SXSW Report

Dennis Crowley – Foursquare & Pete Cashmore – Mashable

One of the big keynote presentations was with Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare (he’s the one waving in the picture with me to the right).  He talked a lot about what it’s been like at Foursquare during their growth over the last year or two.  However, he also gave some interesting information about what they’ve learned and where they’re headed.

They currently have over 7.5 million users, and over 250,000 merchants who use their system.  These users provide them with a ton of data, since the average user has 3 checkins per day and gives back in the form of recommendations.

They have a ton of ideas about where they want to go, but there are only 50 people who currently work there, so they have to carefully prioritize what’s next for them.  They’re focused on providing badges to encourage positive behaviors, such as the gym-rat badge for checking into a gym 10 times a month, or the “I voted” badge during the elections.  Also, just before SXSW, they launched the “Explore” tab, which utilizes their rich data about you and your friends and provides “an amazon-like recommendation engine” about where you might want to shop, eat, etc.

Crowley feels that their future lies in their ability to “blow out the possibilities of the database of information” they have.  This means both providing information to users about what can help them, but also what it means for businesses who utilize Foursquare.  For example, imagine knowing the potential income for your business when someone walks in your location.  In addition, Foursquare has already proven to provide a lot of potential for small businesses who don’t have an organized loyalty program.  Foursquare has the potential to further become a more universal and amplified loyalty program that provides rich data for venue owners.  We’re seeing just the tip of this with the Foursquare/American Express partnership that’s part of SXSW.  By combining Foursquare checkin data with AMEX financial data, they’ll be able to show the exact amount you spent, where, when, how often, and more.

Along with the potential that lies in what’s already been mentioned, Foursquare has their eye on the future.  They’re looking at things like auto check-ins on new phones with technologies like near field communications (NFC) chips.  ”How much easier is it to check in when all you have to do is tap or swipe.”  Not only are they focused on new devices and adapting to new technologies, they’re currently working with over 200 brands, and have their sights set on working with many more.  Much like Twitter, they “love it when people build stuff on top of” their service, and know that others’ innovations could fuel their success.

While most of the conversation felt like Cashmore was having a personal conversation with Crowley, which was off topic, and Crowley avoiding most probing questions, there were some hints at Foursquare’s future.  It was more obvious than ever that Foursquare’s future success lies in its database and the potential to grow it.  The ability for venue owners (businesses) to take advantage of deep, detailed knowledge on people who walk into their locations will help them better market to customers, and at the same time, enhance the customer relationship.

Panel: Hugo Lin – Hunch, Jen King – PHD UC-Berkeley, Mat Harris – BizGreet, Vijay Ravidran – Washington Post, Noah Weiss – Foursquare
Hashtag: #SeeNoCreepy

The point of personalization is to put something more relevant, and therefore more delightful in front of you. In the opinion of the panelists – “Life is too short, and time is too valuable, to have something random/irrelevant in front of you.” However, there’s a fine line between giving you something you might like to see and knowing more about you and your habits than you want a website or company to know.

All of the panelists agreed that personalization is a dialogue you have with the user. It’s asking what information you’d like to have as a marketer, and letting the user decide what they want to share. Marketers have to also be transparent about why they are asking and set clear expectations about how they’ll use this information. In addition, you have to give the user control to decide if they want to withdraw that information or permission they’ve given you. “It’s like remembering to put fire exits in a building,” said one panlist. “Would you build a building without fire exits? Essentially that’s what you’re doing without an open, obvious exit for users.”

Similar to Philip Kaplan’s beliefs in Getting People to Share Information at the Social Business Summit a couple days earlier (but not as extreme), the panelists believe that people are more willing than ever before to share information – especially if they know what benefit they’ll get from it. “Free isn’t free” said one panelist. “People know that they’re paying with their data.”

The WashingtonPost.com has been focusing on customization, and there’s a subtle difference between customization and personalization. Customization lets users choose what they want to see across a long tail of information, while personalization – implicitly or explicitly – takes the users information and automatically uses it to drive the customer experience.

