#SpokeFriday time again. As usual drinks are provided and this month’s edition has special meaning because it’s Dan Klein’s 50th Birthday.

If you haven’t been to one before – SpokeFriday is our monthly happy hour to gather friends of the agency and to make new ones. As a virtual agency, the majority of our creatives work off-site so we use these happy hours as an opportunity to gather our creative teams, clients, friends of the agency and anyone else who is in St. Louis who would like to attend. Come for networking, drinks, appetizers or just to meet some friendly people in St. Louis.

• RSVP on Facebook
• Tweet about this using #SpokeFriday tag

Dear Social Media gurus, ninjas and jedis’ – SXSW Interactive has been around since 1994. Long before Twitter, foursquare or your blog. In fact, this year’s topics were crowd-sourced – so stop with the complaining that the sessions weren’t what you wanted and go meet someone in the hallway, blogger’s lounge or trade show.

Why are people complaining?

Well, one reason is because people like to complain. But there are legit reasons as well. This year, SXSW crowd-sourced some of the sessions topics and speaker choices, so people voted on some of the sessions and we ended up with some weird titles and topics. That’s ok though, because with 10 or sessions going on simultaneously, you always have a lot to choose from.

Apparently a lot of these weird titled sessions sucked. I don’t know, I didn’t attend any of them. I think the problem is actually a little deeper, it’s with the audiences that attended them and what they are trying to learn.

The tale of two conferences…

Interactive / UX / Design Conference

This was my first time attending SXSW and I had a great time. I learned a lot and it was a whirlwind of amazing activity. If registration for next year was open right now, I’d book it. Yes, I was that impressed. I attended several great sessions, one or two good sessions, and one truly awful session.

First and foremost, I’m an interactive director at Spoke, I manage design, brand and user experience for the sites and campaigns we build. Being a geek, I attended tech, interactive, user experience and designer type sessions that appealed to my geeky nature. Overall, my goals in attending SXSW were:

• To learn things I can use for our clients at Spoke, both in interactive marketing and social media.
• To meet people that I’ve only talked to through twitter and deepen relationships that were established online.
• To recap my experiences on this blog and drive traffic to this site.

I had a great geeky time and from a random sampling of comments on twitter and friends there with me who do what I do – I think they did too.

Social Media Conference

I’ve read and heard complaints from people who attended social media discussions, panels or crowd-sourced sexy titles that failed to live up to the hype.

I think there is an obvious reason that the Social Media sessions suffered – the people complaining are probably doing it right to begin with. They have either heard the content before, or they think they know it all already. Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of new tricks in social media day after day. Some general rules apply (and don’t change very often):

• Engage with people.
• Interact.
• Don’t be a jerk.
• Don’t use it as push marketing tool.
• Have compelling content.
• Have a consistent brand voice.
• Gain an audience, not just followers.
• Try to get stuff to go viral (those sessions always crack me up, because viral usually happens organically and no one can predict what will and what won’t and every expert I’ve met has said the same thing).

Do these sound familiar? They should, because interaction on social media is pretty much the same as interaction in the real world (make it personal, develop relationships, don’t just yell at strangers and hope they listen).

Sure there are case studies to learn, funny stories to share, adversity to deal with and plenty of other reasons to go to social media sessions, but these topics can be less compelling if you’re a professional. Maybe experienced social media session gurus, jedis and ninjas don’t get as much out of the sessions because the content is often just preaching to the choir?

The Alternative?

A few friends who purely work in the social media world went to SXSW to meet people, make connections, blog and party and didn’t attend any of the sessions. Guess what, they got exactly what they wanted to out of SXSW, had a great experience (unless they got turned down for a VIP party) and will be back doing the same thing next year.

So if you find the content of sessions not up to your high standards, blow the sessions off and go to the blogger’s lounge and meet some people. Hopefully you’ll gain some new insight.

As for me… next year I’ll be learning about some geeky new way to control your mind using only a browser… and at the end of the day we can meet up at the next party.

Of the several sessions I attended at South by Southwest 2010, three stood out to me as an interactive director – all dealing with the same topic, in a different way – making websites attractive. This is post one of three, covering the first session in detail.

Lead! When was the last time you saw a statue of a committee?

Claiming your website is easy to use is like a restaurant claiming that their food is edible.

