My colleague Catherine Sheehan, audience intelligence guru, marketer, Harvard alum and thinker guest posts this week. She admitted to me that this post was born a bit out of fear, but also genuine concern that humanity could lose its identity. Because my blog usually posts the reasons why we should go head on into new technologies, I thought it was important to hear the counterpoints. I greatly respect Catherine’s opinion and her desire to begin an important dialogue.

Two weeks ago I was at the Jay Chiat Strategy Festival in Miami, a conference that delivered two days packed with strategic, creative, design, and audience insights shared by some of the best planners in the country (with occasional breaks for sleeping and outrageously priced cocktails at the Delano). Eric Hirschberg, CEO of Activision, was the first person to speak at the Festival, and something about his (very eloquent) speech was still nagging at me as we boarded our flight back to Boston. It wasn’t until I saw someone “check in” on Foursquare when we landed at Logan that I put my finger on it – and this blog post was born:

Hirshberg led off the Festival by declaring World of Warcraft “the best example of branding in the modern world.” He made a compelling argument: World of Warcraft is a “persistent world.” Always on, 24/7. Continues to exist even after a gamer leaves. Impacted and changed by everyone who sets foot on it. But operated by a clear set of rules that every player must follow. Hirshberg closed by advising all brands to follow WOW’s lead, and work towards becoming persistent worlds.

What he didn’t mention is a second category of brands that have already created persistent worlds – location-based services companies.

Three weeks ago Allen & Gerristen hosted GeoM, a veritable who’s who of location-based services. The final, most anticipated panel included Dennis Crowley, Founder of Foursquare and Seth Priebatsch, Founder (Sorry. Head Ninja) of SCVNGR. Both young entrepreneurs have successfully created persistent worlds. Foursquare and SCVNGR are “always on,” accessible on your phone 24/7. Each time you “check in” to a venue your activities and feedback are logged – you make your mark on the world, as does every other checked in visitor. Each application operates by a clear set of rules that guide users.

SCVNGR most perfectly typifies “brand as persistent world”: its goal is to build a virtual “game layer” on top of the original persistent world – our real world.

This is where the notion of “brands as persistent worlds” gets scary – when the lines between brand world and real world become so blurred that you can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.

An example: SCVNGR offers points when you check into a location, but awards even more points for a “social check-in,” when you check in to a location with one or more friends. If I were watching my friend get excited over extra bonus “social check-in” SCVNGR points, I’d be forced to wonder – did he invite me along because he wants to spend time with me? Or because he wants SCVNGR points? When the lines between brand world and real world blur, motives, relationships, even emotions become suspect. You may be elated when SCVNGR rates your outing as having a high “fun quotient” – but will you stop to wonder whether you’re actually having fun?

For me, the height of the GeoM conference came at an unexpected moment. Dennis was in the midst of explaining several features of his Foursquare application. And I was taken aback when I saw that Seth, sitting directly beside Dennis, wasn’t listening to him at all – he was up there on the stage, typing on his phone. At first I chalked it up to a lack of manners crossed with extreme millennial ADD. But I was floored when, as soon as Dennis finished speaking, Seth looked up and commented: “While Dennis was explaining his application to you, I created an application on SCVNGR.” He had created a SCVNGR challenge specific to our event and location. And he invited the audience (who, incidentally, had just indulged in trays of cupcakes) to sign onto SCVNGR, complete the challenge, and win a chocolate bar.

I then watched in disbelief as at least 80% of the audience immediately looked down at their smartphone/iPad/laptop, pulled up SCVNGR, and began working on the challenge – paying absolutely no attention to another panelist who had begun to speak. What had seemed like a lack of common courtesy a few minutes before was now something much more disturbing. SCVNGR’s persistent world, or game layer on top of the world, or whatever label you give it – had eclipsed the real world. And nobody in the room seemed to notice.

Fundamentally, we all want our favorite brands and products to exist in a persistent world: available on demand. Receptive to our creativity. Permitting us to make our mark and show off to our friends. But we’d do well to remember that the real world is the most persistent world of all – offering more challenges, discoveries, conversations, tear-filled lows, ecstatic highs, and pure analog joy than we could experience in a lifetime. And every so often it deserves our full attention.

