experience matters

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I’m both attending and speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City (this is a first for the city). Web 2.0 is a large event, with over 6,000 attendees over the course of 4 days and the focus of the NY venue is slightly geared toward not only a tech crowd but marketing, design and business as well. I had the opportunity to attend 3 very interesting sessions yesterday morning. Here’s a few take-aways.
Customer Service Is The New Marketing
Probably one of my favorite talks of the day, Lane Becker former founder of Adaptive Path and currently with Get Satisfaction made the case that the best way to market your products and services was through the customer experience itself. Lane used a very simple and effective metaphor in that companies need to seriously consider taking direction from the hospitality industry—specifically the concierge. In Becker’s metaphor, the business that will thrive in the future will provide a personal touch, be helpful and make you feel good about them. There were three pillars Becker outlined in his talk which in order to achieve this:

1. Put conversations at the center of your business
2. Reduce the notion of control
3. Tear down silos

In addition to customer focused brands such as Zappos and Timbuk2, Lane cited the efforts of companies such as Comcast on Dell leveraging social networks as customer service channels. In one of the most interesting bits of information Lane discussed how Comcast scaled their customer service efforts on Twitter from a one person operation to a 10 person operation in just one month.

Tap Is The New Click: Designing Gestural Interfaces
Dan Saffer, who recently launched a new firm called Kicker Studio gave an in-depth talk about re-thinking human-technology interaction using physical gestures. Dan outlined a high level approach to how think about gestural interfaces which utilize our “whole bodies” as opposed to just a fraction of it such as our fingers. His approach was articulated in “3 zones of engagement”:

1. Attraction
2. Observation
3. Interaction

The bigger point of Dan’s presentation could be summed up with a quote from Naoto Fukasawa:

“The best designs are those that dissolve into behavior”

Dan’s talk is definitely inspired by break through experiences such as the iPhone and Microsoft Surface—his thinking comes at an interesting time as stated in his presentation “interaction design is undergoing a revolution”.

PR 2.0

Brian Solis gave a very articulate and clear presentation of where not only PR but Marketing is heading and there is one quote that I feels summed up his talk:

“read the conversations, read comments to generate insights into how organizations can better leverage social efforts”

In a reoccurring theme through Brian’s talk, he stressed that as online communities become more influential, it becomes our jobs to understand them. “we all have to be sociologists and anthropologists—we have to learn how to listen”. Coming from a “PR person”, this was both refreshing and I believe is the key to realizing new opportunities that are presenting themselves in the social space. The idea of being a “sociologist” is a pretty powerful notion. It means it’s all of our jobs to understand human behavior well enough if we are going to try to play in this space.

All good talks in my opinion. Tomorrow, I’ll be giving me own on “micro-interactions“. Wish me luck!

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