SXSWi bits n bobs

It was a while ago now, but I’ve got a few notes left over from a couple of panels I went to and I may as well dump them here in a single post – you never know what someone else will find useful, so here they are:

Regional Whuffie – Attracting Innovation

Or ‘the co-working panel’. Truth be told, ‘awesome fatigue’ had taken hold around this point and so, although the panelists were all interesting people doing interesting things, the excessive chuminess and back-slapping was a little hard to stomach.

It’s a problem that marred many of the panels – a lack of incisive questioning which glossed over the troubles, mistakes and difficulties to allow much less useful evangelism/self-promotion.

To spin the self-promotion more positively, this panel saw some interesting case-studies including The Runway Project and ArtCamp.

On the question of how to fund a coworking space, the advice was to not think of it as a business but to do the minimum necessary at any time. Focus on improving community and the city as a whole. The space will follow.

The other piece of advice was to adopt successful international projects such as Pecha Kucha nights, Ignite or 20×2.

How LA Built a Successful Tech Community

The worst panel I attended but the fascinating awfulness of it all left me rooted to my chair. Apparently LA’s scene is a humble one, living in the shadow of LA’s entertainment industry and the San Francisco scene. I didn’t see a lot of humility though.

Half the room were LA residents and things never really lifted above being an insular love-in/bitching session.

The lessons, such as there were any, were to self-promote and to promote others around you. Actually, this is probably worth bearing in mind – there’s been plenty of good stuff happening in Birmingham but information about this rarely gets outside the bubble. The social media surgeries, for example, tend to generate a few blog posts where people say what a good thing they are and those posts are read by others who attended. What about writing a press release and sending it to a newspaper/some council officers/charity workers instead?

A post about posters

As a little light relief from the semi-coherent notes from SXSW that I’ve been posting, here’s something a little different.

On the last night in Austin we were at the Brit Bash, having a merry old time and looking forward to seeing the headliners when a wall of posters caught my eye. This one, in fact:

All the posters were advertising the efforts of various UK regions to promote their musical talent – in this pic you can see the North West, Belfast, Yorkshire and Scotland (twice) all represented.

Alice Russell played on the night and was ace. I saw her at Glastonbury a couple of years back when she sang with the Quantic Soul Orchestra – their take on Sunshine Anderson’s ‘Heard it All Before’ was superb.

SXSWi Notes: Remixing the Museum Exhibition

Remixing the Museum Exhibition

Speakers:

• Jim Forrest – Peabody Essex Museum
• Ben Tucker -  GreenRiver.org
• Ellis Neder – Creative Dir, Sway Design
• Steven Alvarez – Dir of Programs & Media, Alaska Native Heritage Center

Museums can be conversational – you can go with friends and chat about the exhibits. Museums have not generally translated this online. The idea is to get visitors to help museums to collect and share.

The object on display is the point of conversation.

Echospace

Each item in the museum’s collection will be on there eventually.

The site has a digital uploading tool similar to Flickr or YouTube. The site also plugs in to Flickr and YouTube’s APIs.

It also has a touch of wikipedia about it. Users can grab museum resources, add their own and tell a story.

Why did they do this?
Not bandwagon jumping.
It’s a very diverse organisation with locations all over. They are used to using tech just to operate.
They take a lot of viewpoints – academic, tribal, and cultural values and mash them together. Media has been very useful to find commonalities.

New Trade Winds (2002) – project was to use web 2.0 tools to bring together stories.

Artscape – personal collaborative bookmarking tool

Hawaii Alive – traditional navigation/database model did not suit the best way to represent Hawaiian culture and values. Divided by realms of gods, man and ocean.

Teachers Domain – a crucial step on the way to Echospace. Filtering the best from worst practices but tricky to do so – delicate matters not wanting to insult a tribe

Realise that they’re being very open and that won’t go down well with some. Also accept that they don’t know everything and others can be brought in to give their view. Dark side of that conversation might come out but that’s needed.

Steven Alvarez

They’re not stuck in a pre-contact ‘leathers and feathers’ state. They use tech.
However, there’s a tension when doing traditional stuff with new methods. for example, new media allows shift from telling a story to a few people in a room to being able to amplify that voice immediately and, potentially, globally.

They’re targetting a narrower audience with Echospace – that’s a good thing.

All user uploads via the site go to a single YouTube account. A video that breaches YouTube’s T&Cs could be enough to have the account closed – a problem they’re still working on (although they keep back-ups of all videos).

Fears

Joy of oral history is that it changes with the telling – recording in this way captures and freezes those stories.

Also, the tribes have been burned before – people have taken stories, got rich off them and not paid promised royalties.

What happens if no-one uses this resource?

That’s fine. It’s a modular site so if some areas are not used they can dump it.

Is there moderation?