Different than both of these is the idea of targeting – mostly advertising that appears in these locations. It’s effective because most users want information that is of value to them, and it’s a win-win for the customer and marketer. However, what makes it “creepy” is when it’s exposed that over 700 pieces of data about you, your family, web use, etc. may have gone into targeting you. As one panelist put it – “If you feel like, ‘I don’t want to have to explain that,’ you probably shouldn’t be doing it.” This is becoming an increasingly hot topic as many services, such as Facebook, have started using social validation, or adding your friends’ information to make recommendations to you.

Additionally, marketers must consider the context in which their message or brand is being presented. In social media, the terms “Like” and “Follow” have taken on some interesting meanings. Unprovoked “following” of a user by a brand is almost as creepy as asking a user to “like” hemorrhoid cream on Facebook.

One suggestion is to understand the user experience so well, that the personalization is seen as a benefit. For example, YouTube recently created an algorythm for serendipity. Not only do they recommend videos that they think you’ll like (based on your other viewing), but they’ll now show you interesting videos that none of your friends have seen – Letting you be the first one one of your friends to send on that next viral video. This insight came from a YouTube focus group, and has been one of their most successful tools.

More than ever, it’s time for marketers to consider the impact of actions that appear “creepy” to the consumer. The FTC has said that targeted marketing raises “Questions of human dignity,” and have suggested the potential for a “do not track” list online.

This wasn’t necessarily a presentation I attended at iMedia, the Social Business Summit, or SXSW, but among the many brand people I got to meet, it was an extremely hot topic of discussion.  The discussion was further fueled by something that happened the day before the Social Business Summit.  If you hadn’t seen the news, an employee from a company called New Media Strategies, accidentally dropped an f-bomb on behalf of their client, Chrysler’s twitter account.  As you can imagine, the employee was immediately fired and Chrysler let the agency go the following day.

Many of the brand people I met worked in various parts of the company, and something mentioned in the Ad Age article about the incident sparked a lot of discussion…

Turf battles over social media between marketing and communications have been an issue at the automaker — and other companies — for a few years. Early in the day after the tweet went out, Chrysler’s communications team was grappling to get hold of the details of the episode after bloggers and media began calling, in part because Chrysler’s marketing department controls Facebook and Twitter social-media accounts that are “consumer facing.” The communications department has separate Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr accounts that are meant to be “media facing.”

Many companies say the divide only serves turf and budget wars, not the brands. “All that has blurred, so it’s critical for communications and marketing to be coordinating and cooperating all the time,” said Stuart Schorr, VP-communications and public affairs at Jaguar-Land Rover North America. One of the issues creating the turf war, he noted, is which department gets the budget.

What I think we all discovered was social media is something that can’t be fit into a traditional box, as it has blurred the lines between paid and earned media, marketing and customer service, as well as transactional versus relational communications.  I’m not sure anyone has figured it out, but everyone expressed frustration about how this confusion was causing issues within their companies  (like the ones mentioned above).

The general perception is that social media is “cheap,” because sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube don’t necessarily charge you to be there.  However, in order to do it right, you have to invest first in listening to conversations about your brand and industry… which isn’t easy, when there are over 1 billion tweets per week, 1 billion Facebook messages posted per day, or the 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Imagine the resources it takes just to do this… and if you want to respond to any of these messages, that takes more resources – and as pointed out above, multiple resources across functions/silos.

Hopefully you can agree, at the very least, it takes a large amount of time and organization.  Generally, brands are already heavily committed to traditional media – and spending money to outsource this work to traditional media agencies – because the “push my message through a one-to-many framework” has been in place for so long.  Even more important, leaders aren’t yet prepared to organize new internal communications structures to deal with a “new” media which requires one-to-one relationships.

In the meantime, there are certain to be many, many more ethical debates (like this one – Should You Outsource Social Media?) about whether or not you should hire someone to manage customer relationships in social media on your behalf.  Please tell us what your take in this debate is by commenting on this post.

Panel: Jeremiah Owyang – Altimeter Group, Leslie Bradshaw – Jess3, Steve Rosenbaum, Sam Decker

One of the things I love about SXSW is serendipity.  I was a bit bummed, as I tried to go into 2 different sessions, and there were long lines at both.  I thought I’d head back to the Samsung Blogger Lounge to catch up on these blog posts.  I ended up hanging out with @redboypodcast and stumbling into this great panel discussion on content creation and curation.

