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.

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!

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.

Being able to spend each day in a group with in-depth focus on a many topics, allowing you to discuss your problems, share solutions, and make lasting connections with your peers and future colleagues.

Extra special keywords for these events: Usability, Development, Marketing and Networking

dConstruct 2008 Designing the social web. 3rd-5th September, Brighton, UK.

‘It’s a grass-roots conference that gathers some of the brightest minds in the industry from around the world’

Head The Singularity 2008 conference has now been renamed ‘Head’, 24th-26th October, Online (worldwide).

‘It’s a seminal web event intended to form a time capsule or snapshot of Web ’08 . The conference will have experts in WebDesign & Blogging, Artists, 3D & Flash Developers, Gods of JavaScript & MarkUps, Hackers, Entrepreneurs; conducting sessions on various topics.’

Adaptive Path UX Intensive, October 13-16 2008, Copenhagen.

‘Workshop series examines the four key elements that contribute to a successful interactive experience: Design Strategy, Design Research, Interaction Design and Information Architecture. Workshops are led by Adaptive Path’s team of experts, including: Dan Saffer,
Chiara Fox, Brandon Schauer and
Todd Wilkens’.

Search Marketing Expo – SMX London,
4-5 November 2008, London.

‘2 days of sessions featuring the latest intelligence on cutting-edge SEO and PPC tactics and best practices from the brightest minds in search marketing’

The User Experience 2008 Conference, 16-21 November 2008, Amsterdam.

‘These guys bring together structured disciplines and apply them to improving the user experience while considering business needs — something we should all do everyday’.
Testimonial from Jason McKenzie, PricewaterhouseCoopers

Adaptive Path MX, 1-3 March 2009, San Francisco.

‘MX brings thought leaders from IDEO, Google, The Mayo Clinic, Cisco, and many others, to show you what it takes to get great experiences out into the world’.

SXSW Interactive, March 13-17, 2009, Austin, Texas.

‘The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology’.

All we can say is that it’s very exciting to be part of this and the future of the internet, we hope to meet you there. If you have any questions about what these events mean to how we work contact us.

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.

The event is free, with the only condition is that everyone should have a presentation to show. This way the information exchange and conversations resulting from each presentation can be maximised on.

You never quite know what will be presented or discussed at each event, that is the beauty of it. A really good networking event to meet new colleagues and possible clients.

Add yourself to the Barcamp Wiki if you want to attend, the weekend of 6th – 7th September 2008.

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The second event we are sponsoring is Singularity 2008. This is a completely new event organised by local Brightonian Aral Balkan.

Singularity is a web conference with all of the traditional elements. They’ve a wonderful lineup of speakers, presentations, question and answer sections, and networking opportunities.

The twist is that the conference takes place everywhere — all over the world — and using the Internet to tie it all together.

Being environmentally friendly web conference is something that definately appeals to us: saving on thousands of flights and the resulting carbon emissions by having speakers and attendees interact with the conference locally over the web.

We look forward to participating, on October 24-26th 2008. Put it in your diary and see how the event unfolds online!

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 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

Future design trends:

• Softer colours – wordpress org
• Use of video – Ms Dewey
• Horizontal vs Vertical Scrolling – ie. Personal portfolio site site where you can push creativity

User experience vs brand identity – ‘The iceberg experience’

User Experience and successful websites are built upon the following values: Visual 10%, Interaction 90%.

• Top part of iceberg is amazing but underneath is terrible.
• Like code on some web pages. The main and rewarding part of experience is when they start interacting with the site.
• Looks do count but if not thought well the user can be left with shallow experience.
• Create good cohesive experiences, by paying more attention to whats underneath.

A great designer creates the tools to help a user achieve a task they need to accomplish. A user will validate the success of the designers work or design.

Inspired design: a usable design need not be a Safe design (back to horizontal scrolling? , as this is the way the limits of design can be pushed further online.

Hot Design Tips – from various speakers

• Make connections. Show your name, your company. Develop relationships. Build trust. – join communities
• Trust, passionate users, ambassadors, Enthisiasm – Be human
• Desire paths, don’t try to predict things – get the site out the door and see how people use it.
• Adapt to scale – its a great problem to have. Solve problems that you didn’t worry about before
• Subtraction is iteration too.
• Realign don’t redesign – users will lose their pathways if you remove/change important functions.
• Don’t panic – listen and learn carefully before reacting to latest release.

References to sites and books mentioned by the speakers:

• Society of Digital Agencies – Created best practices for our service industry.
• Ideas that spread are more likely to suceed. These are idea viruses. Best ones are by friends and recommendations. Purple Cow
• Designing for Interaction – New Riders
• Ways of saying hello – Business card book
• Juxtapoz.com
• Seedconference
• Revyyer.com
• Abriefmessage.com
• Shauninman.com
• Creativebits.org

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

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

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

• Say Hello and speak to everyone, there may be some important people to meet, standing right next to you. Ask them ‘where are they from’ then you will be well on your way to exchanging contact details.
• Ditch the freebies, from your welcome bag – if you are lucky enough to get a platinum pass you will collect three bags, don’t worry there are recycling points in the conference centre for plastic paper and aluminium.
• Go to all the parties – Its a lot of fun, soak up the Texan atmosphere, make new contacts and drink the free beer
• Be Polite – You may just be sitting next to your all time web hero, or your next big client.

