SXSW Report

Panel: Lori McLeese, Jason Shellen, Karen Walrond, Brian Mason

The panel consisted of a diverse group of techy folks who’ve bounced around in the business.  It was basically a discussion covering how to deal with four types of difficult people and offered tips for each:

Staff

• If it’s obvious it won’t work out… don’t be passive agressive or wait… deal with it now.
• You can’t fire someone simply for being an asshole, but get them to agree it’s not working out.
• Document by email to make sure you don’t get into trouble.
• Dealing with difficult staff – TIPS – Timely (deal with it soon), Impact (make sure your message gets across), Private, Specific (be specific about the change you want to see)

Peers

• Dealing with competitors in a high performing environment – it’s OK to be competitive, but don’t let it get emotional – emotions get in the way.
• When someone is being a difficult, it’s usually because they are incompetent and you shouldn’t engage someone below your level. It’s actually a defense mechanism that they’ll only dig their heels in further.

Business Partners

• Set expectations up front, in detail, vocalized, and documented repeatedly.
• Look at choices – can you or can’t you work with them.
• Partnership is a 2 way street. If they violate your core values, abandon the partnership.

The Boss

• Deal with it, or look for a way out.

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.

Unfortunately, I’m still sitting here in Bloomington waiting for my flight.  It’s now been delayed 2 hours and 15 minutes.  It’s given me time to double check things (although I’ll still probably forget something) and update my iPhone.

I’ve already mentioned that the location based wars were heating up before SXSW, but I was shocked when I went to update my iPhone today and had app updates from Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Whrrl.  And these are just the location based apps I have on my phone (along with Brightkite).

It should certainly be interesting to watch as things progress this weekend as each are running plenty of promotions.  Gowalla is even throwing a party, and the only way to get in is to “find” a virtual VIP wristband by checking in around Austin.  They’re also having a contest giving away some real items if you find them virtually.

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.

Since Twitter hit it big on Oprah about this time last year, everyone’s been wondering, “What’s the next big thing.”  The technology that has been emerging as the next big thing appears to be location based social networking tools.  Over the last year, services like Gowalla, Whrrl, and Foursquare have been catching on with the techset and are starting to reach the mainstream.  It has forced other services like Yelp to incorporate location based checkins to their services. 

Just in time for SXSW, one of the players in this area – Brightkite – is planning to launch a universal check-in feature to their service – tieing into the APIs of these other services.  Essentially, this would allow users to check in via Brightkite and it would automatically update their location on Foursquare and others (although Gowalla’s API is currently read-only).

It will be interesting to watch the location based social networking services battle at SXSW this year.  Me, I’ll keep updating the services I have on my phone – Yelp, Gowalla, and Foursquare (just removed Whrrl) – while I’m there.

We’re about a month away from SXSW and the buzz has begun.  Twitter CEO, Evan Williams (@ev) is scheduled to participate in a keynote interview at SXSW on Monday, March 15.  On Tuesday, February23, several technology blogs reported that Twitter was planning to launch an advertising platform at SXSW.  This stemmed from a report in Media Post that Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter, apparently made a comment at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting that Twitter will roll out an offical advertising platform within the next month or so.  Rumors abound about whether or not we’ll see, or even catch a hint at, what the new ad platform entails.  Some have speculated the announcement will not take place at SXSW at all, but instead at “Chirp,” Twitters first ever official developer conference, to be held a month after SXSW.  If there is any sort of announcement or talk about it at SXSW, we’ll be sure to bring it to you.

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