Monthly Archives: March 2011
Before:
The recycled air on this SouthWest Airlines flight to SXSW– or Austin, TX as the city is usually known – is filled with an excitement similar to what I remember of the bus-ride to summer camp. The parallels are unmistakable. Rows in front of me, I hear two people becoming fast-friends and exchanging stories from years past. Two dudes in the row behind me are engaging in what I can only term a game of “who knows more about what happened in social media and tech in the past three hours,” often peppering the conversation with, “Oh yeah I saw that” and “That happened like three days ago, dude.” To my left, in the window seat, an Austin native just sold me on his friend’s start-up, Tabbed Out and I’m already ready to evangelize the brand.
I can almost guarantee the 80 percent of us are attending the conference have started a conversation with, “I’m so excited.” These “kids” are going crazy and I expect them to break into song at any moment. Maybe that just happened at my camp.
Singing or no singing, as a SXSW newbie, I feel wide-eyed. I think the guy from Austin sees it on my face. He keeps asking me about the conference in that 30-minutes-before-a-first-date way a roommate asks about a guy.
I’m on board with these excited, laptop-filled rows of professionals sent away to camp for the weekend by our bosses. I am so excited, but when I’m excited, my attention span gets shorter and I flit around like a hummingbird, so I’ve set some objectives for myself. Further down, you can see how well I did in meeting them.
Another confession, Mum. I’m writing this posthumously. All the opinions and positions in this document have gone through at least two hazy evenings, 3 hamburgers and a bucket or two of Shiner Bock (mixed with razor blades and hipster cred). In fact, the number of hamburgers, seared on the side and glowing salmon in the middle, that I’ve eaten has astounded me. It’s a contest, I suppose: My brain cells vs my weight. One’s a race to the bottom while the other increases in order to decrease…
Bill Simmons, a writer for ESPN, has postulated (smart talk for: said) that we should wait 5 years before selecting a best movie/actor/director/etc. Why? Perspective, of course. The matured opinion is usually the reasonable one. We want to make sure what we say holds up to posterity.
I’m not bringing this up to support the late nature of my next few posts. Those were conditional, not intentional. No, I bring it up in order to address the relationship between real-time, always-on communication platforms like twitter and foursquare and events like SXSW. Do they add anything to it? Are they more than just background noise? Do they pump out any content that I, Kerry Janes, finds interesting or enjoyable?
The short answer is, No. The long answer is Noe.
I’m being obnoxious, of course. But, take a look at #sxswi. The thread runs from anticipation to arrival, through talk and party, and ends with everyone bitching about the airport. There’s really not much substance. Sure, you could farm the feed and find some interesting quotes and a few links but, for the most part, it’s a steady diet of nothing.
Photo Credit: Richard Tseng
Today: two online media moguls. Well, as impressive as that might seem, I suppose, as the group had little knowledge of either party. Chris Hardwick of the Nerdist and Felicia Day of The Guild acclaim both made appearances in my schedule.
Most saw Felicia Day, she was one of the keynote speakers, the one for the day. Besides being the the subject of many a guys dream, she has a perspective of media distribution that may elude to the future of tv and the industry. Felicia is writer, director, and actor in the web show The Guild, she spoke on how she built the show using a meager budget that afforded her a camera and utilized her own house as the set. The Guild is an example of the self-publishing movement the Internet brings – and seeing the show itself caters to online gaming geeks, it would poised for success. The show is now in its fourth season, but has gained a bit more gravity now that it has a couple of sponsors that helps bring a higher level of production to the modest web show.
Now that I’ve had a night of good sober sleep, I’m able to take a step back and reflect on the past few days and what I learned. There was certainly a lot to take in at SXSW, but I’d like to focus on one of the key things that stood out and how I think applies to the trip itself.
The most informative and engaging talk of the week was Jared Spool’s presentation about the different types of user experience design and how and when to use them. He sprinkled just the right amount of humor throughout his deep look at the design types, and he wasn’t afraid to share his knowledge with the audience.