Cennydd Bowles

The first session was led by Cennydd Bowles of Clearleft, Ltd and was called simply Beauty in Web Design. This session was the first session of the first day of SXSW and included these wonderful quotes above. Cennydd’s point was that there are no works of art in web design, no truly revolutionary sites and as designers (visual or UX) we can all do a bit better.

Bowles talked through a bit of the history and psychology of good design. For instance, humans are always judging beauty innately, it’s not a learned behavior (it’s something you can watch a baby do) and the three types of beauty:

• Universal – everyone sees it
• Sociological (example of model’s now vs Milo’s Venus), changes with society preferences
• Subjective – personal opinions – beauty in the eye of the beholder

This session really emphasized how good UX design isn’t just making the site usable and Cennydd’s point was we should be pushing limits and trying to do something new. I agree completely with this sentiment and as you’ll see during the next post, I talk about one of the reasons why website design is becoming too consistent due to content management systems.

In the movie “City Slickers”, when they’re talking about the key to happiness, Jack Palance’s character (Curly) holds up one finger, and tells Billy Crystal’s character (Mitch) that the key to happiness is “one thing”. It was up to Mitch to find his ‘one thing’.

Good marketing is a lot like that.

Too often companies make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. The most obvious example of this is when companies try to list everything they do in their ads, emails, and conversations with prospects.

Guess what? They don’t care.

Potential customers don’t have the time, interest, or energy to learn your life story. They’re just interested in that ‘one thing’. It could be innovation, customer service, or even price. But, it’s just one thing.

Good marketing isn’t about ‘you’, it’s about your prospect.

The next time you’re tempted to rattle off a laundry list of every possible reason someone might want to do business with you, take a minute and try to determine what you do that is most important to them.

Then, be that ‘one thing’.

image source

Just sat through the first 10 minutes of arguably the worst session at SXSW2010. It had a great title – Interactive Agency Workflow: Design and Development Process – and based on the full room and the fact that SXSW staff were doing a “1-in 1-out” process to keep the room from going over fire code capacity, you could tell a lot of us IA agency folks were looking for real insights.

Unfortunately, the material was nothing new, was presented in a non-visual way and became very sales-y, very quickly. Almost instantaneously the tweets started out about the presentation:

Fail

The exodus began and everyone started ganging up on the guys who presented on twitter. (Don’t believe me, see for yourself here, the results are funny and sad).  I ended up feeling bad for the presenters… because they were unable to stop the onslaught (presentation was built already and underway, the only feedback they were getting at the time was the people leaving the room). But online the slaughter was on and has continued since it ended. I felt bad, but in the end their session should have been better. So it truly was a mistake.

This experience got me thinking about the type of effect a failed brand touch can have on your business.  This could be a bad presentation, a failed webinar, a buggy product launch or any other number of things.

In the ‘old days’ if you make a presentation and it doesn’t go well, you chalk it up as a learning experience, your audience chalks it up as a waste of time and you both move on, probably to never interact again. Prior to social media if you had a product that failed to deliver, people could call or email you (or the Better Business Bureau), but rarely did they have the means for public, instant feedback and an audience of interested readers.

Since the dawn of social media, feedback is instantaneous and often it’s brutally honest. What can you do to protect your brand reputation in the days of social media (besides not giving horrible presentations)?

Make Sure You Know You Failed

Sure there were clues during the presentation (people leaving and potentially chuckling quietly), but the folks from Archetype probably didn’t know how bad it was until they look at the twitter hash tag search results. You need to make sure you know you failed and are being flogged online, to do this you need to:

• Monitor the results of brand searches – use twitter and google searches (or a twitter tool or client, rss feader, google reader, etc) and save searches for your company name and key terms.
• Solicit feedback from others at the event. Hopefully you have people at the presentation who will give you constructive criticism (if you don’t, you should, this will help you improve your public speaking and presence).

You Know You Failed, Now What?

1. Publicly acknowledge your mistake(s). This is important and should be through a public forum (blog post, tweet, press release, web page, etc). Once acknowledged, start reaching out to the people who are publicly pointing a finger at you and apologize that they had a bad experience and insist you’ll try better next time. Honestly most people will stop publicly flogging your company if you just acknowledge the source of their frustration, sincerely apologize and tell them you strive for improvement.
2. Strive for improvement. Fix the problems and try to prevent them from happening again.
3. Move on to hopefully bigger and better things.

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FYI: I have a lot of other posts queued up and will be publishing them daily for the next few days. This one came out first since it was the most timely.