Experience Manifesto

Full Schedule of SXSW Interactive Sessions | SXSW.com

Looking forward to my first SXSW and heading to Austin tomorrow morning! Aside from it being 70 in Austin this weekend, there's so much going on that I don't even know where to begin. Between SXSW and SIGGRAPH 2009, should see some interesting things this year. I'll be doing my usual blogging & twittering from the show, so look for my updates throughout the weekend.

Emerging From a Recession with Emerging Media Intact Room 10

Saturday, March 14th

10:00 am - 11:00 am

Experience emerging technologies revolutionizing the digital world and glimpse what today would look like if we hadn't developed emerging technology from a few years past. This panel is sponsored by Razorfish.

David Polinchock  Brand Experience Lab

Patrick Moorhead   Dir Emerging Media,   Razorfish

Full Schedule of SXSW Interactive Sessions | SXSW.com.

BRITE '09 Next Wave of New Media and How It Will Shape Customer Experiences of Brands

Bernd is talking about how brand advertising went from very feature/benefit advertising to more emotional advertising.  Broke into smaller groups to talk about how new media has already impacted our brand relationships:

• Having access to much more information
• Having too much information that we have to sort through
• Consumers feel that they have more power with brands because of the ability to communicate
• We can see if the brands are actually delivering on their brand promises
• Brands need to look at their entire experience

Different types of experiences you can have with brands:

• Sense
• Feel
• Think
• Act
• Relate

The new media has impacted feel, think, act & relate (relate is a very new component).  Sense has not really been impacted yet.

Comments from the audience:

• In 10 years out, companies will be more impacted by the consumers then the consumer will be impacted by the company. 
• Brands that don't respect our permission will be the bottom feeders. 
• In the future, we will have a choice about how the brand talks to us. 
• In the future, we will need a trusted "editor" of all the brand information out there.

Session 4: Imagining the Future: the Next Wave of New Media and How It Will Shape Customer Experiences of Brands Bernd H. Schmitt, Faculty Director, the Center on Global Brand Leadership

Agenda: BRITE '09 conference on branding, innovation, and technology.

Agenda: BRITE '09 conference on branding, innovation, and technology

We've broken up into smaller sessions now and I'm looking forward to this session.  See names below for a guide to initials.

AM -- See great opportunities to expand the Amex story through digital.  Two opportunities:

• Affiliation/membership
• Experiences

How do they create those experiences and continue the affiliation online?  How to build & cultivate relationships and have a 2 way conversation.  Spending more of their budget into digital.  To succeed, they have to have an ongoing conversation with the customer.  Have to get much more personalized with what they do.  They're looking to join communities, not build new ones.  Partnerships are very key to what they're trying to do.  How can you co-create value with your partners?  They did a partnership with Diane von Furstenberg that involved a great deal of unique content only for Amex members, including having Diane make the winning garment from Project Runway that would only be sold to Amex members.  That allowed them to leverage several partnerships to create a large member program.

RB -- Lot of challenges when you move through the process of moving beyond traditional advertising.  They started as the realtionship marketing group at Molson, which they've been doing for over 10 years.  How do they use these tools to connect using all of the new tactics.  They have 19 consumer web sites to coordinate.  They have an insider community of almost 2 million people now.  Mobile is very big for them, doing almost 400 mobile programs a year right now.  Everything they do is about making people feel special about being part of their group.  They really looked at who owns the social networking spaces & put together a team to handle internally.

EM -- What TV & TV advertising will look like in the future.  2nd generation TV headed to narrowcasting, with a lot more content targeted to smaller audiences.  3rd generation TV"

• Widening of TV.  Includes user generated content.  But, as consumers create more content, how do you enforce consumer protection rules that exist for more traditional TV.
• The deepening of content.  As it gets less expensive to send the bits, the content gets richer.  Future will include 3D, VR, tactile feedback, etc.

Advertising will become more "experiential" in the future.  You won't just watch a car commercial, you'll take the car for a virtual test drive.

Session 1: Beyond Advertising: New Practices in a Digital Age

• Ross Buchanan, Director, Digital and Relationship Marketing, Molson
• Alyson Meranze, VP, Digital Content & Strategy, American Express
• Freddy Mini, CEO, Netvibes
• Eli Noam, Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School, and Director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information
• Don Sexton, Professor, Columbia Business School, and Director, the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business

Agenda: BRITE '09 conference on branding, innovation, and technology.