One mistake sites often make is sending people off of their site to their social networks or other places to get to content.  The best thing you can do is to begin aggregating that content on your site.  You can curate content from all over the web and have people looking at it from within a context you are comfortable with and adds brand equity.

There was a bit of debate around the difference between a curator and an editor.  While nothing was decided, the thought was that a curator looks at different multi-sourced content and writers, whereas an editor pulls from a fixed group of resources.  It’s not all wonderful, as many people, especially writers see content curation and aggregation as leeching off of their content.  However, it seems to be an increasing acceptable method of getting content.

Panel: Amber J Lawson – Head of Original Programming, AOL, David Tochterman – Head of Digital Media, Innovative Artists, Rick Fox – NBA All star/Entertainer, Kevin Pollak – Actor, Paul Kontonis – Digitals
Hashtag: #sxswbigbrands

This panel discussed how traditional media is changing and how brands can get involved to take advantage of this shift.  In particular, two celebrities on the panel are taking slightly different approaches to this.

Actor Kevin Pollak, created Kevin Pollak’s Chat show - http://kevinpollakschatshow.com – because he said, ”If you’re not creating your waiting.”  As an actor, you wait for the phone to ring for the next thing.  He felt that new media provided a tremendous opportunity to create his own content.  He used Felicia Day as another example of someone who created their own show to take their future and potential in their own hands.  He simply tries to create interesting content to draw an audience, as he said, “If you can earn an audience you can earn a living.”

Pollak gets brands involved from a very traditional perspective, through pre-roll advertising, display ads around the content, etc.  He feels that this helps big brands who may not be comfortable jumping into this area, get involved.  Therefore, they primarily use impressions as a way to sell the show to brands.

NBA all-star, and now entertainer, Rick Fox, takes a slightly different approach.  What’s important to him is telling a good story, and he looks for opportunities to integrate brands into the story.  For example, on one of his shows, you may see a basketball player having a Gatorade after a game.  It’s a bit like celebrity endorsements, but extends it by showing how the product is used and its benefits.  This takes cooperation between the celebrity/producer and the brand.

Working through partnerships like VuGuru/AOL, he can offer these product integrations, as well as non-traditional promotions.  He believes you are not only bring on a celebrity to use/endorse your product, but you’re also utilizing their Twitter followers and other social media “klout” to influence their fans.  And it’s not just the celebrities’ followers, but their personal networks.  For example, when Rick Fox was on Dancing with the Stars, he was able to get friends (Kobe Bryant and Shaq) to post messages to their followers asking for support.  This can get a little muddy when you’ve got multiple projects going on at the same time.

Panel: Tom Ashbrook – NPR, Lora Kolodny – TechCrunch, Pawan Deshpande – Hivefire, Gary Kim – Carrier Evolution, Joe Pulizzi – Junta42
Hashtag: #curatedebate

The purpose of journalism is to inform or educate, while the purpose of brands is to drive profitable customer action. The Internet allows for the democratization of information, but we’re also starting to see the corporatization of information.

People will make time for a good, relevant story, no matter who tells it. If brands can tell compelling, interesting stories on a regular basis, they can cut through the clutter (those 30 billion messages a day, as Shiv Singh discussed here). The more money that comes in from doing this, the more money there is to do this.

We are all media publishers, and all brands need to think of themselves as publishers.  They need to take a viewer/reader/listener centric approach that asks: What are their painpoints?  What keeps them up at night?  You have the ability to tell a story that shows how your brand can solve this issue. Content will be successful if it targets those customers painpoints. We now have the ability to communicate directly to consumers without having to go through another channel – advertising.

Even media companies are realizing a decrease in advertising and rise in “advertiser services” which essentially teach brand advertisers how to be content publishers.  One company on the panel – Hivefire – aggregates and curates content for brands on industry topics.  This allows these brands to continually publish information, and be a resource on industry topics.  Another example is P&G’s Home Made Simple.  It’s tremendously similar to Real Simple – providing nearly identical types of information, but Home Made Simple highlights their own products as examples within stories.

Brands need to make sure they are seen to be the trusted authority, and they need to be straightforward and honest about their perspective and motives.  As hard as it tries, journalism is not objective. Everyone has a perspective – and brands need to be up front about their motives.  Consumers get to decide who they pay attention to – journalists or branded content.  More importantly, social media allows for a broader application of the “Fourth Estate” among corporations, so they also need to be honest, or they’ll get called out on it.

