Fabulous Social Web Strategies colleague Honoria created a wonderful set of paintings during Interactive Austin 2009, including the one above, which is her impression of the Emergent Leadership panel including David Armistead and I with Clay Spinuzzi from the University of Texas.

Why you’ll want to join us at Interactive Austin ‘09 (April 27) – sign up now!

Social Web Strategies has been working with FG Squared to cultivate Austin’s social web scene and make our city the nexus of social web innovation and development. Steve Golab presented with Bijoy Gosami of Bootstrap Austin and Heather McKissick of Leadership Austin at last Thursday’s Social Media Club. Bijoy and Heather have been working with several others (including our own Jon Lebkoowsky) to promote Austin as the Experience City, focusing on the concept of experience design via Bootstrap Austin’s Experience Subgroup. The three will present again at the 2009 Interactive Austin conference on April 27. Working with Mike Chapman and FG Squared, Jon Lebkowsky helped create the program for Interactive Austin, and is featured as one of the “gods of Interactive Austin 2009″.

The Austin American-Statesman featured this video of Social Web Strategies’ Jon Lebkowsky discussing what he’ll be doing at SXSW Interactive…

Yesterday (October 14), I gave a breakfast presentation on Twitter to the Association for Women in Technology, speaking at the Austin American-Statesman’s offices, along with Rob Quigley, the Statesman’s resident social media expert, and food writer Addie Broyles. My slides:

Friday I tweeted advice to the TechCrunchies after their ill-advised attempt at a “grassroots” panel:

1) 20 people is not a panel, it’s a mob.
2) There are women in this industry, too. (They only had one on the panel, and she was there because Lori Hawkins raised the issue in the Statesman.)
3) Make sure your panelists know not to mention that their companies bought their slot on the panel.
4) A bunch of CEOs and marketing guys do not a grassroots panel make. That mislabeling of the event was just silly.

There were also distracting ads flashing behind the panel, but worst of all was that the audience – at least everyone I spoke to who showed up – found the talk boring. I wasn’t bored, though… I was truly interested in hearing the perspective of people who are relatively new to the web and have only ever known it as a business platform. The conversation, and the afterparty, were very much like late 90s web events, but the conversations suggest a business environment that’s grown far more complex.

A few of my notes:

Is word of mouth marketing (WOMMA) the same as “grassroots”? (Later someone came up with a definition of grassroots as “grown from teh soils of the people’s hard necessity.”)

Greg Lee of the Lance Armstrong Foundation notes today’s high rate of web adoption and says that “passion drives revenue.” Focus on passion and awareness first, and the dollars follow. Advocacy is stronger than satisfaction in driving decisions about brands.

Kip McLanahan of OnNetworks said “this is a conversat4ion about consumer control. The consumer is in control now more than ever.”

Matt Corey of Golfsmith says they’ll still keep bad user-contributed product reviews on the site as long as there’s no profanity. I’m thinking there shouldn’t be a question whether you’d keep those reviews, if you wanted to have authentic customer conversation.

In the music industry, each band is a grassroots marketing machine. They’re selling concert events, which is where the money’s made these days – presumably recorded music in digital format is so easily ripped and traded that it’s become, not the product in itself, but advertising for the product delivered live, and demand is increasing for live performance.

Andrew Busey: a grassroots campaign has a prerequisite, which he referred to as the seed, using Obama as an example.

Acknowledgement that things that suck also spread virally.

Brett Hurt: brands can listen in ways that they coudln’t listen before, and they have to respond in ways that they haven’t responded before. LL Bean says the product knowledge lifecycle has decreased from thee months to three days. (Reference to knowledge about how consumers are responding to a product.)

How do VCs evaluate a product’s possibility to become viral?

In marketing, we’re having to change messaging from interrupt to something that drives engagement, and creates a dialog.

The need for efficiency of customer acquisition varies.

Here’s one that David Armistead and I found relevant, because it’s about what we do: Businesses are not geared up for listening, and they’re not prepared to be facilitators of dialog. They need help. Customers are clearly up for dialog, and marketers are getting there.

