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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 ()

February 20, 2010

Digital Opportunities for Sustainability Leadership, Part 1

As people and brands begin their long term journey towards becoming truly sustainable, what are appropriate and effective ways to use digital to share data and engage stakeholders? Overall, even award winning brands are still over-spending efforts on static sustainability reports that are relatively useless to the digital generation. Below are some opportunities for agencies and brands willing to lead.

Last June, I attended the 2009 Sustainable Brands conference on behalf of a client. The experience talking with brands, sustainability consultancies and agencies confirmed two things:

1. While major brands are slowly making progress, most are embracing digital engagement and sustainability strategies in separate silos with different teams and different agencies.


2. While sustainability consultancies and marketing agencies are both serving clients, there is an opportunity for digital agencies to proactively develop platforms for engaging customers, employees and shareholders to accelerate the evolution towards sustainability.

These lessons got me interested why agencies weren't more aggressively exploring these opportunities. So after completing a major project with Nokia and Rihanna in November, I chose to leave my job as an Account Director at R/GA in London, spend the month of January in India, and move to the Bay Area to further explore opportunities to apply lessons of digital marketing to sustainability.

Social media's influence on sustainable brands is already well documented by sources such as the Gort Cloud, and I won't spend time here discussing that in depth. Instead, I will focus attention here on opportunities for digital agencies and brands to drastically improve the way they create digital experiences for their customers, shareholders and employees.

From Sustainability Reporting to Data Storytelling

Due to the nature of sustainability, most major brands have rightfully focused their energy on evaluating the social and environmental impact of their products and services. Particularly for manufacturers and distributors of physical goods, the vast majority of the improvements they can make are in the physical life cycles of their products. Therefore, the question from a digital perspective is: How can digital media engage stakeholders to share progress more dynamically, and also accelerate the momentum of those improvements for the company and its stakeholders?

As part of the 2009 Ceres/ACCA Sustainability Reporting Awards, which highlight best practices in reporting on sustainability issues by North American organizations, the General Electric pdf report won top prize for how it communicated the strategic alignment between their sustainability and overall business strategies. And Seventh Generation received a special award for making their report a flash based e-book with links and videos.

However, comparing these prize winning reports to even basic digital user experience expectations in 2010, the reality is that sustainability reporting is still extremely poor on interactivity and utility. In a joint research project by the Global Reporting Initiative and Radley Yeldar evaluating trends in online sustainability reporting, they were similarly unimpressed:

"Few companies are taking advantage of the more innovative uses of technology. No company in our survey used XBRL to tag data; none used Web 2.0 technologies to create engagement and dialogue with users of their primary report; and even where other online functionalities are being used, these tend to focus on 'design' rather than functionality."

There is a major opportunity for brands and leading digital agencies to make a step change that goes from simply reporting to long term dynamic storytelling. Instead of static pdfs and e-books with lots of photos and text designed to impress advocacy groups and shareholders, imagine amazing data visualizations of historical, current, and future projected social and environmental impact based on tangible, implicit data. Some early explorations of life cycle storytelling at the product level are Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles, and so many creative opportunities are yet to be explored. Also see TED International speaker and friend Manuel Lima's post on the subject of data visualization and sustainability.

The Need for a Strong Sustainability API

Beyond being product and brand specific, useful sustainability data eventually also needs to be intelligently shared through APIs that enable stakeholders to visualize, compare, and innovate on the data. In order to gain wisdom across products, companies and sectors, brands will need to become comfortable opening up their data, some of it proprietary, for customers and even competitors to build on and mash up effectively.

One of the most forward looking projects has been the GreenXchange project with Nike, Creative Commons and other partners, which opened up some of Nike's patents for innnovators to build on. I am curious to see what results are created out of the open innovation, but the long term strategy is spot on.

Similarly, some smart technologists have been working on open standards on environmental impact data to enable the kind of innovation we've seen in web 2.0 in the green economy. Walmart's efforts to create a Sustainability Index have major potential, and it would be great to see the UK retailers like Marks & Spencer build on their already strong leadership to formalize standard data sharing through an API.