Branded worlds, game layers, life-charting apps – they’re cool, fun, and very often useful. But when they become truly “persistent,” they confer a great deal of responsibility to the person engaging with them: knowing when to turn them off.

What is this Movember thing anyway? Movember is a global organization bent on ending cancer encouraging members to simply grow a moustache during the month of November to raise awareness for men’s cancer issues. While Movember is focused on men’s health issues like prostate and colon cancer, it ends up being much more than that. Movember builds and strengthens communities. Movember is a healthy competition. Movember is a series of networking events and galas.

One of the big competitions this year is the Digital Challenge. Teams from across the United States, Canada and Australia will compete to see which city has the best – uh – Mojo. Last year two teams vied for the title in which Team Boston barely edged Lance Armstrong’s home, Austin, TX. Team Austin and Team Boston’s captains are:

The Original 2

Team Austin : #TeamAUS : Aaron Strout
Team Boston : #TeamBOS : Graham Nelson

The challenge was so competitive last year that we have expanded! You can follow and send a tweet to your captain to find out how to join their team, get involved in Movember events or just plain donate a few bucks to the cause. Your money does not need to have a cult of personality with a moustache, you can’t spell money without “mo” so we take all kinds.

US Expansion Teams

Team Dallas : #TeamDFW : Kris Morrison
Team Los Angeles : #TeamLAX : Brian Aucoin
Team New York City : #TeamNYC : Lisa Kolodny
Team Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill : #TeamRDU : Gregory Ng
Team Toronto: #TeamTOR : Sean Moffitt
Team Salt Lake City : #TeamSLC : DJ Waldow
Team San Diego : #TeamSAN : BJ Cook
Team Seattle : #TeamSEA: Damon Cortesi
Team Washington DC : #TeamDC: Justin Herman

Canada Expansion

#TeamYHZ – Halifax – Ryan Joseph @famousfolks
#TeamYUL – Montreal – Eric Robillard @clownonfire and Sara Lomas @drawnin
#TeamYOW – - Ottawa – Allan Isfan @isfan
#TeamYYZ – Toronto – Jeremy Wright @jeremywright
#TeamYKF – Kitchener-Waterloo Karl-Allen Muncey* @cutegecko
#TeamYXU – London Matt Bergmann @creativematt
#TeamYWG – Winnipeg Jason Abbott @jabbs7
#TeamYQR – Regina – David Bellerive @stupidinregina
#TeamYYL – Calgary – Sarah Blue @superblue
#TeamYEG – Edmonton – Chris Labossierre @chislabossiere or Ken Bautista @kenbautista
#TeamYYJ – Vancouver John Ounpuu @ounpuu Kris Krug @kk
Movember Victoria – Andrew Wilkinson @awilkinson

How to get involved

• Lead a Digital Challenge team in your city. Tweet or email me, @schneidermike, to find out how.
• Grow a moustache and raise money to change the face of men’s health by joining a Digital Challenge team.
• Put a Movember twibbon on your avatar http://www.twibbon.com/join/Movember.
• Make a donation.
• Tweet a link to this post or any other Movember content!

Thank you for supporting Movember!

One of the things I hear most about location based systems is that people want offers. They want to get stuff for checking in. Some people wonder why they do not see a special in every application every place they go. The key to actually receiving offers is building awareness everywhere. Someone has to tell people that location based apps like Foursquare and Whrrl enable this ability quite easily. Dennis Crowley, Jeff Holden, Josh Williams, Seth Priebatsch, Lawrence Colburn (etc) are doing a great job of going around the country and letting people in on the secret. It is important to remember that just because conferences, twitter and blogs like generate dialogue among marketers, technologists and brands, they do not reach everyone. The people who are passionate about LBS (I am probably talking to YOU) need to let businesses know first and foremost that people are checking in to their business. Everyone within the business should be talking to these

• people that care enough about them to go through the process of
• pulling out their phone
• finding the place
• checking in to let their friends and stalkers know that they have done so (which some say is risky)
• sending that information to the Twitter or the Facebook

Whenever I go into the city, I check in on Foursquare and Whrrl (and Gowalla, SCVNGR, MyTown, Pegshot, Yelp and sometimes even Friendster, I mean Brightkite). When I do it, I often ask the employees if they know the mayor, or the ambassador or duke or the person highest on the leaderboard.