Greg Lee asks about the call to action: when is the right time to ask for engagement?

Another note relevant to SWS: How many companies are ready, when the firestorm occurs, to change the core of the company. What’s the firestorm? It might be a situation where the values of the company clearly don’t match customers’ (or stakeholders’) expectations.

Matt Corey: core values are supposed to stand the test of time. (Well, yes, but paradigms are shifting hard.)

Principles to take away. Are people, realizing that the balance of power has shifted, playing offense, or defense? Brett Hurt: the best brands have always played offense. Social media is a reflection of the physicality that has always been there. Now we have tools to speak for them and tools to listen for you.

Working with the phenomenal Maggie Duval, Cafe Caffeine, and Austin Jelly instigator Dusty Reagan, we’ve put together Austin’s own One Web Day celebration – Monday, September 22 at Cafe Caffeine. We’ll have speakers all day, from 10:30am to 8:15pm, during a special One Web Day Jelly. Sign up at Eventbrite or just show up!

More about One Web Day

Interesting account of Sarah Lacy’s presentation at Gnomedex – not really a conversation at all, but a conversation with the audience about blogging. I wouldn’t have assigned much credibility to Lacy after her smarmy public interaction with Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW Interactive, but her approach with the Gnomedex crowd about “the growing blogosphere angst” evidently worked to engage the audience and produce a kind of creative tension – wish I’d been there.

From the account linked above, oddly appearing in CNet’s Gaming and Culture blog:

Her theme was that because of that co-opting, blogging as a medium has become less and less distinguishable from technology journalism, as bloggers and traditional reporters alike find themselves too worried about pumping out content to focus on meeting people and finding good stories.

My perspective is that the blogosphere has become an intensely competitive space for some, especially those who hope to make real money with their blogs. Blogs are truly “social media” with a low entry barrier. Anyone can play. There are so many articulate people with stories to share, and so many of them are blogging away. Because there are so many compelling sources of content, rather than the relatively smaller number of periodicals and newspapers (and television and radio channels) we had in the old media world, mindshare is fragmented, it’s hard to build a sustained audience. There’s a huge strain if you’re trying to monetize attention in this environment.

There’s also confusion about “blogging” as a medium: “while the architecture of blogging is fairly standard, what people do with it can be quite different: Some may write a small personal blog and TechCrunch may be a large media company, but both use similar tools and are therefore lumped together to the detriment of the terminology.” “Blog” is a format, not a kind of content, and not a kind of operation. We probably need new a new terminology (or a retooling of old terminology) to speak clearly about the new world of media. And we should get away from old-media models of thinking – that seems obvious, yet it’s not happening, partly because the PR world has within the last couple of years embraced social media, and the initial embrace is smothering.

In this conversation that Lacy structured, Robert Scoble – who’s been very successful, partly because he picked up a large audience as Microsoft’s blogger but mainly because he’s a good guy, smart, and articulate – “said that working with an ever-increasing number of unprofessional PR people has turned him off.” The operative word there, I think, is unprofessional. I’m not sure what Robert was thinking (because the post I’ve linked doesn’t expand on it), but it’s important to think about the impact of social media scale and character, the fact that professionals and “amateurs” are all stewing in the same juices, and the line between them – as well as the line between the publisher and the audience, is a razor-thin blur. This is clearly true in content production, but it’s also the case in PR. True PR professionals, like journalists, sit on a foundation of study and professional standard that informs their work. We see more and more folks who lack that foundation but are more or less serious players, because they’ve managed to get and leverage attention on the social web. I suspect those are the people Scoble’s talking about. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, but it’s the world we’re in and we have to make sense of it. How we do that will shape the future of social media, which feels like a frontier at the moment.

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.”

Brian Massey and I recently conducted a workshop, “Why isn’t your web site generating business?” We talked about identifying your web pattern and associated strategy as the foundation for building a successful web presence. Here are the slides we used. Contact us for more information.

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