360DigitalInfluence

On November 23, 1787 James Madison wrote:
“A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.”

When he wrote those words, social media was nowhere on the horizon, nor was the telephone. At that time, getting messages out in a timely manner was much more challenging than it is today… significantly more challenging. The smaller the society, the easier it was to make sure everyone was informed. Today’s technologies make reaching thousands of people in real time no challenge at all.

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Social media has dramatically changed the way we book travel and plan vacations.

According to a Destinations Analyst survey - “The State of the American Traveler” - nearly 35.8% of travelers listen to the opinions of friends, colleagues or relatives when making travel plans. And with the average person having 130 Facebook friends, social media is a natural place for gathering recommendations from our peers.

This change has been accompanied by the growth in use of social and web tools for planning vacations; social media has become a necessary partner in experiencing the best vacation possible. So what are the most useful tools for planning in advance and while on vacation?

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I’ve got a lot of thoughts about SxSW.  Frankly, I’m not sure how I’ll synthesize them all into a longer-form post with a modicum of value (perhaps I should hire one of the unbelievably talented Ogilvy Notes artists).

Starter for 10, I pulled a slightly incomplete word cloud based on my Twitter output from Friday-Monday (courtesy of Wordle).

What it tells me … I obviously liked it.  Clearly I met a lot of  great, funny people.  Apparently the iPad was on my brain.  Austin made a big impression on me.  I liked a lot of people, places and things.  I responded to @virginiamiracle quite a bit.  My outfit of choice was jeans.  And I crowdsourced a new word for when someone accidentally takes your drink at Starbucks - Starpluck (I am on an Urban Dictionary kick lately).

Again, I’m still trying to sort out what resonated with me.  Broadly speaking, here are the themes that sparked second and third thoughts, and which I hope to explore in the near future:

Video: I sought out and loved a few sessions on video.  How to make it compelling.  How to make it interactive.  How to make it beautiful.  There is some unbelievably creative stuff going on right now on YouTube, and the future promises to blow our minds.  Check out what the Fine Brothers are doing with ‘choose your own adventure’ style videos.  The opportunities seem endless.

Experimentation: Something I heard everywhere - regardless of the topic at hand - was that experimentation wins.  It’s faster.  It’s more agile.  It often leads to bigger breakthroughs.  Idea to execution in the shortest time can be a winning approach.  Duh, Ian.  I know, but hearing it so many times in so few days is very reinforcing.

Humor: Between the Oatmeal and Baratunde I had plenty of laughs.  Humor entertains.  And entertainment can be a form of engagement.  There’s a right and wrong way to be funny in, say, 140 characters.  What intrigues me is the permission (or not) brands have to be funny (or try to be funny) in social media.  Get it right - you’re beloved.  Get it wrong - get the gong.

Relevance: Our own relevance, that is.  Lots of discussions.  How do we stay relevant?  How do we stay passionate?  How do we discover the next great thing?  How do we innovate - for ourselves, our agencies and our clients?  How to we keep learning?  One answer I heard over and over  (and over and over) was delving into side-projects.  Little things with friends or colleagues.  Not necessarily to make a buck, but rather to make something cool and energizing.  The lingering question … how willing are employers to give their people the white space to experiment?  3M and Google have thrived off this model.  Are you willing to follow that path?  Check out Method & Craft for a really inspiring example of passion-turned-side-project.  Wonderful stuff.

Branded Content Creation and Curation: The role of brand as creator and curator of content was a pervasive theme.  Besides one very dogmatic journalist I saw, everyone seemed to agree that brand as content creator is an unstoppable force. Fraught with issues yet to be sorted?  Sure.  But it’s happening and only promises to grow.  The topic of brand as curator wasn’t as widely discussed in the panels I attended, but I’d argue that’s where the debate should be taking place (best-practices, editorial obligations, rights issues, etc.).

That’s all I’ve got for the time being.  By the way, having been on the outside looking in, I know how ‘noisy’ SxSW seems via Twitter.  I can assure you the madness and mayhem of SxSW has been grossly exaggerated.  It’s quite manageable, sane and enjoyable (with a little planning, and plenty of flexibility).

