Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > March > 10
Monday, March 10, 2008
Modern marketing
A few brief notes from Monday’s session “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing.” Moderator David Parmet led a discussion on what he called the best kind of marketing, the kind you don’t notice.
Deborah Schultz — It’s less about technology and more about the way you look at customers. Don’t be afraid of tools that let you hear back from customers.
Chris Heuer — Social media change how we relate to each other. They change the relationship between companies and consumers. A company can’t just say “build me a community” and expect results. Don’t just think about giving away a product to build relationships with customers. You can share knowledge and bring people together to learn from each other and communicate.
Jeremiah Owyang — The companies that are best at this type of marketing let go and let customers take charge.
Tara Hunt — After finding jobs and other opportunities by first giving away her work, she believes in the value of social capital, your relationships and reputation. Giving away some of your work shows people that you have knowledge. For example, you could give away general advice, and then a client will pay to get more specific advice from you.
Hugh McCleod — Communities form over “social objects” like a new phone or gadget. Corporations tend to think of community is a lever they can pull to make it to do what they want. The shift in marketing is from “here’s why you should buy X’ to social gesture, such as getting product samples to opinion leaders on MySpace.
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Managing creativity
How can your group create creative results, on a deadline, over and over again? Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path studied theater troupes, orchestras, a restaurant kitchen, a magazine and a screenwriting collective to find out how these creative groups work well together, and came away with “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment,” which they presented Monday afternoon.
Cross-train the entire team. Give all members of the team experience with other related disciplines and administrative tasks. It’s important to have a sense of what others are experiencing. It makes the group cohesive, so that it’s easier for members to step into new roles as needed. It also teaches empathy.
Rotate creative leadership. In the Neo-Futurists theater troupe, actors make final decisions on the plays they wrote, but then they also act in fellow troupe members’ plays. Having ownership of their own play makes them more willing to play along with another troupe member’s ideas when he or she is directing.
Actively turn the corner. The creative process has two parts: Divergence is when everyone is throwing out new ideas and considering the possibilities. Convergence is when an idea has been chosen and the focus shifts to executing it. The key is making sure everyone feels part of this shift and is aware that it has been made. There can be problems when some people think the group is in the brainstorming phase while others have moved on to execution.
Know your roles. Once that corner is turned, members of successful teams know what their “battle stations” are — they know what they’re supposed to do, what they can make decisions on and what they can’t.
Practice, practice, practice. In crunch time, you want to know that what is supposed to happen is what will happen. Find ways to try new people and new methods during times that aren’t mission critical.
Make the mission explicit to the whole team. In the making of “Avenue Q,” creators set the theme of the main character searching for his purpose in life to determine what material would stay in the show.
Kill your darlings. When you’re getting rid of material, do it in a respectful way. Another “Avenue Q” example: Songs that got cut weren’t rejected, they were “going in the TV show” (although there were no plans for such a show).
Leadership is a service. Being a leader is the ultimate support position.
Generate projects around the group’s creative interests to give people more ownership and engagement.
Remember your audience. In creative work, it’s easy to get caught up in your own creative vision. it’s easy to
And they threw in a No. 11: Celebrate failure. It’s a necessary byproduct of theh creative process. There is something in every project that can be done better next time. Let people know it’s OK to fail.
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PostSecret’s Frank Warren makes all of SXSW cry
If there were blog categories here for “emotional” and “profound,” I’d be using them.
Frank Warren’s Monday keynote about his Web site, PostSecret.com (which was written about by Lilly Rockwell Sunday), was one of the most well-received and humanistic South by Southwest Interactive panels I’ve ever seen.
It was everything the Mark Zuckerberg kerfuffle wasn’t.
In fact, stunned audience members left the packed convention center ballroom wiping away tears. One person said, “This just turned the whole festival around for me.” In the hallways, attendees couldn’t get over how moved they’d been by Warren’s lovely, generous and heartbreaking presentation (which is bring me close to tears now just writing about it).
