Interactive Austin 2008
I spoke at the sold-out conference Interactive Austin 2008 on Thursday, on a panel called “How the Convergence of Media and Online Affects Marketing and PR, moderated by Cynthia Baker of Accolades PR and featuring Clint Howell of Business Wire, Omar Gallaga of the Austin American-Statesman, Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOM, and my pal Adam Weinroth from Pluck. Funniest line: Omar Gallaga, talking about the the future of journalism, siad “I hope I’m not eating cat food in the back of the bus in five years.” He also told how online is working for the Statesman, which adopted social meda features early and well. The Statesman was Pluck’s first customer, and Adam noted that the relationship helped refine Pluck’s offering.
Other notes I jotted down: Stacey said a PR person has to be a stalker and a concierge to work with her – persistent but polite, and they have to know how to get her what she needs for her story. Clint said to “start listening to the crowds and find out where everybody is.”
I hung out for a while, talked to friends and colleagues, attended some other panels. I was impressed with Pete Hayes of AMD, who demonstrated real cluefulness about effective web presence and uses of social media. He noted that search marketing is a waste of time if you don’t have your act together with content, which should be persona-focused and well-distributed. One clueful thing AMD is doing: AMD Unprocessed, a site that gives bloggers access to all kinds of information about the company.
Dave Evans hosted a panel called “Trends & Technologies Driving Social Interaction,” feauring among others former Walmart CEO Bill Fields, who said, regarding the need for authenticity in social media, “You can’t lie to customers that much anymore.” That got a laugh, and he went on to say that a company now has to do what it says it will do. “The traditional marketing approach won’t work anymore. You have to quit lying.”
Much discussion of sharing and collaboration vs traditonal top-down command and control structure, and possible down sides of crowdsourcing. Len Hause asked “does mob rule overcome deep thought?” He quoted Henry Ford: “If I asked my cusomers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
Fields emphasized that many or most companies are stuck in the past and don’t know that the game’s changed. He also mentioned someone he knows who sells products related to music, and who gets 90% of his sales via MySpace, and not through his very good web site. What does that say about our assumptions about the web?
Susan Scrupski talked about barriers to adoption of social media and social web strategies within the enterprise. They’re completely unaware of the tools and their power. She also noted that you can’t overlay web 2.0 on a 1.0 culture – what we used to call business process reengineering is necessary for most customers. (Shameless plug here: this is where Social Web Strategies has expertise.)
A couple more quotes:
Somebody quoted Sam Walton saying “If you have questions, go to the store. Your customer has the answer.” And Bill Fields said, at the end, “There’s a real danger in asking for input that you don’t use.”