A bonus that was not on the agenda at the Tweet House today was the addition of Blendtec’s Tom Dickson.  He spoke a bit about how they started and got to be as successful as they’ve been with their “Will it Blend?” series on YouTube.  Here’s a brief video of his presentation.

Speakers: Mary Henige – Director, Social Media & Digital Communications at GM, Erika Brookes - Vice President, Marketing for Vitrue, Paull Young - Director of Digital Engagement and Fundraising, charity: water, Moderator: Steve Broback

I decided to spend the afternoon at the Tweet House, an intimate setting with some pretty good panels on social media.  This panel included folks from GM, charity: water, and Vitrue.  The discussion really covered managing communities and managing relationships and brands in the social media space.

All panelists agreed that one of the strengths of social media is the ability to tell an interesting story.  It gives brands a platform for storytelling.  In particular, Mary Henige from GM discussed how they’ve tried to use social media to humanize their brand.

“You can hate a brand, but it’s hard to truly hate a person if you get to know them.  You have to humanize your brand, and this provides a great venue to do that,” said Henige.  They’ve created a site called the Faces of GM - http://www.facesofgm.com – where they’re telling interesting stories and giving a behind the scenes look at the brand.

Getting people with passion for creating content is key, as Ericka Brookes from Vitrue illustrated.  While they have a blog owner, they’ve tried to get anyone who wants to participate involved – someone from engineering, marketing, etc.  People who are passionate about it will create content and will express their passion in their messages.

Of course any discussion of social media these days comes around to ROI and whether or not you’re being effective in this space.  As Henige said, “you can’t always measure ROI directly.  Sometimes you do something because it’s the right thing to do.”  Being in social media and interacting with customers is a relationship building activity and relationships can’t always be measured quantitatively.   However, all of the panelists agreed that you need to measure what you’re doing and estimate the impact it’s having.  One brand uses a customer happiness index which compiles interactions, mentions, and sentiment.  Whatever you choose to measure, you have to look at it as an indicator, not a direct measurement.

Henige also mentioned that there’s a tendency in the industry to focus to much on those who don’t like us, instead of spending time on/with brand advocates.  During the auto show, GM met with fans and interacted with them, giving a few of them a behind the scenes tour.  They’ve found them to be tremendous brand advocates, even helping other customers themselves in the social media space.

Charity Water had a kid who asked friends not to give him a 17th birthday gift, and instead donate$17 to charity water on his behalf.  He did it on his own and raised $50k in a couple days.  Paull Young from charity: water said that when he started they tried to focus on the 50% of site visitors who hadn’t donated.  He found it to be unsuccessful, so he has turned his focus on the 50% who do donate.  He’s found it to be much more successful.  Similarly, one of the most successful campaigns Brookes said she has seen was the release of Katy Perry’s new album.  Facebook fans were given a preview before anyone else, and these fans shared the content and had the feeling of being rewarded for their loyalty to Perry.

Presenter: Shiv Singh, PepsiCo
This was easily the best and most practical presentation of the day, providing a very clear outline for building a company structure to take advantage of a real-time environment.  The recent revolution in in Egypt highlighted the power of real-time communication and timeliness of information. Businesses can utilize social media for real time marketing, but there are six elements that need to be in place to execute effectively:

• Real-time Insights – It’s most important to be aware and know what your customers are thinking and doing in real-time.  The listening tools must be in place to provide a stream of updates.
• Real-Time Response – When you know what your customers are saying, you need to be in a place to act immediately.  A response only has meaning if it’s timely, so having staff who can respond in real-time provides an answer or response immediately.
• Real-Time Content Studio – Not only do you need to be able to respond immediately, but you need content and creative experts organize to be able to produce content in the moment.
• Real-Time co-creation - We can work together within the organization and with the consumer to develop the message and let it evolve.
• Real-Time Distribution – As a brand, the tools should be there to allow you to talk directly to consumers without having to go through your agency or a middle-man.
• Real-Time Engagement – Interacting and engaging with customers in real time creates engagement and trust.