Agenda: BRITE '09 conference on branding, innovation, and technology

The first session is kicking off with a keynote by Seth Godin, who will be talking about Tribe's, the subject of today's session.  What do we all want today?  We all want more!  There's too much clutter and we can't brand our way into people's minds.  In the last 10 years, not one consumer brand has been built using traditional advertising methods (I'll have to check that out.  DBP) 

Two questions that people always ask:

1. Who else is going to be there?
2. Who is going to lead us?

Being in a tribe protects you.  Three tribes -- spiritual, work and community.  (Hmm, sounds a lot like the 3 places that are discussed by Ray Oldenberg in Great Good Places. DBP)

A tribe is not a mob, it is a group of people who want to be a part of the group.  Tribes matter, they're bigger then WOM.  As the quality of the tribal connection increases, the brand value increases.

The factory model is going to die.  The factory model has been interupted and the factory can't go any faster.  The audience is not buying our products anyway.

Tide doesn't have a tribe and they don't deserve one.  Walmart owns Tide and they will determine what happens with Tide.  Whole Foods had they choice to create a tribe and they didn't.

Strategies, not tactics

• Making your tribe tighter, makes it more powerful.
• You can make your tribe bigger
• Who are you going to exclude from your tribe?

Marketing management is now tribal leadership.  You're never going to get everyone.  But tribes don't have very much in common, so there are not a set of tactics that you can use or copy from another tribe.  I can't tell you how do it, just that you have to.

If you find 10 people, you can start and once you have 1,000 true fans, you can make a living out of it.

You do it by starting a movement.  No one will follow you if you're average.  People who join start at the edges.  Yes, sometimes heretics are burned at the stake, but very rarely any more.  If you can't spread your ideas by yelling at people, you lead them.  

How to change everything?

• They create a culture
• The have curiosity
• They create connections.  People join because of the other people in the tribe.
• They charisma.  You get charisma after you become a leader, not the other way around.
• They commit.

Inspire you to be inspired.  Littlemismatched started 5 years ago with no revenue and now does $40 million selling mismatched socks.

Are you doing it for the tribe or to the tribe?  Where's your tribe?  It's not an opportunity, it's an obligation.

Keynote: Tribes and the Power of Online Communities Seth Godin, author of "Tribes," "Purple Cow," "Unleashing the Ideavirus," and the most popular marketing blog in the world

Agenda: BRITE '09 conference on branding, innovation, and technology.

NYConvergence - A digest of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut digital media technology news: BRITE Conference Begins at Columbia

Got a little love for my work covering the BRITE conference today. Thanks NYConvergence, glad you appreciate my efforts!

NYConvergence attended the opening day of the BRITE Conference today at Columbia University. Digital marketing and media dominated conversations at the show with industry veterans like Jeff Jarvis and Seth Godin speaking.

Topics such as the current Skittles campaign were addressed. David Polinchock has several posts up on his blog that sum up many of today's presentations. Videos of the presentations are also available on the BRITE Conference Web site.

NYConvergence - A digest of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut digital media technology news: BRITE Conference Begins at Columbia.

BRITE Conference: Innovation and the Next Generation of Business

Next speakers are Aaron Cohen, Founding Partner, TechAviv & Yaron Samid, Founder, TechAviv. We've hosted a meeting for Yaron at the Lab in the past and he's doing some very cool things. TechAviv has created a support function for start-ups around the world.

George Bernard Shaw -- The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

• Get out of the way. Before you get something, put an ad in front of it since we'll force people to watch it to see their content.
• Engage & see.
• Show, don't tell

Innovid - In-video Spaces, let's you put clickable content onto media. Doesn't make you stop watching the content unless you want to. Doing a cool demo that shows how the message can move out of content and into surrounding area on screen.

Teewe created software that brings up to 8 web cam feeds into game shows, etc., so they can actually participate in the show in real time.

SundaySky - Content in Motion, creates videos using the text and content already on a web site. Showed a very cool demo for Experdia.com

Really loved the technology that they showed and can't wait to see how we can use them in the future.  Good fodder for my presentations at SXSW next week!

BRITE Conference: Innovation and the Next Generation of Business

Umair Haque, Director, Havas Media Lab is the next speaker here and I have to say, he's got the coolest presentation yet.  Like the way that he uses visuals to help tell his story.