According to Programmable Web's API Directory, for example, there are some noteworthy independent APIs such as the Carbon data measurement standards AMEE, Open Eco, and Carma. Of the three, the UK based AMEE, which stands for Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine, seems the most aware of its potential role in driving innovative mashups for sustainable choices.

While independent organizations may be in a better position to gather and process data, sustainable brands and the agencies that serve then have an opportunity to be pro-active about leading or participating in these platforms, and will improve their brand reputation strongly by doing so.

In the second part of this series on Digital Opportunities for Sustainability Leadership, I will evaluate some of the best digital sustainability experiences that brands and agencies have produced to help people and communities to improve their life and buying choices, and live more sustainable lives.

Posted by Colin | Permalink | Comments ()

February 9, 2010

LoudSauce is a Changemakers WeMedia Finalist

We just found out that our social venture LoudSauce, a social way to buy ad space for your favorite causes, was selected as a finalist for Ashoka's WeMedia Changemakers Pitchit competition, which means I will be pitching on March 9-11th in Miami for a chance at $25,000 to start the social enterprise.

A little less than a year ago, during another yearly beginning of reflection, I engaged in an excercise to find a new name for the social venture I had been discussing over the past few years. In 48 hours, a group of professionals and amateurs alike suggested names for a "crowdfunded media buying service for social enterprises," and the name that emerged as the winner based on NameThis.com's algorithms, was LoudSauce (suggested by non other than a previous Nokia client and hip hop karaoke master Dan Goodall.

The excitement of the interest from friends and supporters was contagious, and we ended up applying to a few venture competitions including TechStars and Ycombinator, and found a developer in the Bay Area who was interested in joining as a co-founder. We were happily surprised to be invited by Paul Graham and the friendly Ycombinator team for a final round interview in April, which perfectly coincided with a trip back to the US from London for my 10 year Duke reunion.

After one of the most efficient 10 minutes of communication I've ever experienced, they handed us a check to cover our travel expenses, and later that night we eagerly awaited their decision. While the discussion during the interview had focused on the model - we showed an early prototype and were asked what kinds of causes would attract the most funding - the email from Paul gave us the main reason they chose not to invest.

He said they liked us and they liked our idea, but they felt that LoudSauce would be "open to criticism on the grounds that you were encouraging people to spend money on advertising instead of giving it directly to charities." He wrote that advertising is criticized heavily anyway, and that as a for profit, we could be accused of channeling dollars away from solving problems and into advertising for our own profit.

While we understood his point, we were frustrated because we hadn't discussed that during the conversation. The appropriate causes that will benefit from LoudSauce are not causes like disaster relief in Haiti, which are well publicized and well served (at least initially) by current funding channels. The right causes for LoudSauce will be those that groups of friends or networks think are under-exposed for certain target audiences (like the Atheist bus campaign in London). We're essentially developing the tool to automate what groups like MoveOn and Repower American have been using with their users already, so that the rest of us active citizens can fund ad campaigns that we think are worth focusing attention and investment towards.

For too long, many conscious people have understandably criticized advertising as largely trying to get us to buy more plastic stuff that we don't need. In many cities, some graffiti and murals seem to do a better job at providing a positive vision for communities than billboards and television. However, now it's time to leverage some of the talented designers and culture jammers of our generation, and put our money where are vision is.

Over the coming few weeks, I'll be working on my 10 minute pitch for the WeMedia PitchIt session in Miami. If you have ideas about how you think it can be the strongest, please do let me know. Thanks so much for your attention and your support.

Note: I've also posted this on the LoudSauce blog.

Posted by Colin | Permalink | Comments ()

November 17, 2008

Crowdfunded Atheist Bus Campaign

In an example of the demand for crowdsourced marketing for causes, check out the post from 1000 Heads about the Atheist Bus Campaign.

Posted by Colin | Permalink | Comments ()