I saw a lack of data-driven content in last year’s SXSW and hope these ideas will fill some of that void. I don’t have a free pony or even a case of Red Bull to give to you if you vote for these panels, but I do havesome themes that should spark passionate debate about quantifying the value of Social Media and relationships.
Uncovering Social Media Data You Can Count On
With stakeholders throughout the enterprise taking a role in the ownership of conversations in social spaces, each wants to know the impact of a relationship on demand creation, customer retention and support efficiency. This panel addresses how to make the numbers meaningful for sales, marketing, customer service and product teams.
Click here to vote for Uncovering Social Media Data You Can Count On
Extending B2B Acquisition Strategies Using Micromedia
Let’s discuss the importance of proper brand personification in micromedia spaces. We will talk integration of micromedia as a channel in a communications plan and alignment of messaging with strategic objectives. We will cover clear statement of objectives, managing multiple objectives, integration with CRM and community initiatives and attribution of a sale to micromedia. The overlay will be the balancing act of how much sales vs. thought leadership vs. customer service vs. your laundry list of others.
Click here to vote for Extending B2B Acquisition Strategies Using Micromedia
DataRock
What would this post be without a little DataRock?
<sarcasm>Shocker.</sarcasm>
Trent was a vocal advocate for spam controls in twitter. Twitter users know that twitter is not going to implement a big new feature like that in the near future. He announced back in June that he was leaving. He came back in July to announce his last shows and to talk to Dave Navarro. No “wave wave wave wave goodbye”. The @trent_reznor account is just gone. The @nineinchnails still persists though as he said it would.
Good to see he has not gone soft.
Meg Porter who most of us knew as @megapixel was recently killed in a car crash.
She was 24, smart, funny, snarky and had infinite potential. Don’t take life for granted. Make every day count. I think she did.
An Epic Event / Themes of Social CRM
I attended Radian 6 and Chris Brogan’s the Rockstars of Social CRM event last night. The panel had some of the heavy hitters of Social Media and CRM. Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian 6, Frank Eliason who you know better as @comcastcares, Paul Greenberg, Author of CRM at the Speed of Light, President of The 56 Group, LLC, Brent Leary, Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials and Michael Thomas, National President, CRM Association. The key themes really resonated with me and I agreed with them.
- Social CRM gets back to basics
- a return to Helpful 1.0 not Sales 2.0
- Good relationships = good sales
- You must earn your right to sell.
The Land Grab
Then something weird happened. The panel made a comment about Social Media ownership. They poked fun at PR and Marketing trying to get their clutches on Social Media and suggested that the only real home for Social Media is with Sales, specifically Customer Service. Suddenly, all of the IT people in the room fainted because they were left out of the land grab! Marketers wept openly. PR folk made some calls.
People complain about #FollowFriday because people just throw out a bunch of names without giving any reason to follow the people on the list. My solution has been to provide a reason or theme with each person I recommend. For instance,
#followfriday @agrahamwilcox <- Must follow for NBA fans
Today, Brad Ward decided to take it all up a notch.
The story begins at SXSW. SXSW is the conference that keeps on giving. In the past I have equated it to cramming a whole semester of college into 2 weeks. The people that you meet are the people you want to meet, the experiences that you share are meaningful both in the “classroom” and in the bars and social events.
On the night of the mashable party, Not only did I sing Ziggy Stardust with a live band, meet Seth Rogen and Joseph “Cobra Commander” Gordan-Levitt, I met Brad J. Ward.
I was heading to the bar to pick up my 4th (or so) and I was in queue to sing with the band. Well, the video tells the story
Did I think he was going to gank my charger? No. But my own phone was low on juice and I couldn’t hear the bartender. The band was RIGHT in front of us and Brad was looking to disappear. What good is a business card if I can’t charge my phone later? I decided to chill out about it, sing my song and have fun at the party instead of worrying about whether I would be connected later. Glad I did. Brad is an amazing person that I met at the conference and I am having a good time getting to know him better through twitter. Follow him!
Back on 4/17/2009, Oprah Winfrey tweeted for the first time. Although officially she joined twitter in January, she held out until spring until she could schedule time to have twitter founder Evan Williams on her show to make a media event out of her first tweet. I’m using the term First Tweet to mean 4/17/2009.
David Armano nicely asked about the Oprah effect on twitter, which got me to thinking. How many people joined twitter since Oprah first tweeted? How many people is she responsible for bringing to twitter?
In order to answer this question, I collected a sample of Oprah’s twitter followers on 5/6/2009, 774,561 of them. Don’t let me lose you here, but I must caveat that twitter is a moving target. As of this post, Oprah is sure to have well over 850,000 followers, but people add and drop all the time. As a result, it’s tough to collect everyone because the API allows you to take a 100 person-at-a-time chunks called a page. That sample becomes changed if someone decides to follow or unfollow Oprah. This basically means that without being able to stop time and twitter and grab all of Oprah’s followers in one swoop, our data is bound to be incomplete or different within seconds of the processes completion.
CYA aside: let’s take a look at Oprah’s following by the date that they joined twitter.
PERCENT GROWTH CHART – First Tweet to 5/6
As you can see, Oprah-twittermania exploded and peaked in 7 days. In our sample, 389,067 of her followers joined twitter on or after First Tweet.
So who is following Oprah? What is the breakdown? I divided followers into the groups.
Elite = 50,000+ followers
Mavens = 10,001- 49,999 followers
Twelebrities = 1,001 – 10,000 followers (hey, if 1000 people know you…)
Starters = 101 – 1000 followers
Noobs = 1 – 100 followers
Nothings = 0 followers
Elite is that tiny sliver (62)
I asked 200 people who joined twitter after Oprah started if they joined because of Oprah. This is not scientific, but about 50% of my replies were “yes”. Anecdote: one person said MC Hammer was their inspiration! Please Hammer, don’t hurt em!
