The theme for this year’s event was all about getting content out to your customers and getting them to connect with you through the various networks your message can be on, like Twitter.

Attracting and keeping customers

• Attract – ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude to why people should visit your web site
• Engagement – search, copy, tools – creates awareness
• Motivate – the dance between the customer and owner, you can “entertain” your users by following these steps:
  • Popular – relevant content
  • Useful – an online tool to save them time and costs having to research elsewhere
  • Accessible – not hidden, integrated with other networks – feeds, etc
  • Social – interactive, changing daily, eg: reviews
• Commitment – show customer you care and you value your relationship with users
• Make any offers online easy to adopt and participate, make it distinctive so your site stands out

Social media increase

A recent Nielsen report in the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.

More recently, stats show that Online video more popular than blogging and social networking

Brand new world

Andy Hobsbawm’s (Agency.com) Keynote

Be a verb not a noun – be about action rather than words. All about the ‘active principle’ at the centre,
eg: topshop at fashion week, podcasts, rss.

The way to multi task and handle information is the way brands will be managed in the future – easier to get info from social network – Twitter search. May become a superbrand, completely up for grabs. No right answer now.

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories. These social networks allow us to tell our stories.

Unless you have a great product someone could ruin your product using social media. eg expensive acai berries, or organic pomegranite. Don’t always aim for a narrow slice of the shelf, or share of market. Compared to Tesco who manage all of these exotic fruit and much more.

Micro brands, enough people that buy them might make a business, but no right answer at the moment.

Media industry based on old costing model. DVD region 2. Publishing on Internet is next to nothing compared to costs of producing and marketing a advert on TV. Television at the moment is just another screen to display content.

Communication is what makes the world go round, and the essence of social media.

This was our second year to what can only be described as the mother of all Web Tech Events, each year thousands of entrepreneurs, start-ups, geeks, bloggers, and industry types attend SxSw in Austin, Texas.

Depending on who you talk to, SxSw is all about the 1000 different panelists talking tech to a very enthusiastic International audience, others refer to it as ‘summer camp for geeks‘. Being a super friendly conference means that it’s very easy to speak to a number of people from different backgrounds.

The best part of SxSw?

Is that everyone, whether they are ‘Internet Famous’ like Scoble, or whether they are freelancers is that the hierarchy is flat. So you can be sitting next to a CEO, and converse with a great variety of businesses in an informal setting. There are very few ego’s here, which I find quite refreshing compared to other events.

How to choose the right session

The level of information and user generated content that is generated from this event is staggering. 19 different panels happening at the same time, a choice of topics that covers everything from internet privacy to social media practices. Think like going to a music festival and having to choose just one panel out of 19, a tough choice. Two ways of getting round this, 1: if the panel you are in sucks after 5 minutes, walk out, and find the next one on your schedule. 2: Realise you can’t catch everything and listen to the podcasts when you return home.

The difference between this years event and last years

The mention of the word ‘downturn’ made some people look like you had just swore at them. However, the number of sponsored events around town and presence of silicon valley companies made it feel like the event was throwing caution to the wind, and giving people the opportunity to get on with business and make new connections.

Twitter usage. Each panel had a hashtag (#) on twitter so the panelists could take questions directly from twitter and also keep a track of what was being said in real time as they spoke. It’s hard to believe Twitter won a web award 2 years ago at SxSw for best newcomer web site.

The hashtag #sxsw has been a trending topic in Twitter search for two weeks now.

I must say that the Twitter network held up very well during this manic time where lots of data was being pushed from Austin over the week. The bloggers room was like a war room, there was a sea of laptops, people on phones, and after a few days it didn’t smell to good either.

Our favourite sessions

• The Kawasaki and Anderson keynote (youtube link)
• Version Control: No More Save-As (Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress) (no media yet)
• Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable (Folks from Google, Microsoft, and the CTO from Amazon) (no media yet)
• HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! (podcast link)
• Curating the Crowd-Sourced World (podcast link)
• Designing for Irrational Behavior (podcast link)

Our favourite SXSW tweets

Our SXSW photos

This years set is here. More photos tagged SXSW are available on flickr.

Podcasts from SXSW

SxSw 09 Podcasts – More being added everyday. And from SxSw 2008 and the SxSw channel on YouTube.

See you next year Austin!

Here’s a list of conferences and exhibitions you will find us at over the next few months, and into 2009.

Why? Not just because they are great fun, but also very valuable tools in training, learning emerging internet technologies and trends.

Getting to the cutting edge of Internet leaders minds is what it is all about, and chatting up close and personal with other exciting innovators on the web.
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We’re happy to let you know about two very exciting (local) web events that are happening this autumn.

Barcamp Brighton 3. We are helping to pay for the staffing for this event which is being held at Brighton University.

‘BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats”, Wikipedia.
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This post is regarding online brands, and accompany notes from Internet world which was a while back now, however it’s always a good free event to visit and see the big brands and startups represent themselves in a competitive marketplace on and off-line.

There were lots of seminars on search to content management, from hosting to email, some terrible powerpoint slides.

One particular highlight was Andy Hobsbawm’s (Agency.com) Keynote on “How people value brands and brands value people in an interactive world”.

Below are some quote and points from his Keynote:

• Be a verb not a noun
• Go with the flow
• Be a guide not a gateekeeper

“Today ‘the virtualisation of everything’ is possible”

“A brand is not what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is”

“No place for brands to hide, as information flow to the consumer is so great on the internet”

“The internet is one big social network, email being the biggest tool for networking”

“Don’t assume customers don’t know anything nowadays, they now have the information by searching for the answer = information driven”

“Exploding connections on the web means that brands can’t be linear anymore”

The latest event from Carsonified is The Future of Web Design, which was held in London this week. These are the notes from some of the speakers presentations.

The theme for the event focused on creative approaches for design:
The main ways for the speakers we by ‘changing your perspectives’ and ‘asking and collaborating with other people for ideas’.

Inspiration vs duplication – Often leads to designs being directly copied as its easier, but leads to abuse. How do we go about doing the right thing? By looking for elements that solve problems in intersting ways.

Inspiration. Takes practice and is never ending process. Lead to wealth of ideas that you can apply to web design

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For those that want to find out about the presentations, and for indeed the people that made it, but couldn’t missed panels that ‘rawked’. Check out the links below to relive some of the panels back in March from SxSw 2008:

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/mov/ Movie – Quicktime

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/swf/ Flash – swf

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/mp4hi/ Audio – MP4