All of this fits within a pop culture frame, meaning an awareness of the environment and what’s going on in the world at that moment.  The way we think and process information is changing, and new media technologies are literally addictive says psychologist Susan Weinschenk, fueling a “dopamine induced loop of seeking behavior and instantanious reward.”

There are 30 billion Facebook updates a month and a brand’s marketing message is competing for attention with all those status updates.  Therefore, brands need to think like a content company, regularly producing relevant content that cuts through the clutter.  During fashion week, Pepsi launched its new skinny can with a campaign called “Get the Skinny.”  During fashion week, they set up a content center for information on culture and fashion, essentially acting as a small news organization for the week.  It resulted in over 90,000 new Facebook fans and a large amount of engagement online with the brand.

Brands must be aware of culture and what the general public is thinking in order to take advantage of real-time opportunities.  During the BP disaster in the Gulf, Pepsi took the opportunity to expand the Pepsi Refresh Project.  They decided to give away and extra $1.3 million to fund reat ideas to help fund Gulf communities.  Because they were structured as outlined above, within a couple days, they got the idea, had it approved, and launched the site.  The next phase of the Pepsi Refresh Project will take advantage of consumer generated videos, allowing organizations who would like the grants to make a case to consumers via video.

Overall, in order to make this happen, Singh suggests that all of the following are needed to make it happen

1. Be able to ride “glocal” culture trends as they’re shaped by consumers.  Your company must be organized to communicate in real time, both on a global and local basis.
2. Target your brand loyalists and let them spread your message, but to do so you need to know who they are and have a relationship with them.
3. The ability to engage in real-time, meaningfully.  It’s about engagement, not just broadcasing your message, but if you’re able to do so, your message will be amplified by others.
4. Have a content studio to operate as a media organization in real-time.
5. Build your own distribution network.
6. Organize to be able to go from strategy to execution in seconds.
7. Don’t limit this to digital – make everything addressable, targeted, and instant.
8. Acknowledge real-time marketing has no geographic boundaries.

I got a question via twitter from @kellythul who asked what KPIs or metrics Singh utilizes for measuring success.  Singh suggested something he helped to develop while at Razorfish – the SIM Score.  The SIM Score for a brand is the ‘Net Sentiment’ for that brand in social media divided by ‘Net Sentiment’ for the industry.  Net Sentiment is defined by Razorfish as “Net Sentiment for the Brand = (Positive + Neutral Conversations – Negative Conversations) / Total Conversations for the Brand.”  He suggested looking at your real time score and comparing it to competitive brands within your industry.  He says that he has definitely seen a correlation with changes in SIM score and sales, mostly in CPG type industries.

Foursquare had been a bit coy these last couple weeks regarding their plans for SXSW, simply tweeting, “SXSW IS LESS THAN THREE WEEKS AWAY! NEW APP + NEW BADGES + PARTIES + CONCERT + MOAR FOURSQUARE. DETAILS COMING. OKTHXBAI.”

A few hours ago, they started to let us all in (a little) on what is to come. Their site – http://foursquare.com/sxsw – has been updated, and what we know is this:

• They’re releasing a new version of the app – Foursquare 3.0
• They’re hosting a party on 3/12 at the Cedar Street Courtyard
• They’re hosting a concert on 3/14
• They’re introducing 18 new badges (not sure if they’ll be exclusive to SXSW or not)
• They’ve partnered with American Express

I’m really excited and interested to see what becomes of the American Express partnership.  When I saw American Express’ own version of Foursquare built on Foursquare’s API – Social Currency – I was immediately impressed.  Not only did they add photo capabilities before Foursquare did, but they added a feature which allowed you to enter in how much you had spent at that venue.

With the partnership, any purchases made with an Amex card would not only check you in via Foursquare, but could provide incredible individual and aggregate data to retailers.  For example, with Best Buy’s Rewards card, they know how much you’ve spent with them – and provide you rewards based on how much you’ve spent.  They also know who you are, along with when and where you made the purchase.  That’s incredible data for targeted marketing and predictive modeling.

Now, every retailer (who accepts Amex), even the small business down the street could have this type of data on their customers, thanks to Foursquare and Amex.  It has the potential to be the retail version of Google analytics for businesses.  When you add the gaming incentives that Foursquare provides, you’ve got something that people want to do and are willing to give up this data for gaming and loyalty incentives.