I was in New York with Joel Idelson the other day and we went to Pret A Manger to get some coffee before a big meeting. The manager was on the floor making sure that the displays looked perfect. I already had my phone out because I was checking in, so I showed her a picture of “the mayor” and asked “Do you know this person?”.

She said “No, should I? Who is he?”

“He is your mayor. Have you heard of Foursquare?” I inquired.

“My what? What’s Foursquare?” she asked. Even in the Cradle of Foursquare, the villagers are not 100% aware that they are among greatness.

“Foursquare is a tool that lets people check in to your store. They then tell their friends that they are here so that they can find each other. This person is your mayor. That means that they have checked in here more than anyone. They care about you enough to tell their friends that they are coming here and this guy does it the most.” I said.

“Wow!” said the manager. “I need to reward him for that!”

I smiled the biggest smile. She got it immediately. I then told her that Foursquare and Whrrl both allow you to build specials for mayors and regular folks that check in. She was thrilled. The lightbulb went off immediately and I am hoping to find a special at Pret A Manger the next time I go.

We all want LBS to work. We all want offers. We also know it’s not just about offers, but that they make it interesting for the masses. So here is my challenge to you, the early adopter, LBS superhero that you are. When you check into a store, restaurant, coffee shop, or pretzel wagon, flash the picture of the mayor, ambassador or duke in the face of the staff, ask “Do you know this person?” and come back here and let me know how it went. Seriously. I would like the whole story in the comments here or in your own “The Do You Know Movement” post that you link to in the comments.

#dykm

The hashtag is #dykm.

I was in Las Vegas at BlogWorldExpo 2010 last week meeting old friends, making new ones and things were going well until – my belt broke. I only brought one. My pants are two sizes too big. It’s a long story. So I went to Urban Outfitters at the fabulous Mandalay Bay Hotel (honestly, I can’t see myself staying anywhere else in Las Vegas, I loved it there) to buy a new one. They did not have any that I liked so I checked out the t-shirt section because I do not have enough t-shirts. All the while I am holding on to my belt loop so I don’t lose my drawers. I walked through the casino, to the Starbucks, into the convention and back up to the mall with one finger in a loop at all times. Mad mad cool. So there it was, in the t-shirt section – the perfect shirt. I bought it instantly and because they did not have any belts I liked, decided to forego a stupid belt and hold my pants up with my fingers through the loop like an 80s middle schooler until my flight.

Flashback

Flashback 2009, SXSW, a confused @schneidermike from “themichaelschneider.com” goes to the mic to ask the keynote speaker a question.

“I’m @SchneiderMike from themichaelschneider.com” he said.

“SchneiderMike!” says Gary Vaynerchuk.

“So I have this friend-” he said to groans and chuckles from the audience. “-he’s pretty good at a lot of things and is not sure what to focus on and short of going on a vision quest in the desert, taking peyote and finding his spirit guide, how should he decide what to focus on?”

“Do all that shit.” said GaryVee. “I can’t tell you how many projects I have 80-90% finished. Someone could come up to me and mention plastic cups and I could be like ‘plastic cups’ and go off on a three week tangent.”

A Symbol

At that point I decided no longer to worry about labeling myself as a specialist in anything. I decided that it was ok to be good at a lot of things particularly when I have the motivation and ability to get fairly deep in a lot of topics simultaneously. In other words, a ton of passion combined with knowledge. Specializing in the past never really made me happy. Sure, my SQL is better than some people’s English, but my mind is too active for that and I need to be able to think about more than one thing. I will continue to have goals and develop paths to those goals, but I decided that if I stray from the path for a bit or leave it for a new one that I will not beat myself up like I did in the past.