Yes, there is a moderator – a non-native anthropologist who will have her set of biases. Already found snags.

SXSWi Notes: Building Strong Online Communities

Building Strong Online Communities

• Ken Fisher -  Editor-in-Chief, Ars Technica
• Alexis Ohanian – Prod Mgr of Awesome, reddit.com
• Drew Curtis -  The Member, Fark.com
• Erin Kotecki Vest – BlogHer Inc

BlogHer started from a flame war about where all the female bloggers are.

(Liked the line “We decided to do something instead of blogging about it”)

How do you talk to your community?
F – have to take stuff with a grain of salt. Decide if their views are representative of all users.
R – give users the tools and let them do their thing. There are areas they have little/no knowledge of. Found a use for Twitter – can do a search so if someone’s ranting about Reddit he can see and get a conversation going.
A – Twitter useful for engaging people who are on the fringes of participation. Created a forum for complaining about Ars Technica. They don’t have to answer everything as other users may not agree. Doing this publicly can be tricky – give people a chance to slate you in public but transparency is appreciated and if there’s a problem that many complain about you should probably fix it.

How is the community policed?
B – strict community guidelines. Provide safety from trolling/hate speech. Set that standard very early and now the site polices itself quite well.
F – Their rule is don’t be too much of an asshole. They have ‘Nark’ button for reporting users but sometimes see people using this to report comments just to get people in trouble.
R – they set up a wiki for guidelines. Became a list of dos and don’ts. Now they let people set up their own Reddits and let them moderate them themselves.

What do you do with problem bits of content?
B – pulled immediately and email sent to originator to explain why. Anything borderline gets you yanked.
F – similar but philosophy is it’s not capital punishment, it’s just deleting comments on a web page. Can always revisit/reconsider.
R – ditto
A – they leave stuff up unless it’s spam. Worry about silencing people as it’s seen as censorship in the AT culture.

DON’T:

• Tell rather than ask
• Change things without telling community in advance
• Not involve the community
• Troll your own readers
• Listen to readers too much (tyranny of the minority)

Also need to pay attention to the silent majority who don’t login, contribute, etc but make up most of traffic. Stats will tell you what they’re looking at, what they like and don’t like.

Common problem – forums with loads of topics. Starts off emptier and makes it hard for people to get to content.

Expectations online are very low. Engaging people in real life (or just via email) can be very powerful. Do this with the most engaged participants.

Is it worth educating users about being good net citizens?
B – yes. New people are always coming in so it’s good to restate things occasionally.

Other notes about this panel:

• Sexy Widget
• Fast Wonder
• DIIA Blog
• Team Rubber

SXSWi Notes: HOWTO: 149 Ways…

HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!

Speakers:

• John Gruber – Raconteur, Daring Fireball
• Merlin Mann – You Look Nice Today

Talk about everything and you talk to no-one.

Who is your ideal reader?

If you’re going to copy something successful make sure you’re copying the right parts of it. Not just the outside bits but the attitude, etc. May have been the unique circumstances surrounding something that made it a success.

Lawyer – a person who knows which forms to fill out to ruin you.

Getting paid – you get paid in attention. You can’t buy stuff with that but it’s amazing what you can do with that when it builds up.

When there’s news you want to know what happened, what it means and what that person thinks of it. Not many people will do that. Loads of people will just tell you that something happened.

Top tips:

• Give away stuff. Make it easy to get and give away more than you think you should.
• Have diverse revenue streams and keep looking for others
• Don’t do stuff that seems profitable but interferes with why people liked you in the first place

Photo by Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com.

SXSWi Notes: Curating the Crowd-Sourced World

Curating the Crowd-Sourced World

Speakers:

• Jen Bekman – CEO, Jen Bekman Projects and 20×200
• Paddy Johnson – Editor, Art Fag City
• Nion McEvoy – CEO, Chronicle Books
• Dustin Hostetler – Special Projects Curator, skinnyCorp
• Gina Trapani – Founding Editor, Lifehacker.com

This talk is available as a podcast.

Notes

Curation – taking suggestions from your audience. In the echo-chamber though. Making the popular even more popular. Doesn’t help with reaching beyond that audience.

There is value in changing perceptions.

Is presence of a curator a recognition of failure of the crowd?
No. Useful to inspire the crowd (cf V&A’s approach re setting a standard for other users to follow)

On too high a level (ie with a very large crowd) there’s a signal:noise problem.

Other notes about this panel:

• Adam Schwabe (liveblog)
• Aaron Sumner

Fwiw, my notes on this panel are sparse because (without wanting to sound big-headed) I found it was pitched a bit too far below my level. The panelists are all engaged in interesting projects but some of them seemed unable to step back from their practice and articulate what it is they do and how.

SXSWi Notes: What Can We Learn From Games?