My biggest complaint about the content of the conference is that there were far too many presentations focused on “what we did” and far to few that were brave enough to show “how we did it.” Spool was the best example of a ‘how’ focused talk, and he was the only presenter I saw that offered to send out their deck afterwards. Bravo to you, Mr. Spool. But the quote from his talk that had me thinking was this one: Experience focused design seeks to fill the space between activities.
We often think of online experiences as holistic things. You can’t break them down into pieces – everything counts as part of the experience. And yet when he said it, it made sense. Maybe our brains don’t distinguish between the experiences of filling out a registration form on one site from another. The connective tissue of an experience – the transitions between tasks and the creative layer on top of them – make the biggest impact on our impression. I know that was true for me at SXSW. Sure, there were several great presentations, but when I think back about it weeks, months and years from now, my memory of the experience will be defined by connective tissue just as much as the speeches. It was the first conference where I saw more iPads (and iPad2s, which launched on the first day of the conference) than laptops in the audience. I’ll remember how miserable I was with my app-lacking blackberry. I’ll remember getting to know several bright and talented fellow CMers for the first time, bumping into old friends and colleagues from past jobs, meeting new people from interesting companies, waiting for the shuttle, getting food from a truck, eating in a parking lot, and marveling at the spectacle of all the rest.
Sexy digital. Those 2 words don’t really pair together very often. We hear about sexy adverts or sexy product design all the time, but digital isn’t really thought of that way. It’s often functional, it’s sometimes fun, it’s frequently structured- but it doesn’t have that va-va-voom s-e-x-y of the more obvious creative mediums. And if you think about it, from a tool, personalisation and possibilities POV, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
When I think about all the places digital could go I think of the Never-ending Story. Vast kingdoms, mind-bending experiences, Sebastian realising he was in the story all along…Oh, the possibilities! Experiences that can be so much more surprising, charming, authentic and emotionally in-tune with the individual than nearly any other medium.
Sexy doesn’t come from a spray of cologne or a pair of cufflinks, nor does it come from a place of desperation to be liked. Tarting something up with a new logo or colour scheme does not cut the mustard, nor does a social media campaign for a brand that needs bigger help. Sexy is a way of carrying an attitude–a swagger, an elegance, a charm…and those things start from within. They start before the wardrobe door is opened to dress the body; they are built on a foundation. They’re built on everything we do, from the ground up.
Photo credit: Richard Tseng
I was able to see 2 completely different speakers on Sunday, Guy Kawasaki and Chris Poole. Guy was up giving his latest talk on “Enchantment”, which I won’t repeat too much as you can read more eloquent synopsis anywhere on the web (Jonathan Littman loves the book). I’ve always found Guy to be a great speaker and this was no different. Guy’s premise of Enchanting Up and Enchanting Down in an organization was pretty interesting. The principles for Enchanting Up are pretty appealing to any sort of “boss” in an organization (Drop Everything for your Boss’ requests, Always be prototyping to show your Boss continual progress, and Always deliver bad news early). My question was “Do a group of twenty-somethings really think this is a good way to manage up?” Since I’m at SXSW with a group of them, I thought that I’d ask them.
Next onto the stage was Christopher Poole of 4Chan and Canvas fame. He’s at the other end of the spectrum from Guy: 23 years old, quirky and he doesn’t really know how to own a stage…yet. To be fair, he’s not about selling ideas or books. He’s a developer. He talked a lot about 4Chan and the different type of creative class that frequents his site, and soon on canv.as. One point that got twitterland all a flutter was when he politely disagreed with Mark Zuckerberg on the idea of authenticity, stating instead that “anonymity IS authenticity”. Not rocket science but definitely something that most of us would agree with. We’ve even seen it with our internal Talk Shop community, where our anonymous panel gives great feedback that we would never get from our staff.