Gary meant plastic cups as something arbitrary, but to me plastic cups now represent always allowing myself the possibility of learning something new, having a conversation with someone about a topic that I am not even the least bit familiar with or carving out time to think about something that I have never even considered – Solo or in groups.

Do you allow yourself time to explore or are you focused on that “one thing”?

The more I talk to people about location and location based services, the more I hear the question: “Why?”. People want me to tell them what the purpose of the check in is and why they continue to check in on one or more location based applications like foursquare, Whrrl, Gowalla, MyTown,SCVNGR, TriOut, Pegshot, Friendster – I mean BrightKite, Facebook and the list goes on and on and on. What is the consumer value? The answer is pretty simple really. You’re either getting value or you are having fun.

Value

You should get something for sharing your data. That’s right. When you tell someone where you are, what you like or what you bought, it makes them smarter about you. Being smarter about you means they can tailor their offers instead of throwing a giant net into cyberspace hoping to catch you. Think about tailoring for a minute. A tailor knows you from head to toe. They carefully measure you so that they can make a suit or dress that fits you exactly. They know your chest size, you arm length and they know a lot more about your crotch than anyone else does. The result is something that fits you – at least until you plow through an entire box of Oreos.

Place is a component of relevance. Getting a tip from Foursquare when you check into a nearby location is fun and cool and a step in the right direction. I really like how Whrrl is focused on learning from what you do with it. In the early versions of Whrrl 3 they toyed around with telling people things like “people who check in to The Rattlesnake go to the Arlington T Station”. Now they take all of that data and use it to make recommendations that you may actually want to do based on Amazon-like technology. Every want, do, check in and ignore tells the model more about how you like to behave and helps it make smarter recommendations about what to do. That said, it also needs people to use it because the recommendations come from the user community. The content is is not mined from Yelp or Google or anywhere else. It’s only as strong as the community.

Gowalla has a unique opportunity that it does not exploit enough. Gowalla has virtual goods. These items are found by checking into places and have real world value. The cool thing about these is that you can pick up a taco that can be redeemed at a place like One Taco in Texas. You can use it yourself or you could choose to drop it somewhere for someone else to find. So imagine you’re Tony Hawk and you have a bunch of virtual skateboard decks. I once got a virtual eye-fi card from Best Buy. This kind of surprise creates buzz and makes people feel good about the brand that left it for them. The effects are short term and could be targeted to places and in theory to certain kinds of people.

Marketers. Location data is another measurement. Take it and create a custom offer. Yes. It takes time to combine data from twitter, facebook and location streams, but when you are sitting in a board room talking about the feedback on offers that were actually relevant to the customer, you will be singing the praises of the data wonks who did your segmentation. Why? Because the people will care about what you’re offering them. Anne Mai Bertelsen and I wrote a paper about the future of loyalty that gives an overview on how we see loyalty and social colliding.

Fun

Checking in is fun. It’s a game. On Foursquare you get points every time you check in and you can battle for checkin supremacy in your city or the mayorship of your favorite package store or donut shop. SCVNGR sends you on treks through places and has you do challenges along the way. Some of these give you real world rewards. For example, SCVNGR created a trek through The Smithsonian that makes going through the museums entertaining and gave people who were really dedicated a chance to win an iPad.

Gowalla partnered with USA Today to put together treks through US cities. These were designed to help people find the coolest (and in some case most touristy) spots . The reward was a Gowalla pin, but I think the real reward was the time people saved in planning because they knew that Gowalla already had scoped out some fun things for them to do.

Marketers need to incorporate fun and value into location based marketing strategies in order to get people to participate. More importantly, they need to take the opportunity to learn about the people who are interested in participating in their programs. Remember, these people have gone to great pains -pulling out their phone, searching for the place, interacting with the content, checking in, doing challenges and sharing these with their social graphs – and getting to know these people, rewarding them, can pay dividends for the brand by creating evangelism and seeding loyalty.