PostSecret.com features cards sent in by readers sharing their deepest secrets.
Warren began with a video presentation of some of those cards set to a song by Tori Amos. He read some examples of confessions from his site: from a barista, “I serve decaf to customers who are rude to me.” From an expectant father: “I know she’s not mine, but I love her anyway.”
Some of the funnier South by Southwest confessions: “All these Web celebs have never worked for clients.” “I have a SXSW crush, but I’m married.” “My company, a large one, sent me to SXSW to steal ideas from start-ups. I’m pretending to be a freelancer.”
Whoah!
Warren said some people just want to share a funny story. Others, he says, “are mailing in secrets to search for grace or to be able to apologize to someone or search for a greater sense of authenticity.”
Things got even more emotional during the Q&A after Warren’s fine and warm presentation: A guy from the audience proposed to his girlfriend. She said yes. An Austin woman confessed that her sister is sick and that she fears she may die.
Warren encouraged attendees to “Free your secrets and become who you are.”
Clearly taken aback by the appreciation of the very large audience, he said, “What a special place. I’m coming back to South by Southwest.”
Before the keynote, which may go down in SXSW history as one of the best (and worth finding online when the video is posted by the fest), director Hugh Forrest addressed yesterday’s Mark Zuckerberg/Sarah Lacy keynote.
“When we say ‘South by Southwest Interactive,’ we do mean interactive,” Forrest said.
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Laughing with the LOLcats guys
Doesn’t it seem like you’ve been reading I Can Has Cheezburger? for more than a year? Yet that’s about how long the addictive LOLcats site has been around.
Two of the players behind the site shared its Cinderella story with a large and thoroughly charmed audience at Sunday’s 5 p.m. session. They even gave away free cheeseburgers.
Site founder Eric Nakagawa (aka Cheezburger, as he’s known on the site) shared how the it all began when a friend (known on the site as Tofuburger) sent him the picture of a cheerful looking gray cat with the “I can has cheezburger?” caption. When he finally quit laughing, Nakagawa bought the domain name. The Web site that now gets 1.5 million page views a day started with that single image.
While LOLcats were floating around already on the Web, Nakagawa and Tofuburger decided to compile them in a blog organized with tags.
They began the site as a hobby, but its offbeat humor caught on. Nakagawa drew laughs from the audience as he talked about living a kind of “double life”: working at his day job while e-mailing site users in LOLcat speak. At the same time, he was handling problems like server crashes, adding features like the “cheezburger factory,” which made it easier for users to create their own cat macros, and sleeping not at all.
Site CEO Ben Huh, who wore a cheeseburger hat with great aplomb, joined the storytelling to talk about the growth of Cheezburger after it was purchased last summer. It now has nine full- and part-time employees. The site gets 8,000 pictures a day, and posts about six of those. Huh says the site has a “keep it simple” philosophy. The goal after it was bought was that users would not notice a change at all. They focus on growing the core group of users who love the site.
The Q&A was also lively, with one audience member asking Nakagawa and Huh about whether they used LOLspeak in real life (she admitted to saying “nomnomnom” — LOLspeak for eating — a lot during Thanksgiving). They both admitted to doing so, and Nakagawa even talked in the voice of the LOLrus. Eric and Ben, fans - you has them.
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Zuckerberg watch: billionaire unfazed at developer meetup
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered some real questions (ones posed in the form of a question) at a Facebook application developer gathering at Pangaea at 4:30 p.m. today.
Zuckerberg briefly mentioned the unpleasantness of Sunday’s keynote speech, but didn’t seem particularly disturbed by what happened and he defended journalist Sarah Lacy.
Zuckerberg used the occasion of the “make-up Q&A” to talk directly with developers. Questions posed included questions about Facebook’s place in the international community (the company is talking about how to deal with its site in China; it plans to include regions in its site for countries the U.S. recognizes), whether it will create its own currency/market or use someone’s else’s infrastructure (no real decision there) and how it will handle privacy concerns versus opening its platform (carefully).