So the lion’s share, more than 93%, of her followers are people who are brand spanking new or just getting started at the party (Noobs + Nothings). The question is: how will these people assimilate to twitter? This is a question I will attempt to answer over time. Let’s chew on this a bit. I’ll refresh the data and maybe we can drill into some of their conversations. What do you want to know about these people? Comments on this “study” are appreciated and I will try to incorporate your feedback. Example: Maybe I should reorganize the segments to take updates into account? Does only having 100 followers really mean you are a NOOB? Some digging showed that a good deal of low follower / high updates were content aggregators like @sevenplanet and spammers like @hardflash. Let’s keep them in this category for now.
Thanks for reading! @SchneiderMike
Starbucks VIA Instant Starbucks from Schneider Mike on Vimeo.
Guy Kawasaki was hanging out in the blogger’s lounge early one morning at SXSW. He had a coy smile and announced that he had something cool that we would all love. As a result, I got to try Starbucks VIA! Thanks Guy!
WTF?
At SXSW, I sat in a session with some of the brilliant minds in interactive experience creation including: Victoria Ha from Stitch Media, Phil Stuart of Preloaded, Mark Pytlik of Stink Digital and Rick Webb from the Barbarian group. They wasted a good 10 minutes of the panel discussing the classification of games versus experiential video. Is it a game? Is it a video? Stop worrying about how to classify the damn thing and put that time to good use working on the experience. Writer, researcher Martin Sarafian [God Marty, why aren't you blogging yet? At least get on twitter!] and I classified all of this stuff 10 years ago so you would not have to worry.
We Call it Non-Linear Entertainment
A vocal academic came to the microphone and offered her “perspective” on the conversation, arguing with the panel about her thesis in which she wrote 400 pages on the classifications of various mediums. Either she did not do the paper justice or she wasted a lot of time and money at Indiana University (see below for video) because I can sum it up right here. It’s called Non-Linear Entertainment (NLE). The criteria of NLE is that you have some sort of story line that requires the consumer of the video to make some kind of choice. NLE does not usually go from point A to Z in a straight line so that everyone (given 5 senses and taking perspective out of the equation) experiences the exact same content in the same way. The Dark Knight that I saw was the same as the one you saw. That was linear. This is different.
Non-Linear entertainment allows the viewer, or even the reader to make choices. These choices are influential in the way that the content is consumed. NLE includes games, ARGs, MMORPGs, RPGs, experiential videos, even choose your own adventure books. Most times NLE has alternate “plots” or even open-ended outcomes, the exception would be instances where the camera angle can be changed to give a different visual perspective, even if they do not necessarily change the plot. I still call that NLE because the user has an aspect of control. Rick Webb summed up arguing the symantics pretty well:
Non Linear Entertainment Panel at SXSW from the Michael Schneider on Vimeo.
Writing a Matrixed Script is Tough
Eventually we moved onto bigger and better things. What kind of writers do I need? The answer is that you need people who understand writing matrixed scripts. These experiences are time consuming to write, shoot or develop, particularly if you want them to be particularly long. I suggest not attempting to boil the ocean in the short term. Keep your experiences to 60-180 seconds of content and limit the amount of characters because every character adds complexity. Imagine a very simple storyboard beginning, middle and end. Now lets say there are 7 controllable characters in the story and that each requires perspective. Now each character needs a beginning middle and an end.
Thank goodness we finally moved on and Victoria Ha took over and told us about their execution of an event at a comic convention that featured “hot chics” (her words, not mine) with water guns and temporary tattoos approaching nerds at the convention and asking them if they could apply the fake-ink which actually was a series of clues. So here you have a bunch of people walking around the convention with contest clues on their body which caused people to interact both on and offline. I can imagine the conversations: “Hello, I am Milton Scrathmore. I love your Frank Cho, limited edition t-shirt, can I please scan the tattoo on wrist?” Should we call that offline experiential gaming with QR codes? Nah. NLE.
The Pepsi lounge at SXSW has a bar where you can try Pepsi products and a series of tents where you can go an create content. It’s a cool place to hang out and meet people, shoot video, charge your phone or talk to the folks who made it all happen. What did they make happen?
Pepsi Built a SXSW Information Command Center
Jumping right into the zeitgest stream gives you a a real-time summary of SXSW conversations. The current trend is towards eating [as it's lunch-time]. Other trending topics are arriving, drinking, connecting and partying. Messages that flow through the stream are color coded to their topic.
The “popular” feature shows the most popular words and assumes that those are also topics. Trending topics right now include Facebook, Austin and work. I would love it if this feature let me drill to the tweets so I could see what people are saying. Bigger points if I could follow the people on the fly.
The “swarm” is a geolocator that shows where tweets are coming from and who is tweeting. It’s a real-time maplication. It’s kind of cool to see people migrating to and from the convention center.
My favorite feature [and perhaps the most useful and innovative] is the party watch! Not only is it a good way to find out what is going on, you can find out how people feel about the party good/neutral/bad. I was tracking the Burlesque/Cupcakes party last night and found out that not only was there a long line, but that generally people thought it was a bust.
If we take some of the learnings from Jamie Monberg’s panel this morning which basically says that your application should be more like a pencil than a helicopter when it comes to usability. I think Pepsi has struck the right balance here. Good job Pepsi. I hope you do not let this die and figure out cool ways to use it beyond SXSW.
