, we’ll plan on bringing it to you in photo, video, and words the best we can.