Final Day wrap up!
The 2010 SXSW Interactive conference has come to a close and the experience for me personally, has been an awesome one. Just writing and sharing these daily blogs has added a great deal to my overall experience and I’m glad I could share them with everyone that took the time to read them. This year the estimated attendance was at 15,000 for the interactive portion of the conference and my personal take is just one of those voices. The goal of my blog was not to try to offer an all-encompassing coverage of the conference; just my personal experience. So if you’re looking for “big story” coverage, these blogs won’t give you that. It is a” journal blog” and while those may be a bit out of date for the times; it is the format that I chose to offer up here. That being said I’ll get on with the final day of events.

Making Sure the World Doesn’t Suck:
How Independent Content Can Save the Media
An intriguing title and an intriguing panel as well, Sean Lennon – Chimera Music, Evan Shapiro – IFC, Marc Lieberman – The Onion, Harvey Smith – Arkane Studios, and Jake Dobkin – Gothamist.com, all representing the variety of genres at the conference. Each talked and discussed content and the value of community that surrounds it.  The major focus was on not trying to control and promote the content but instead letting the content, based on its quality, organically spread and proliferate through social communities.

Much of what they discussed was how todays indie content should have a new business model that is representative of this new web 2.0 strategy and unfortunately, where the income sources for the content may exist is still somewhat debateable. Everyone did agree on the fact that good indie content is founded on passion and all the new social tools for content delivery allow everyone to pursue what they are passionate about, without having to “quit the day job” and expect the passion to pay the bills. Man can I relate to that! While music is my passion, it really isn’t even paying for itself and I’m relegated to web and Information Technology services to “pay the bills”. Luckily, these things leave me a great amount of time to pursue the passion of music. Seems very appropriate to the times though. In the words of Sean Lennon “today especially, you have to be making your art from a place that is not financially motivated”. In essence, the panel could be summarized as such. If you are doing what you love, it will show in the work and that will bring forth the quality needed for it to proliferate and help to keep the world from sucking. Follow your passion and let it infiltrate the channels as best it can. In todays indie market, this is the best anyone can do.

Welcome to the State of Now
I spent pretty much the rest of my final day attending @jeffpulver‘s mini #140 conference. A conference within a conference, cool idea Jeff! He assembled an awesome group of speakers covering some broad angles but all centrally focused on the central theme of connectedness. The current state of now is indeed all about connectedness and the variety of panels Jeff brought together all demonstrated this in their own unique way.

Without going into depth about all the different speakers at the #140, I think the concept of “The State of Now” is a great overall note for me to conclude my blog series on for this years conference. My take on the whole experience is that today’s technology has us so obviously connected to each other, more so than at any other time in history, that the possibilities for collaboration and communication are endless. The new business is model is something that businesses today will either adapt or they risk losing their voice entirely in this vastly connected culture. The general rule of the road is transparency and the days of deceptive marketing campaigns are gone.

Every individual using these new tools now has just as much of a voice as a massive company with a million dollar a year advertising budget. Customer service is going to be what ultimately makes or breaks a business as well as each and every personal reputation online. We are all in the business of customer service now and we are all, each of us, our own brand.

It’s a real-time world and if a company falters in any way in terms of customer service today, a Twitter user with 15,000 followers can dramatically affect how that business does in the future. If they pull out their phone on the spot and document the service they are receiving, one person, one moment, one incident, dealing with one employee, can make or break the company’s reputation going forward. It’s a bit scary but it’s also empowering to know that the field has been leveled and that truth and respect now stands just as much of a chance as yesterdays deceptive advertising tactics. I say bring it on!

Day Two
Saturday, day two, not so laid back as yesterday. The crowds have grown and it’s all too easy to get trampled under foot if you’re spending your time glancing down at your shiny new iPhone. Since my schedule, my email, my Facebook, my Twitter and my camera all now all reside on this miracle device I’m walking around with in my hand, I’m finding that it’s very easy to collide with the masses. I’m adapting though, it takes skill and a bit of experience to walk through the real world with one of these powerful devices distracting you at all moments of the day.

Socialnomics
I made my way to the Day Stage Cafe area of the Convention Center to hear Erik Qualman speaking on Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. A great talk which started with a truly inspiring video of statistical data that can be viewed here! It really sums up many of the reasons businesses need to be tapping into this new market. Check it Out!!
For a humourous take on what social media means to customer service these days check out this video from a frustrated musician whom made in his grievances with United Airlines public via the social media of youtube! Over 8 Million plays to date! United Breaks Guitars. I hear United did offer to pay for his guitar afterall. Imagine that.

The next panel I wanted to see I couldn’t get into due to the massive swarm of humanity that was ahead of me. So instead, I hung out a bit, had some free bacon on the street courtesy of freshbooks.com and shot the walk through video at the top of this blog. Afterwards, I made my way into the trade show and gave it a quick once over.
A couple of the booths that caught my eye first were Bandize, a site geared towards organizing the planning aspects of a touring band, good stuff for a guy like me with goals of touring the band someday soon. The second booth that immediately caught my eye was a booth for imagespacemedia.com, with a keg of Shiner Bock front and center and free hotdogs. Hell Yeah bro! I had to see who was behind this. It was there were I met CMO Tad Davis (A former Austinite, hence the Shiner) and a truly nice guy to chat with. I immediately envisioned a way for a band website like my own to possibly start pulling in some revenue from more major advertisers and I’ll certainly be going back to chat with Tad again more. Especially since, for some reason, I left the house today without any business cards! Ooops.