What Can We Learn From Games

Speakers:

• Henry Jenkins – Co-Dir CMS, MIT
• James Gee – Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University
• Warren Spector – GM Creative Dir, Junction Point – Disney Interactive Studios

People are turned off by learning in the education system, but games are using learning as a ‘gateway drug’.

Games don’t just exist in the game, they survive online in the social networks. Support and advice on how to get through a game can be found eg in a forum.

Schools reward autonomous learners – collaboration is seen as cheating.

Trend now is to see the player as a designer – ie Spore

Critical media literacy is important.

When using games for education the authority/basis of the simulator/game is not questioned – just as textbooks don’t tend to be questioned. Need to look at mechanics of a game, critique it and so be able to design one yourself.

Games have taught that failure isn’t bad and collaboration is good. Opposite of schools.

Sci-fi is more interested in world-building than character-building. Reading for a world invites more creativity than reading for narrative. Readers can fill in the gaps in that world – flesh out the stories/narratives for themselves.

Photo by austinistdotcom.

SXSWi notes: Tips for Making Ideas Happen

Tips for Making Ideas Happen

Scott Belsky – CEO, Behance

This talk is available as a podcast.

There is a love for ideas generation but organisation is as important as creativity.
In the creative sector there is a general lack of accountability and leadership as well as disregarded and isolated networks. There’s also a lack of feedback.

Behance’s aims:

• Macro – organise the creative world’s work
• Micro – productivity for creatives – tips and tools

They have developed The Action Method (now online and with iPhone app).

Big point is that ideas don’t happen because they’re good. There needs to be a bias to action.

Ideas happen if there is:

• Ideas
• Organisation/productivity
• Communal forces
• Leadership

Ideas

Generate ideas in moderation and have someone to kill off the rubbish ones.

Distinguish urgent from important. Hoarding urgent items is a problem. May be able to delegate constant time-based stuff. Also, use windows of non-stimulation to get important stuff done

Organisation/productivity

Creativity x Organisation = Impact

Organise with a bias to action. Achievement is action taken.

The Action Method – from any occasion of creativity (meeting, dream, brainstorm, etc) one of the following should happen:

• Action steps
• Backburner items
• Reference items

Reference items are often worthless and only useful for legal reasons or for when someone is absent.
Measure a meeting in action steps.

Don’t just meet because it’s a Monday. Periodic meetings can be a waste of time if you get into the situation of itinerary-stuffing.

Publicise productivity. Brainstorming can be creative and visual – need to do the same for the process of getting things done.

Create a backburner ritual. Take time to sit and work through it.

Foster a culture of capturing action steps. Make sure people write things down. get people to say what they’re doing at the end of a meeting – makes sure less is missed and nothing duplicated.

Attraction breeds loyalty. Applies to productivity systems as much as anything else. If it helps, make folders pretty or, if someone likes to hop from system to system then let them – newness of organisation may be helping them.

Prioritise projects visually – use an energy line. This will show capacity of the team. Plot projects on a line showing priority from Extreme – High – Med – Low.

Create action areas (ie a post area) to group jobs

Communal forces

Doers, dreamers and incrementalists. Need to pair doers and dreamers. Are incrementalists the ideal combination? They may be trying to do too much.

Share ideas liberally. This is hard because:

• worry that ideas will be stolen (but if it’s that easy to execute was it that great/unique an idea)
• tendency to hang on to an idea until it’s fully formed

Share ownership of ideas too. Let others run with them. Letting go can be hard, but beneficial too.

Fight your way to breakthroughs – let all parts of a team fight their corners to make sure their standpoint comes across.

Don’t become burdened by consensus. Fight for a few of the more extreme ideas and let go on the rest (example of the person designing the World Trade Centre memorial.

Get respect – overcome the stigma of self-marketing. Example of violinist Joshua Bell busking.

If you’re not getting respect for your strengths then you won’t be listened to. It’s your responsibility. Creative community – lot of talent but don’t want to market themselves well enough because there’s a stigma attached.

Leadership

Leaders talk last. Not speaking is not a natural inclination for leaders.

If leader speaks out first then others are more likely to fall into line behind or not differ quite so much in their views.

Also, this discourages new talent and younger team members from getting involved/engaging.

Reduce the amount of ‘insecurity work’. Cut down on checking information – analytics, Twitter searches, stats. People check these out of insecurity, not business need.

Value the team’s immune system. Some ideas need to be killed off. Need the people who will shoot down ideas and will help to cut down unnecessary features, etc.

Stop focussing on visionaries. Most new ideas fail. Ideas often generated for the self of the person’s own crowd. Run them by someone ‘normal’ to see if they stand up (ie your mum).

Judge new hires based on initiative, not experience. A history of taking action is better than a history of good jobs.

Value chemistry over people. Having all the best people is good but having a complementary mix of skills on a team may be better. Harder and more expensive to hire for this but worthwhile.