The Q&A lasted about 30 minutes and was pleasant. Zuckerberg seemed unfazed about all the negative attention to his keynote and, dressed in a zip-up sweater, seemed ready for tonight’s Facebook party.
Brief aside: I met the CEO late last night at Pangaea. He was walking past me and we were right in front of the club near the live band.
The exchange went like this: he walked by — I poked him (as I would on Facebook) and offered my hand. He shook it and we leaned in to talk, but couldn’t hear each other. I tried to introduce myself. He couldn’t hear me.
“What?” he said.
I tried again. He couldn’t hear me. It was really loud.
Finally I said, “Welcome to Austin!”
He nodded and hurried away.
I ask the tough questions.
We’re gonna need a better photo app.
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So what did Zuckerberg say?
By now you’ve all heard of the keynote Incident in which audience members started heckling journalist Sarah Lacy as she interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
It was pretty brutal to watch, as the audience members chafed at Lacy’s chatty, conversational style, and at one point yelled at her to “Ask more interesting questions!”
But enough of that.
Here are some highlights of what Zuckerberg had to say:
-“A lot of people thought it was a college thing for a long time,” Zuckerberg said. But he assured his audience that this is a “long-term” thing. “What we are tapping into is a universal need,” he said, the need to connect and communicate is a “fundamental thing,” and eventually, “this or something else like it can be used by everyone in the world.”
-On Microsoft: “They are very happy. We are very happy…I can tell you that it’s going very well for both of us.”
-On advertising/Beacon: “When we announced that, we probably got a little ahead of ourselves. We said we had more of it figured out that we probably did. We view that as a mistake that we made.”
The first iteration of Beacon was “just trying to get it out.” There were “a lot of mistakes in how we communicated it.”
“We’re still relatively new still and figuring this stuff out.”
-Discussed how the company structure is to build the Facebook platform, but an increasing number of applications “we’re not developing.”
“We know our DNA isn’t set to develop these things,” Zuckerberg said. We try to build a platform that allows other people to build services, he said.
-When asked if these privacy concerns were going to keep cropping up, Zuckerberg pointed out that 20 to 25 percent of Facebook users share their cell phones with their friends on the site. “Actually giving granular control, the more information we will be able to share and achieve our goals,” Zuckerberg said.
-Incentive system. Users are fundamentally good, Zuckerberg said. Their process keeps them in line. The more requests get approved, the more privileges, etc.
-When asked about article in the Financial Times that discussed the possibility of an iTunes-like music feature on Facebook, Zuckerberg’s first response was “I don’t know.”
“What is going on there is we talk to a lot of companies all the time about a lot of different things. There are great music applications. That is a vertical we haven’t gone after at all…music is not something we really touched on a lot.”
“As a company we’re out, talking to different companeis in this space, but at this point, I can say that … we have nothing to talk about right now.”
-Zuckerberg said along with Microsoft’s 1.6 percent stake and the $15 billion valuation came high expectations. He said recruiting can be difficult because it can attract people who may want to work for Facebook because they think they will strike it rich with an initial public offering or a sale of the company.
-An initial public offering or sale of the company “is not the goal. That’s really not what we are trying to go for.”
-When asked about the hiring of Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer, who was snagged away from Google, Zuckerberg said Facebook has about 500 employees now. “Having someone who can help us scale is incredibly important in the coming years,” he said. “I think she has a good track record.”
-When asked why he wants to be CEO, Zuckerberg said: “What the CEO does is sets the tone for the organization and sets the tone for what you are trying to build. Being in that role is a good way to make sure the organization focuses on that.”
-Being a technology company is an important part of the culture. Zuckerberg said they have a lot of empathy toward developers.
-When asked about whether Google was mad because Facebook is trapping so much information, Zuckerberg said in an aw-shucks manner, “No, those guys are nice.”
Anything else I missed? Tell me in the comments section.
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