The link to the white paper is a little hard to find in the Harvard Business Review post so click here to download it directly.

October 4-8, MITX presents Future M week in Boston. On October 4th, brands, marketers, technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, students and business people and will gather in Cambridge at the Microsoft NERD to talk about the future of geo location and the future of geo marketing. Yes. This is a promotional post for an event that my company, Allen & Gerritsen is planning, but since you have read this far, I think you will find the content helpful in making a decision as to whether or not you should attend. For the record, I think you should, particularly if you are a B2C brand or working in the B2C space.

Making Money with Location

Everyone needs to be able to make money to be able to be a going-concern. In this panel, Jason Keath of Social Fresh leads a discussion that will look at revenue streams and service models that make sense. We’ll talk to two platforms that started with revenue models. David Chang will represent Where.com and Wayne Sutton will talk about Triout’s model. We also have Josh Karpf of mega-brand PepsiCo who can tell us about how applications like Pepsi Loot are important to their marketing and revenue stream. Jason Keath is not known for shyness, so I expect he will pose the tough questions and drive panelists toward talking about useful models and cases that drive business results.

Data and Loyalty

Why does it matter? Location is an important component in doing what every brand would like to do – provide a relevant message to its audience at a time when the receiver is ready to hear and act on the message. Everyone would like a reduction of noise and an increase in overall signal. The future of marketing is not casting a wide net, rather brands conitinue to hone their communications and become trusted companions that better the lives of those who need them. In order for this to happen the way we all would like it to happen, brands need access to data and they need to be willing to give something in return to receive.

In the panel entitled “Data and Loyalty”, Melissa Parrish of Forrester leads a discussion with 2 of the industry’s top thought leaders on LBS, Aaron Strout of Powered Inc and Simon Salt of Incslingers. They have not only been vocal about the space, but built solutions that incorporate their thinking. With the focus of this panel being data, we are elated to have the founder of SimpleGeo, Matt Galligan coming out to talk about how their database / backbone aligns the ecosystem by eliminating the disparity across platforms thereby making near limitless applications possibilities – possible.

The Future of Geo

The day culminates in a visit from 3 of the top LBS platforms on the market. In the last panel we will talk to three heads of LBS technology shops and give them the opportunity not only to talk about their current plans for word domination, but about how they see the industry evolving. Jeff Holden of Whrrl, Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR and Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, three very different location based platforms, will be asked to talk about why location is important today and what it means in the grand scheme and how it becomes increasingly useful for everyone. The end game needs to be a win for brands, consumers and for platforms and currently the fog-of-new is still very prevalent. Each company has a story to tell about engagement with the consumer, rewards, loyalty and relevant content.

This conversation will be 90 minutes so there will be plenty of time to get deep on the topic and to get the crowd involved. I’ll be moderating and as I prepare, would love to get your thoughts on some of the things you would like to hear about from these 3 gurus. Just leave a comment.

How Much?

$130 per person. Beam Interactive thinker and disruptor, Graham Nelson tweeted about the charge and I think this is the proper forum to address the question. We want to be able to provide snacks and libation to our audience and record the event while covering some of our costs. As you well know, it takes a lot of time and effort to plan an event of this size (and it’s nothing compared to the entire Future M event, kudos to MITX!). The point of this session is to provide an atmosphere to push the conversation to the next level. As one of the missions of Future M, the parent conference, is to promote innovation in Boston, we are currently talking to MIT about donating any profits to an innovation scholarship.

Where’s Gowalla?

Because some of you have asked: Where’s Gowalla? Brightkite and Gowalla both expressed regret for being unable to attend. Facebook is still a non-responder.

See You There!

Come out for a day of discussion filled with a balance of best practices, ideas, innovation and though leadership.

To register, go to the official Geo M site and click register.

“They got the Big Mac we got the Big Mick” – Cleo McDowell in Coming to America

We got the trapezoid, they got the square

Notice the 4 in the places logo and it’s nearly in a square.

Is this a sign of a partnership with Foursquare? (haha) Or does this little Easter egg openly mock the darling of location based software, Foursquare?