Madmen
After a long lunch break, I made my way to a panel called “Rules of Brand Fiction from Twittering Madmen”. Essentially a panel led by the creative advertising director and the Technical Director for the AMC series Madmen. A hugely creative and succesful way of approaching social media using fictional characters. If you’re up on Twitter at all, you witnessed a bit of this, for those of you that aren’t, essentially the creative department for the show created Twitter accounts for all of the characters of the show and began tweeting “in character” to the twitter universe via 1963. I won’t go into all the ways they engaged the world of Twitter but it’s safe to say the campaign they pulled off brought many new viewers to the show. Many people who had never watched the show, wanted to check it out after following the fictional banter the characters added to the experience of Twitter. A brilliantly creative way of taking social media and engaging an audience of fans that are thirsting for more on a whole new level.

Support Group?
My last panel of the day, I have to admit felt more like an AA meeting than anything else. Entitled “Keeping Sane While Working From Home”. I swear it was like “Hello my name is John and I work from home.” I was amazed that the room was full for this one as well, another sure sign of the times. While I have my own reasons for attending this panel I truly did get some good ideas for helping out with the monotony of day-to-day life while working mostly from the house.

Well we’re almost half way through the conference and I’m sure the next few days will have more surprises in store.
More to come indeed! – John

Day One
Day one of the Interactive Festival started out pretty laid back and mellow. The panels didn’t start until the afternoon, so I spent the  morning strolling around, checking out all of the various lounges that were setup in the convention center as well as the Independent Film Channels Crossroads House a few blocks away, where there was a free brunch composed of  breakfast tacos and coffee, a Texas brunch for sure. It was here where I had my first celebrity sighting of the conference as Jamie Lynn Sigler (Meadow Soprano) came in to do an interview for her new Independent Film “Wake”. Yes guys, she’s just as adorable in person.

The Conference Buzz
The entire conference so far seems to be buzzing with Social Media. Everyone I talked to, it was the main reason they were attending the conference and the biggest thing that they are hoping to learn more about. This is such a big deal because, if you are selling a product and you are not engaging and quantifying in online social media of some type, you are soon going to be so far behind the marketing curve you simply won’t be taking part in shaping your own brand any more. It is the only marketing medium that allows instant, one on one, focus group type interactions with the audience of your product, and the tools are free. The time it takes to develop and implement a plan that everyone can understand, this is where businesses are currently struggling.
I came into the conference a bit ahead of this curve since I’ve already been through a series of sit down meetings with a client to discuss all of the how’s and why’s of social media marketing and many of the same issues we discussed, were talked about in the first panel I attended.

Social Media Marketing For Your Business
The biggest concept a company needs to grasp today is that, one on one customer engagement is now possible on a global scale utilizing social media. There is no other form of media that gives you this kind of opportunity for engaging and communicating with your customer base on such a massive and yet personal scale. It opens up a dialog for your company to listen to what the buyers of your product are saying directly in a setting that is not only “one on one” but “one to your entire customer base”. Companies and customers now both have the opportunity to put forth information about a product by participating in a conversational forum where everyone can have their opinions documented. While it’s surely not always positive feedback, it is invaluable feedback for sure. If the product does have a flaw; maybe the company needs to go back to RND and start again. If the company provides lousy customer support, everyone will hear about it, creating what I’d describe as a ”lifting of the marketing veil”. No longer can companies hide behind big marketing campaigns that only have a one way line of communication, it’s now a two-way dialog that requires utilizing honesty and complete transparency. It is the only way a company can operate and succeed within the social media model. Truth in information. Anything that is bull, will eventually get called out in a medium like social media, so make sure you can believe in your product before you venture forth. It comes down to the fact that if you want to be the ultimate authority on your product, then social media is the line in the sand where you can prove it.

Alright, that’s my rant on Social Media for the day. I have many more panels scheduled to attend that focus on many more aspects of this topic so I’m sure I’ll hit upon it many more times over the course of the next few days.

Fire Drill
The next panel I attended was called “Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income” by Darren Rowse. Unfortunately, we only got to hear him for about fifteen minutes before a fire alarm went off in the convention center. OMFG! The Austin Fire Department, while I’m sure concerned with everyone’s safety, owes a few thousand conference attendees a bit of a refund. It’s not cheap to attend a conference like this and to have it interrupted and miss out on turning my blog into a six figure revenue stream….well, you see my point. I heard they actually did this fire drill last year as well.

Tomorrow I plan on checking out “Screen Burn” and seeing what’s hot and new in the realm of gaming.
Stay Tuned! – John

I’ve had many folks expressing their interest in following me through this years SXSW interactive festival, so while the occasional status update or tweet can pass along some good information, I’m going to also try to get out at least one daily blog summarizing the conference as I work my way through it. For those yearning for a better grasp of the experience, I hope this blog will give you an idea of what attending this massive conference is like.

Pre-Conference Thursday
Today began with the badge and “Big Bag” pickup, after which, since I live in here Austin, I’m lucky enough to go home, unwind, unload the dishwasher, have a good dinner at the house while sorting through the bag of goodies and generally rest up and prepare for the week ahead.
Living in Austin does indeed have it’s perks at times.

 So here’s to a rocking 2010 interactive festival! It all begins tomorrow!
You’re blogger on the street here in Austin – John Orr Franklin

Hope I can keep up