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.

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.

Great post from John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing about why you should start with the basics before you jump on the Twitter and other social media bandwagon.

Also a great summation by Ike:

This reminds me of an earlier post of mine about why you don't need a blog – If you don't have anything (or the right things) to say, don't say it.
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Quick Spoke update – We're busy! Sorry for the lack of posts the last few weeks.  Look for exciting news about new clients and our Sprockets program soon.  Also, you may have seen our building on the cover of the St. Louis Business Journal recently, but don't worry, we're not going anywhere (and we didn't and don't own the building).

Cheers,
Brian

You may disagree  – you may think to yourself: “I have things to say and people will want to read them”.  If that’s you, sorry, move along sir or madam, I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the other reader who doesn’t have things to say, but a consultant / friend / neighbor told them they should start a blog and post things because it will help their business. 

If you are considering blogging because you’ve either been told or believe that it will help your search rankings, it will help personalize your business or drive traffic to your site.  I’m telling you that you don’t need a blog. 

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