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March 22, 2010

SXSW Interactive 2010 & Improvements for 2011

Over a beer last night with friend and supporter juzmcmuz from Made By Many (who brought 18 people from London), we talked about our overall impressions of SXSW Interactive this year. It was his first time attending, and it was my first since 2005, when Interactive was still relatively small compared to the thousands from startups, agencies, major and emerging brands, and independent bloggers and artists who blew up Austin this year. Here are a few highlights and recommendations for an even better 2011.

1. Fully Embrace Geo Experimentation

In some ways, Interactive has never been about talking, but rather about testing and iterating real tangible services, and SXSW's eager early adopters are able to demo great emerging services better than any. With Twitter and this year's rising stars FourSquare and Gowalla, the fun was in the participation. To keep in touch with friends and digerati alike during the conference, especially at night, FourSquare was best way to find people whose party you wanted to join. (Mashable even reported Foursquare has had 100,000 new users in the last 10 days.) I felt a bit lame that there isn't yet a FourSquare app for my Nokia N900, so was left back in time to 2009 browsing Twitter and Facebook for the latest info.

Other event driven startup services like Hot Potato and SitBy.Us tried to introduce their services through the conference. Unfortunately, they both would have needed a stronger initial base and some promotion by the organizers to be used by a critical mass. It would be great if the festival leveraged these event based start ups more intentionally into some kind of festival long user competition.

This is particularly important when realizing that most of the panel audiences were only about 50% present while tweet heckling or passing links during the talks. For those addicted to ever flowing Twitter hose of new tech and social innovation information, it's tough to find something truly new and innovative at the conference. But testing digital services with a bunch of other people in the same city for a week, now that's something you don't get every day. With additional support from the conference (like they did with special Foursquare badges for SXSW this year), we could pioneer and demonstrate what's possible with the amazing location based services of 2011.

2. Make Interactive Sustainability Leadership a Reality

A highlight for me was hearing Valerie Casey's keynote of the Designers Accord call out the Interactive community for being largely absent from our culture's drive toward a sustainable economy. While I'm unsure how much her presentation made an impact on the thousands of people in the room, I was so happy to see such a prominent venue for what I've been arguing are the best opportunities for people and agencies that build interactive experiences to demonstrate digital sustainability leadership.

The overall SXSW festival organizers have made a decent sustainability effort, having reduced shwag significantly, highlighting some innovate green design, and installing garbage cans with easy to understand icons for waste, recycling, and composting (the whole city of Austin needs them!). But the breakthrough behavior change, as with the rest of society, just hasn't really happened.

I would love to be happily surprised at SXSW Interactive 2011 when the next big competing social platforms are mashups of FourSquare and Mint.com that drive social behavior change toward #zerowaste and #transparency. For all the work that government, non-profits and businesses are already doing around sustainability, until there is a world class Nike+ style service that successfully incentivizes mainstream sustainable behavior, then interactive leadership has not yet stepped up to the plate.

3. HackDays for Great Music & Social Innovation

While the panel format will inevitably continue to unfortunately dominate conferences, SXSW Interactive should continue to innovate on the platform to generate more results out of our time together.

A good example of a session designed for more than talking was CauseLab's full day session dedicated to Ending Hunger. I only attended the tale end, but the group sessions generated 9 tangible ideas that could create breakthroughs toward solving hunger. Hoping for strong follow up as well.

The next level for SXSW Interactive 2011 would be if we were to do something similar to Music Hackday (see image from Music Hackday Boston) for innovating on APIs to either create great music apps or solve social and environmental problems. Especially given that the conference is a full 5 days long, it would be amazing if there could be a thread similar to the Seed Accelerator program, but focused on hacking existing APIs for social and environmental impact data to develop innovative solutions.

While I know that designing and coding for 12 hours at SXSW is not the most fun way of enjoying our time in Austin together, it is getting easier and easier to prototype ideas, and how cool would it be if we could connect talent like @infoharmoni and R/GA with social problem solvers like @seeclickfix and @expertlabs, to create actual tangible output on big screens and big attention of SXSW Interactive 2011?

Now that would actually be worthy of Valerie Casey's call for sustainability leadership from the SXSW Interactive crowd. What do you think?

Posted by Colin | Permalink | Comments ()

March 10, 2010

Preparing for WeMedia & SXSW Interactive

Over the past few weeks, between conversations with people and agencies at the intersection of digital strategy and sustainability, the LoudSauce team team has been preparing for the WeMedia PitchIt Finals in Miami, and talking with potential partners and supporters of LoudSauce, a new social way to buy ad space for your favorite causes.