Thanks to Megan LePaige for pointing out the 4 and Emily Bowden for riffing on McDowell’s.

With thousands of panels listed for SXSW 2011 and an overall feeling that much of the content last year was mediocre (a statement that I vehemently disagreed with), I thought it might be nice to offer up some panels that I felt were worthy of consideration. Check them out and if you agree, please give them a thumbs up so that they have a chance of being accepted by SXSW.

The Panels

Weird Science: Lessons for Online Social Networks – Click here for more information and to vote
Submitted by: Burr Settles
Summary: What’s wrong with current trends in online communities, and how we can fix it? Virtually every CMS or development framework for the web today comes with apps, modules, or plugins for “social networking” such as friending, rating/ranking content, and making recommendations. And because they are readily available or trivially implemented, new websites are adopting these features in hordes. Surprisingly, though, recent research shows that these features don’t necessarily facilitate a pro-social user experience. Is this a problem? In this talk, Dr. Burr Settles surveys some of the scientific literature on this topic, and presents case studies from community websites—including FAWM (February Album Writing Month), which he founded in 2004. Solutions range from simple to implement design decisions (which can change community dynamics and improve the user experience) to forward-looking technologies based on machine learning and data mining to promote pro-social behavior.
Why? Burr Settles gave a talk last year about building a community. It was the single best presentation I saw at SXSW and I saw a lot of good ones. He should have been keynoting. If this talk is anything like his last one, it will take the conversation from beginner to advanced and have something for everyone in between. Burr is an academic who also activates. The guy is a genius.

A Panel About Nothing (You Don’t Care About) – Click here for more information and to vote
Submitted by ME!
Summary Preface: We listened to the feedback of influential attendees from last year’s SXSW. These people want new, interesting experiences and more advanced content. Challenge: Our crystal ball is broken, but we know that come SXSW, we will have valuable insight about mobile and social communications technology. The audience wants panels that are provocative, yet relevant. They need something that sets them up for a great SXSW by starting conversations about the topics they most care about. Goal: Create thought starters about the most important issues of the day. Bring to light how perhaps people may be currently screwing it all up and how to fix it should they care. Have the audience leave with several takeaways and viewpoints on each issue. How will we know what to talk about?: We will pick the most popular topics from the crowd, add some of our own and ask for suggestions from the SXSW panel picker team. Are there rules? Discussion will take place “Pardon the Interruption” style. Speakers on the panel will be given a set amount of time to talk about each topic and buzzed when it’s time to move on. At least one speaker must give counterpoint or divergent viewpoint. Success: Audience participation is vivid. People feel energized about SXSW feel encouraged to seek out more content. People seek deeper answers by attending other panels to take the problems we cannot solve to more pointed, focused groups. The panel is referenced in other panels.
Why? No one has done a panel like this to our knowledge. Having CC Chapman, Jenn Van Grove of Mashable and Jay Cuthrell on the panel ensure that dialogue will be vibrant and the innovative format promises to spurn debate.

Ad Agencies Need a New Model to Survive – Click here for more information and to vote
Submitted by Edward Boches
Summary: If the advertising agency is to survive in an era when the reigns of media have been transferred from a few professionals to 2 billion individuals, it will have to revamp its entire way of thinking. The mindset will have to shift from thinking about target audiences to communities. Strategy will require more insight about a consumer’s relationship to media and technology rather than just how she feels about the brand. The team will change entirely to include production, mobile, and experience design in addition to art and copy. And the consumer will play an active, rather than passive role, in the creation and sharing of everything. What does an ad agency have to do to survive? What are the practices it must unlearn? What new skills will it require? This panel, comprised of agency leaders, each in a different stage of evolution, will explore the challenges and offer ideas.
Why? Aside from a chance to ask Edward Boches the hard questions (read heckle Edward), this one has a direct impact on the agency world and the panelists are people who are not change averse and are very much testing into new and different models.