As you’ll likely hear in every wrap-up post, it’s the people that make SxSW amazing.  So many old and new faces.

Dive in next year - I’m happy to hang with you in a quiet bar over a beer and BBQ.

In the wake of Gap’s recent misstep in crowdsourcing its logo, brands should be advised to tread lightly when crowdsourcing. Truth be told, there are some things that a brand should never crowdsource - like its name, culture, or point of view. But brands can incorporate the fresh perspective of the public without sacrificing its brand quality.

Here are five ways brands can effectively crowdsource:

1) Poll the crowd first to identify brand affinity. If you are considering a major brand overhaul, it would be fatal to do so without first gauging your audience. But try and do so early on, and determine if you need a total brand overhaul, or just some minor improvements. The age-old adage, “If it ain’t broken…” is totally applicable here.

When Time Warner Cable split from parent company Time Warner Inc., it embarked on a journey to find a distinct identity. [Full disclosure: Time Warner Cable is a client]. But after 18 months of research, the company decided against a total identity overhaul, opting instead for an update.

“We are giving ourselves a brand identity refresh… so you’ll see a new logo, new colors, new photography, new graphics, and a new ad campaign,” said Marissa Freeman, Time Warner SVP of MarketingCommunications in a video posted on the company’s blog, twcableuntangled.com.

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Who doesn’t love a dramatic finale to a TV series? I’m particularly partial to Top Chef and Top Chef Masters finales where finalists on both shows are often faced with the challenge of preparing a complicated bevy of courses intended to tell stories about who they are as chefs. Such challenges speak to favorite childhood memories and what inspired contestants to become professional chefs. The personal stories are often incredibly moving and include pictures and/or videos of the chefs as children and in their first professional kitchens.

I could not get enough of Chef Hubert Keller as he transformed viewers back in time to his parents’ European bakery, where I could practically smell the baguettes baking in the oven. I even imagined myself harvesting clams with a young Rick Moonen and his father, inhaling the salty air of the New York seashore where they talked about life and their futures. Watching and hearing these esteemed chefs share their heartfelt stories not only made them more accessible (after watching weeks of cutthroat competition), but also prompted me to seek out more information about them and how they were inspired.

In my quest for chefly knowledge, little did I know that Bravo TV had already provided me with biographies of all of the chefs, recipes, blog posts by several of the judges and chefs, photos, recipes, recaps and the ability to live chat (using Cover it Live) with other fans during the show. Like Bravo TV, many brands and organizations are embracing different forms of storytelling to better connect with their potential customers and incorporate more human elements into their outbound communications.
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The Ad Council and Google DC recently held its latest Seminar Series briefing, Online Contests: A New Way to Raise Awareness and Engage Audiences! The content was pretty 101 for anyone who’s been a Facebook Page administrator but several panelists and attendees offered great tips for video contests; I’ve compiled them below with attribution.

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Thus far, 5000 inspired Johnny Cash fans around the planet have contributed painted frames to an online video of the Man in Black eerily singing “Ain’t No Grave” off  his forthcoming (final?) album of the same name.  Are these hardcore Johnny Cash “fans”?  Doubtful.  I think it is far more likely that this has tapped into the deepest of our human desires.

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It would be impossible to wrap up the first day of TED in 1 post.  Themes emerged around the power of diet (to do everything from prevent angiogenesis leading to cancer to reversing childhood obesity), taking scientific lessons from space and spiders to improve our daily lives, and the Nobel-winner-documented delta between happiness and economics (hint: means, not end).

The theme that is most relevant to our ongoing discussion here, however, is the possible societal echoes of the transparency that social media facilitates.   continue reading

A new experimental site, Photocracy.org, is a crowdsourcing initiative to explore whether images are useful in providing brand identity information. The people behind the site, Princeton University student Josh Weinstein and Sociology Professor Matthew Salganik, are currently collecting information on perceptions of 3 countries - the United States, China and Japan - using votes on images of those countries.  Visitors from each country are asked to choose which of 2 pictures is more representative of the country.  Since the site’s launch a few weeks ago, over 100,000 votes have been cast for comparisons like this one:

Why is this useful?  To find out, I asked the people behind the project some questions. continue reading