WeMedia is gonna be the best opportunity we've had so far to share our vision for LoudSauce, and receive feedback and coaching from experts in the areas of venture funding, social entrepreneurship and media.

We'll have some workshops with the judges and the other finalists, which should be collaborative and helpful for everyone, and then on Thursday morning we'll each have 10 minutes to pitch our venture to what I hope will be a room full of media innovators, producers, funders and fans.

Crowdsourced Creative Partners

Over the last few weeks of preparation, a few key new learnings have emerged. First, I had a conversation with James Sheratt, the CEO of the crowdsourced creative service Adhack. Since I have always seen LoudSauce as a compliment and not a competitor to crowdsourced creative sites, I had researched sites like 99designs, Crowdspring, and Zooppa. We even experimented with 99designs to create the LoudSauce logo (which I got a lot of flack for from my designer friends).

After talking with James, he made a clear distinction between the contest driven services like 99designs, where everyone works and only one person gets paid, and Adhack which partners buyers and creatives for each job, paying designers along the way variable to their input along the path to a particular piece of creative. I think the Adhack model is more sustainable and will attract better talent, recent partnerships with major agencies like Crispin, Porter & Bogusky and DDB are a good sign. I'll continue to talk with James about how LoudSauce and Adhack could partner on one of our campaigns in the coming months.

Gathering the Best Existing "Good" Ads

Secondly, I have discovered the amazing quantity of social TV and print ads already online at the Ads of the World archive. While it needs to have better filtering for ratings and issues, the public interest collection is the strongest I've found to date, and hopefully we can partner to offer Ads of the World users an opportunities to "Go Loud" once the LoudSauce service is up and running. I will be talking with someone from the AdCouncil later this week to see if they would be interested in leveraging the LoudSauce community to help extend the life of their ads, which they already get placed for free across the United States.

The Google TV Revolution Begins

Lastly, and perhaps most exciting, I spent some time digging into the new Google TV Ads service, which is already starting to revolutionize Television advertising. Not only does the service make targeted TV Advertising drastically more affordable for small businesses and nonprofits, but they also partnered with Spotmixer to make it easy and affordable ($150) to make a reasonably professional 30 second ad that can be submitted.

It seems like some small and medium sized businesses have already taken advantage of the service, but (as usual) non profits and social groups have yet to jump on board. One exception is the Hanley Center, which has an amazing success story about what their Google TV Ad has done to the success of their business. Hopefully LoudSauce can help social organizations start using the service.

At LoudSauce, we believe that many non profits and social causes will be similarly surprised by the amazing support and credibility they will receive through traditional offline advertising. For all of the criticism that digital folks (myself included) have thrown at the old ad model, it still is a great way to reach a big audience to create awareness. For all the power of our social networks, the reality is that most people in the United States still have never heard of innovative projects like Kiva and Green for All.

Imagine if Green for All could edit a 30 second or 1 minute version of their great "New Sound" video, and we could put it on TV during March Madness through Google TV Ads. Understandably, Green 4 All's current funders would not appreciate "wasting" money for TV advertising, but what if we chip in to help make it happen?

According to Google, in order to make a reasonable impact, we would need to run an ad for 4 weeks, and spend about $750 per week. That's about $3,000, or only 150 people giving $20 each. What do you think? Would you help make it happen?

Posted by Colin | Permalink | Comments ()

March 1, 2010

A few weeks in, the daily choice

This morning begins the month of March, the third month of 2010 and the fourth week of being in the Bay Area. As usual, after a great first week of "choosing the morning," the second week was at about 50% follow through, and then the third (last week) I didn't even do any stretching, sit ups or push ups. There's always part of me that judges myself, and feels bad about it, like there's something wrong. The reality is that each night and morning are another new fresh opportunity.

So after a good weekend that included our first gathering of friends in our new home (with the couch moved into our main room), an amazing mixed party of happy people and great music and dancing with thePeople, and the first good quality Sunday Session, last night around 10:30 I decided to wake up at 6:30 this morning, and begin this week as I wanted to begin it.

Now, around 7:15, with a cup of tea and no internet connection, I'm thinking clearly about the weeks ahead. With a combination of ongoing conversations and interviews exploring digital opportunities for sustainability leadership, the week to complete our LoudSauce finalist pitch for next week's WeMedia conference, and the everpresent cost and benefit of daily social activities, I look forward to a week of productive creativity and focused conversation.

With thoughts of my sister's family in Chile, those in Haiti and New Orleans, and the rest of whose time is coming soon, I begin the work of communicating why LoudSauce is an important new social venture that transform advertising into a medium for good.

Posted by Colin | Permalink | Comments ()