Understanding Customer Culture; Caution: May Require Cojones – Click here for more information and to vote
Submitted by Ujwal Arkalgud
Summary: A wealth of knowledge and understanding remains hidden from most marketers today as organizations refuse to acknowledge the need to study and understand their audiences culture. This panel will examine why organizations need to immerse themselves in culture, how they can go about doing so and will unearth the hidden and real underlying reasons behind why organizations continue to ignore this domain. This panel is informed through the collective knowledge of ethnographers and industry leaders who are conducting and executing such projects multiple times a year. We however warn you, this will not be easy on the ears and you may need some serious cojones to take this to the field in your own organization.
Why: This panel deals with audience. The science / psychology of audience is the most important thing for a marketer to understand. If this panel can give us new ideas about how to gain an edge, it will be worth the price of the entire conference.

Creation, Curation and the Ethics of Content Strategy – Click here for more information and to vote
Submitted by Margot “Bloomer” Bloomstein
Summary: From Monet to MTV, what practices connect the salons of Paris with Danger Mouse, NFL.com, and Facebook? More importantly, what’s your place in that continuum? If you work with content, embrace your place in the ethical debate of creation and curation. It’s nothing new—but it’s time for user experience practitioners to acknowledge it. Why? Both companies’ and consumers’ expectations of user experience have matured, promoting content strategy in interactive teams, efficient projects, and satisfying user experiences. Content strategists shape communication goals, hierarchy, and taxonomy. Innocent choices? Or politics, discrimination, and the dark side of design? If you ignore these pitfalls of content strategy, what are the ethical implications? We’ll discuss this through the lens of content correlation and “merchandising” on news sites, editing and mashing up to “create” anew, and curating in traditional settings like museums. From seemingly benign audits and style guidelines through published content packages, do curators create meaning? If so, how should content strategists confront similar choices? It’s been a breakout year for content strategy. Come hear why now we need to confront its ethical relevance—and learn about the missteps of teams that don’t—through the lens of case studies and the perspective of the new publishing landscape.
Why? This is still an emerging topic. As owned and earned media become more mainstream, it becomes more and more important to understand how this role that straddles creative and (potentially) analytics fits into the overall machine. Plus, Margot Bloomstein is a creative, dynamic speaker who in the past has brought cookies.

The ROI of Customer Centricity – Click here for more information and to vote
Submitted by Aaron Strout
Summary: While some of us are single-mindedly focused on social media as a phenomenon, we often lose sight of the source of its importance…namely, its ability to enable companies to be more customer-centric. We define “customercentricity” as the intersection of brand values with customer passion points. Some customers find value in promotions and coupons, while others in customer service. Our goal is develop a measurable strategy that successfully delivers value to our customer. During this panel, hear from leaders at Comcast, Cirque du Soleil and GroupM about how they are driving ROI by putting the customer at the center of their marketing programs. Panelists will discuss best practices and insights, methods of measuring customer-centricity and suggestions on how other companies can replicate their success. Additionally, they will cover the essential integration of paid, owned and earned strategies to a customer-centric program.
Why? First of all, it’s a case study so it promises to have quality take-aways. As a strong proponent of Paid, Owned Earned, I want an opportunity to see if we are on the same page in terms of measurement and effectiveness.

Community Failure and How to Recover Click here for more information and to vote
Submitted by Heather Strout with Jim Storer
Summary: Many communities fail. While there are no sure bets on whether a community will be successful, there are ways to turn a community from a failure to a success. Learn how to redirect your community ship by 1) evaluating the ROI of your community, 2) re-assessing your community strategy 3) turning to your company to gain support and the resources your community needs 4) expanding or scaling back your community to create success and 5) trying new ideas and tactics you hadn’t yet thought of to breathe new life into your community. Whether your community is failing or you feel your community could be more successful, you will learn how to assess the health of your community by understand what measurements are valuable in determining whether your community is on the right path. We will provide you with valuable information on how to make sure your community aligns with your business to address business needs while also providing value to members. We will also give you concrete ideas on how to communicate community success to the business in business versus community terms. This will be a moderator-lead discussion with plenty of time for Q&A. Learn from a panel with a combined 32 years of community building and management experience.
Why?: Community is ridiculously important and many companies do not understand the amount of time and effort it takes to actually maintain one. They take a Field of Dreams approach, it dies and they wonder why they failed. It does not have to be that way. The people on this panel get it and the dialogue will be full of useful and actionable information.