Unique is opportune. Tend to shun people when they go against the grain but we celebrate heroes as being like this. Conformists are the oil that smoothes the operation of society.

Other posts about this talk:

• Matt Ceniceros
• Christan Racca
• Aaron Sumner

Photo by alexdesign

SXSWi Notes: F*ck Stats, Make Art

F*ck Stats, Make Art

Dave Olson – Dir of Fan Communities, MovieSet.com

Art Makes The Future
More interested in what to blog or twitter about rather than blogging about blogging and tweeting about Twitter.

Popular art is not the stuff that lasts
No matter the circumstances, etc are, it’s the words that live on.

Craft + intent / integrity = art
(not a perfect formula but something to work from)

Tips:

• Upgrade your heroes
• (something about telling stories)
• Embrace translucency (because not everything is interesting)
• Improve cross-training
• Up your skills
• Don’t get precious
• Ignore the gatekeepers (you can publish yourself)
• Reap the rewards

There was a time when bloggers had the space to themselves and could be dismissive of traditional media, saying ‘they don’t get it’. Now all newspapers have blogs and there’s some good talent out there.

How can you rise above that? By being a better writer. Blogs, etc are the medium. That’s all. It’s still writing.

Build your castles in the air and put the foundations under them.

SXSWi Notes: My Boss Doesn’t Get It

My Boss Doesn’t Get It: Championing Social Media to the Man

Speakers:

• Miles Sims – VP of Product Mgmt, Small World Labs
• Peter Kim – Sr Partner, Dachis Corporation
• Michael Wilson – Founder/CEO, Small World Labs
• Rebecca Caroe – Sales & Business Dev Expert, CreativeAgencySecrets.com
• Christian Caldwell – Web Interaction and Usability Specialist, Small World Labs/American Heart Association

American Heart Foundation’s experience
Show examples, scenarios and models to convince people.
They spent 6 weeks on a project to convince people. Much of this time was spent establishing baselines.
The most valuable metric for them was reach.

Measurement metrics depend on the department
Marketing dept – equivalency is big. ie, what would the cost have been to achieve the same by traditional means
IT dept – cost/revenue balance

ROI models run off assumptions. You can make a case for anything if you choose your assumptions to suit. Culture is more important

Non-financials

The first question is often ‘how can this help us?’ but it should be ‘how can we help our customers?’
What can the company handle? ie what resources can they dedicate in terms of people/tech/etc?
Is the company’s culture one of control? If so then start with that. Need to accept that customers will be negative sometimes.

What about legals?

Their needs to be a fair amount of trust. Wrapping things up in a legal framework won’t work.
Aim of legal dept is to reduce risk to 0. Businesses work by taking and managing risks.
Go by guidelines – eg the Microsoft blogging guidelines.
Executive buy-in and competitors taking a lead will expedite the legal team getting on board.

Also need to deal with misconceptions.
Give up some control over things like ‘brand message’ but not all.

Social media and culture change

Different approaches to introducing this stuff into large organisations:

1. SWAT approach – get a small team sneakily doing something and rack up some small wins. This method can backfire though.
2. Start with a few committed bloggers and roll out wider if necessary.

Share successes and failures and lessons from both. People will appreciate transparency. However, some will also be scared off by failures – first time you cock up may put people off getting involved.

Does pitching change by audience?

Financial dept – give em numbers.
HR – talk about staff retention.

Also, personal motivations matter. Eg, if there’s someone wanting a promotion approach them individually. Get them on board and championing it early so they can claim benefit later on.
It’s all lobbying skills.

Champions come from all depts.
Age is not an issue. There’s nothing innately ‘digital’ about someone who happens to be young.

Get the curmudgeons on board. What do they care about? Give them the tools to help them.

Building on the first campaign

Not a short-term thing – it’s about shifting cultures/lifestyles.
Campaigns may have a start and end to each one but it’s all part of an ongoing relationship.

Measure everything.
Manage expectations. Not everyone is going to get 1million views on YouTube.

Top tips

1. Be realistic but don’t be a fanatic. Social media may not always hold the answer
2. Show business value
3. Be simple first time out
4. Give results back to a large audience
5. Define upfront what you’re measuring

Questions

What about worry that social media is a waste of office time?
Companies should trust thei people. Everyone should have a goal. If they’re not achieving it then they won’t be around for long.

How can you go about getting other employees involved?
Guest bloggers.
Pull it out of them first time. Let them see the response. Also there may be a fear that they don’t know how to use the tech – teach them

Everything is 6 degrees of separation from profitability.

Other posts about this panel:

• Peter Kim’s own panel recap
• Suzanne Minassian
• David Lee King
• SXSW Notes
• Synch.rono.us

Photo by marceatsworld.