Five Paths to Behavior Innovation:

• Stewardship is about the responsibility you have.
• Trusteeship.  It's about the good, always playing on a level field.  The more competition that there was in an industry, the less accurate their credit ratings were.
• Guardianship, the common good.  All of the media we have today is not helping people look out for the common good.
• Leadership is about the challenge.  It's about disrupting yourself and the status quo.
• Partnership is about the outcomes.

Perceived value is no longer a source of competition.  Companies have to pay more to create actual value differentiation.  i.e. -- More & more of the money that Starbuck's pays for coffee will have to go to actually paying more for coffee.

If Wal-Mart is ahead of the curve, then we're behind it.

His presentation was done using a new beta called prezi.com, it was damn cool! 

BRITE Conference: Crowdsourcing, Tribes, and Online Communities

Adam Nash, the Senior Director of product development is the next speaker here at BRITE.  LinkedIn empowers the individual to use to the pwer of their own network and share that network with others.  I've known some people who really use LinkedIn quite well, I don't as much. 

A lot of companies were already using LinkedIn for business purposes, so they created a corporate solution groups and they develop new services based on feedback from their audience about how they're using LinkedIn content.  They're currently adding 1 new contact per second on LinkedIn. 

Your professional reputation and relationships are your most valuable assets.  LinkedIn gives you portable control over those assets.  They are currently only in the very early stages of leveraging this content.  Good point that in the days when you worked for one company or stayed in just one place, something like LinkedIn wouldn't really be that important.  Always surprised about how little information companies actually have about their own employees. 

The pwer of LinkedIn is the power to find and of being found with your professional face being what they find.  They also have 200,000+ professional groups with news & discussions.

People behave very well on LinkedIn, there's enough other places to show off your bad behavior!

BRITE Conference: Crowdsourcing, Tribes, and Online Communities

Mark Yolton, Senior VP, SAP Community Network, SAP is up next at BRITE. He's talking about how B2B companies can use crowdsourcing. There were a number of dynamic market forces that pushed SAP to look for new ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

• Business networks
• Collaboration Innovation
• Globalization
• Consumerization of the business
• Quicken pace of change

Going from "built to last" process to "built to adapt" way of looking at things.  We don't need something rigid & perfect, we need something fluid & dynamic.  It's about putting out constant beta's.

They really latched onto the idea of business networks and using them for competitive differentation.    Old ecosystem was where a few companies dominated the landscape and now many companies are participating in an extended value chain.  They have faster broader adoption with higher loyalty when developing with the community. 

In addition to there online communities, they do frequent, real, meetings where people get together.  Lots of seminars, meetings, community events, etc.

Discussion forums are still the most used communication tools.  A developer can post a question about a problem they're having and get answers back much faster then they would've with out these kind of social networks tools.

Next is the emergence of the borderless community.  Update in one site and it gets updated in all.

1% of their community is highly active.  The next 9% is somewhat active and the other 90% are lower participation people.

This is all a cultural change at SAP and they're working to build a culture of community.

BRITE Conference: Crowdsourcing, Tribes, and Online Communities

Jeff Howe, Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine, and author of "Crowdsourcing"

Crowdsourcing is an open call and undefined.  It used to be that the crowd needed to actually be in the same place physically and the internet allowed the crowd to be anywhere.

Talking about being with the Vans Warped Tour and seeing the kids set-up their little kiosks to sell their own stuff and he thought they were promiscuously creative.  But most of what they made what embarrassingly awful.

The real action was under the surface.  It was liking Old Faithful.  Everyone was watching the geyser, but what was underneath causing the geyser to blow was much more interesting.

John Flugtagen, shoe design, created an open source shoe design process.  You can send your designs and, if he picked it, he would name the shoe after you and start to make it. 

iStock photo started with a model where if you wanted to take a photo, you had to add a photo and then became a place where you bought the pictures for $0.25 to use it.  Business grew and changed the idea of stock photography and the stock photography business.  Eventually, it was bought by Getty images.  It worked because it started with the community and it's needs first.  They weren't trying change the stock photo business.

Mass animation, creating a 5 minute animation project.  50,000 people signed up to participate and 1/3 of people participated.  Make the task small enough that people can do it over their coffee break.

David Rogers was just talking about how most of the online communities work as well as they do because they also have a connection somehow to the real world and people really doing something.

Crowdsourcing

Mass Animation