Most people who write software start by defining a problem to solve. They try to make the world a simpler and more efficient place through lines of code. I am not convinced that Facebook thinks that way. Mark Zuckerberg has once again gone against the grain and proven that Facebook is writing software for their needs.

Who is Places for? As of this post (see what I did there?) It isn’t feature rich enough to satisfy the nerds. There is no model to benefit a business and it does not offer anything to entice the marketers.

So what? The aforementioned audiences have (practically) been begging the LBS vendors for more options and more control. Analysts have been supposing what a Facebook LBS experience would be like, but instead of listening of listening and leapfrogging, Facebook has decided to start by releasing the minimum. The ability to check in and a Read API for application development. Aaron Strout and I had a talk about this on the Twitter. I am disappointed because for some reason I thought Facebook did not suffer from the same kind of tunnel vision that other giant organizations experience.

In my article about how LBS vendors needed to fear the sleeping giant, I gave Facebook way too much credit. I assumed that Facebook would actually look at the market and go live with:

• A clear statement of how to validate that business belongs to the person who claims the business.
• A listing of the services accessible to businesses and marketers complete with a self service model.
• A clear understanding of the activation model including costs and the associated time frames.

I even said: “Facebook will treat this like a revenue stream. Their LBS version 1 will go online with a method of business activation, tiered levels of service and a pricing model”. And why not? They have the resources available to build this functionality into their already massive platform. Instead Zuckerberg’s team has proven that they live in oblivion. There is almost got a Katanari Damacy fun-yet-near-pointless premise in play. Zuckerberg is the King of All Cosmos whose whimsy led to the destruction of the universe. We are the princes and princesses who are employed but the king to roll our katamaris through Farmville and Yoville. We are collecting pictures and videos of people, beer, cows and candy at various places reforming a giant Facebook eternity of whatever.

They are clearly employing a strategy to test whether the masses will play. And they are once again flipping the bird to privacy by allowing a user to check any friend in their social graph into a Place regardless of whether they are actually there. For example, I checked a bunch of people into my local Starbucks this morning. None of them were even in my state (but it would have been a really great group).

Instead of innovation, we got a disjointed experience. A check in is just a check in. We currently cannot associate anything (media) but other people to the place. There is no game, no campaign and no surprise and delight. At least we got the power to compromise the privacy of our friends.

I am going to my happy place now. “It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software.”

We listened to the feedback of influential attendees from last year’s SXSW. These people want new, interesting experiences and more advanced content. These influencers were very vocal about a problem that I personally disagreed with, but would like to attempt to solve anyway for their benefit and the greater good of man and womankind.

Our crystal ball is broken, but we know that come SXSW, we will have valuable insight about mobile and social communications technology. The audience wants panels that are provocative, yet relevant. They need something that sets them up for a great SXSW by starting conversations about the topics they most care about. Our goal is to create thought starters about the most important issues of the day. Bring to light how perhaps people may be currently screwing it all up and how to fix it should they care. Have the audience leave with several takeaways and viewpoints on each issue.

How will we know what to talk about?

We will pick the most popular topics from the crowd, add some of our own and ask for suggestions from the SXSW panel picker team. Are there rules? Discussion will take place “Pardon the Interruption” style. Speakers on the panel will be given a set amount of time to talk about each topic and buzzed when it’s time to move on. At least one speaker must give counterpoint or divergent viewpoint. Is we are successful, Audience participation is vivid. People feel energized about SXSW feel encouraged to seek out more content. People seek deeper answers by attending other panels to take the problems we cannot solve to more pointed, focused groups. The panel is referenced in other panels.

The panelists:

• Jenn Van Grove of Mashable
• CC Chapman
• Jay Cuthrell
• Me

Please take a moment to click here and vote for our panel http://bit.ly/nothingsxsw