Place you need to visit during you stay for SxSw:

• Supermarket – Wholefoods – The only vegetables and organic food you will get in Texas
• Cafe – Halcyon – Great vibe and nice food
• Hotel – The Hampton Inn Downtown – Do yourself a favour, stay here – it’s worth it
• Bar – Shakespeares Pub – Home of the Great British booze-up
  
• Drink – Shiner Bock and Lone Star beer – Most of it free at the parties you will get into with your pass
• Food – Tex mex, Mexican and BBQ – Meat, meat and lots of meat! – Probably the only thing you will spend money on is for lunches – Enjoy the Texan portions

Here are the sort of people you can meet at SxSw Interactive (in fact we met them all at SxSw08):

• Web Celebrities – Scobleizer, Kevin Rose (Digg), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Garrett Camp (Stumbleupon), iJustine
• News Reporters – Chris Valance (BBC), Jemina Kiss (Guardian), Business Week, Mashable
• Rock Stars – Moby – Yes, the bald headed DJ/Artist
• Start ups – Cal Henderson – Flickr
• Founders and Developers – Pownce and Digg
• The Big Players – Mozilla, Opera, Kyte and Google staff
• Web Creators – W3C members
• And even people from right here in Brighton!

Best of the Conference – Reccommended

• Best seminar – Probably any of the Keynotes, and the odder the title of the seminar the more intriguing it becomes.
• Best speaker - Probably realising that the blogger you admire is as clever in real life as well!
• Best experience – Get along to the Star of Texas 17th annual rodeo, and back at SxSw obviously building up networking skills at and around the conference.

You cannot really predict what is going to happen to you during your time at SxSw, but whatever you do just go with it, embrace the feeling and enjoy every minute. Otherwise you may regret turning down that outing that turned into a VIP pass to the party of the year!

Oh and get some rest before arriving, on the Sunday night at SxSw 25 parties took place.

Just one look at the events calendar is enough to make any person nervous, with the amount of world renowned speakers and also some homegrown talent going over to share knowledge, hang out with friends and make new aquaintances.

How to maximise everyones time at SxSW08

This is how I can see the event working. After the initial check in for flight, and at the hotel. All delegates are required to register. This will be a good initial check to get a vibe for just how friendly and excitable everyone will be about the week ahead. Hopefully to spot some of the Brightoninan’s that will also be there.

The main key ingredients for the week will be networking and marketing. Covering all corners of the event, as well as the all important after party’s sponsored by some big brands, Google, MicroHoo!..

An exciting part of any conference it’s not knowing what’s going to be the topic of the day to discuss with other delegates, from inside the seminars to what is happening outside with respect to popular technology and business developments posted on techcrunch.

As with any early adopters for web apps and spending a lot of time generally online you should have an general opinion or most things happening online, and be ready to contribute to conversations with people who either have little knowledge to actual innovators on the topics.

Above all, I think having fun with the web is still the main thing to remember at SxSw, dont take the web too seriously, the world will not end if you get a 404 page error.

Personally, I’m looking forward to how many connections we can all make at the event, and I’m looking forward to contributing to the blogosphere whilst in Austin..

Jim Callender

We are really excited as it looks like a lot of thought has gone into the line up this year. Browsing the events calendar and you will see friends and colleagues running some excellent events.

We have a Brighton Farm Hack day, lead by one of the founders Paul Silver. Good for honing those API skills you were too shy to ask about before perhaps.

We have a whole week of Brighton Skillswap, which involves people volunteering to train a small group of their peers in a subject that interests them. Recent talks have been computer development based, but this week should see the boundaries being pushed into the rest of Brighton’s community.

The “£5 app” meet-up for programmers, web developers and designers to discuss and showcase their “£5 apps”. This has been interesting in the past with entrepreneurs sharing their experiences and lessons from their projects. A good way to get feedback on any startup ideas you may have too!

There looks like there will be a record number of nominations for the Brighton and Hove Web awards 2007, good luck to all entrants!

The dSCAPE/07 annual Portfolio Clinic is an invaluable opportunity for digital media hopefuls to get advice from the region’s most successful companies, if you are starting out after graduating or need to know how to cut it as a designer, artist or developer come along.

The Girl Geeks are combining forces with Guy Geeks to bring one big Charity Christmas Dinner. ‘Full details will be announced ’soon it says, perhaps a good way to recap on what you have seen at the Digital Festival over a mince pie?

These events are always great to network at, put names to faces and share ideas.. finally, to come away with some new skill or technique you wouldn’t have thought of gaining.. Priceless!

Brighton is blessed by having such a grass roots, real-world community, there’s no excuse for staying indoors this winter, get involved!