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What I learned on my Austin Work-cation

Fellow blogger, Jeff Cenna, and I recently attended South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, TX. It was an incredible experience, which every web worker should be able to attend at some point in their career. Lacking the resources to send the whole company to Texas for a week, we decided to document the top five lessons we learned at South by Southwest this year. If you happen to be near our office at lunch time today, we are presenting this in person — with Burritos for all!

Give it away now

A mega-trend that we heard at almost every presentation, panel and even parties was to figure out what you can provide for free. Whether that be a free trial or demo of your software, white papers on your area of expertise or even giving your product to a core demographic for free, the future of the web is free. Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void was very active on this meme in a panel around Self Replicating Awesomeness – which is basically translated to a few key points.

· Word of mouth is still the best form of marketing

· The more you give away, the more social capital you get back

· Social objects, objects which a community forms around, are brought into being by social gestures, the acts a person or business takes toward their target users or the industry in which they travel.

· Communities form around social objects, not vice versa.

Talk like a Human

The buzz about using conversational tone could not be ignored at this year’s SXSW. There are a few sub themes contained within:

· Kathy Sierra talked about making sure your product reflects your feelings. As an example: do you really feel that FAQs are a good touch point with clients in need of assistance?

· Jason Fried from Chicago’s own 37signals highlighted that the simplest way to redesign a site is starting with a read and then a rewrite. When was the last time you really read your site?

· Jared Spool of User Experience Engineering talked about focusing on separating your own mental model of how something works in reality from how the user thinks it works. A great example was shown about Google search. A single Google search can travel many hundreds of miles and interact with loads of systems before it is presented back to the user. That said, we all know that Google doesn’t actually show that in their interface, they focus instead on the speed at which they were able to return results, because that is what matters to the end user.

It’s not you. It’s Us.

There was a great sense of community at SXSW, in a world where internet workers rarely commune (IRL) there was a palpable buzz around the idea of communities both on and offline. One of the most thought provoking theories presented at the Saturday keynote interview with Henry Jenkins was the shift in language from I to We, specifically as it relates to this year’s political race to become president. Jenkins’ point of view is that the rise in popularity for Barack Obama with the youth market is really a reaction to his “non-politician” way of speaking. In the past we have heard from politicians “I can be the next president” or “I can do this or that to improve the world/country” now we are hearing things like “together, WE can do this and that” “Yes, WE can.”

We were also able to see a real life demonstration of our need to be a “we” rather than an “I” when Sarah Lacy’s interview of Mark Zuckerberg was overtaken by an angry mob. This mob really only wanted the interview to reflect the feeling of the rest of the event; a community sharing great ideas and experiences without pretense. Instead, we were forced to sit through 42 minutes of Sarah’s own agenda.

Online doesn’t equal successful

Over the few days immersed in techno babble we got the sense that there was a true feeling that doing the right thing was more important than getting the traffic on your site increased. There was a panel devoted to the worst social marketing campaigns of 2007 that truly showed the evil that is being attempted on the web these days. Here is a great article highlighting the worst of the worst.

Step Away from your mouse

Technology has moved from keyboard and mouse, towards new peripherals and devices that focus on the naturalistic experience instead of the technological. Some great examples of this in recent past are Guitar Hero, Microsoft Surface, Wii, and iPhone. All of these borrow from real world models to accomplish the ultimate barrier breakers:

· In the case of Guitar hero, the real world context and social nature of the game has helped to provide gaming to a new audience — the audience is currently projected to be 40% female!

· Microsoft’s Surface has borrowed so much from the physical world that they admit that little kids aren’t even impressed with it. Not because it doesn’t do what they expect, but because it does EXACTLY what they expect. This totally eliminates the barrier to fun (which in most all cases with technology is computer literacy or experience)

· Wii has also broken barriers to use and expanded out of the traditional gaming market with many Wiis being sold to nursing homes and retirement communities

· and don’t even get me started on the iPhone. iPhone through its touch based interface has raised the bar for everyday device interaction. Proof is in all the iPhone clones flooding the market currently. Another good sign of a device “working” is when most everyone at a technology conference has at least one. And yes – that does mean we encountered people with more than one iPhone.

So in conclusion: Give away the good, stay away from the bad, talk to me like I’m real, think before you launch and try always to reach out and touch someone.