Citizen Marketer 2.1

Aaron Strout

Bring on the Content at SXSW 2012!

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The guts of this post were cross-posted from colleague, Meredith Owen’s, fabulous write up on the WCG blog. Big thanks to her for doing the heavy lifting on this.

If you hadn’t noticed, it’s that time of year again. Yes the time where all of your social media friends flood your Twitter stream and Facebook walls with pleas to vote for this panel or that panel at the grand daddy of all digital/social media conferences, South by Southwest (SXSW). While some people look at this as a nuisance, I take it as an opportunity to look at trends in the space. I also like to keep my eye out for new faces and voices in the world of digital/social.

To that end, a number of my colleagues at WCG have submitted panels this year. All of them look great on paper and having listened to most of them present, I can tell you that it would be worth your while to vote any/all of them through. I’ve also included my panel in the mix. In addition to the one I’ve submitted below, I am also lucky enough to be in the running with friends, Tim Walker, Kate Brodock and Troy Nalls for a panel titled, Down in Front! How to Control Bad Fans. While SXSW only allows panelists to sit on one session, I’m hedging my bets to increase my odds. I’d be thrilled to get the thumbs up on either of the two panels.

Without further ado, here are the eight panels submitted by us WCG-ers:

  • Ultimate Healthcare Reform – Reshaping Our World – Bob Pearson, WCG’s Chief Technology & Media Officer, sits down with Jeff Arnold, founder of WebMD and Sharecare, for an epic discussion on how the technology leaders at SXSW can take people from information to action to create healthier world.
  • Social Media…A Responsibility of WHICH Department? –Matt Snodgrass tackles the elephant in the room during this solo presentation that will dissect various industries and companies to examine where social media responsibility should lie.
  • Friending Pharma: Patients, Industry & New Media – Last Monday was a big day for pharma too. WCG Director Brian Reid joins a sundry team of health influencers including Pfizer VP Ray Kerins, Cancer Health Activist and Patient Expert Alicia Staley, and diabetes bloggers and patient advocates Kerri Sparling and Allison Blass as they examine the risks and benefits of connecting patients and biopharma companies online.
  • My Doctor Poked Me. Giggidy! – Anecdotal evidence suggests that health care providers’ use of social media is in the early stages of an explosion.  Social media analysts Andy Booth and Naimul Huq sit down with long-time MD and leading blogger Dr. Bryan Vartabedian to explore how social media is changing the future of the doctor-patient relationship.
  • Social Networks are Killing the Company Org Chart – Every company has an org chart – but we all know intuitively that work is done based on relationships and connections across the organization.  Mapping those connections can reveal a whole new world to smart corporations. Greg Matthews (a former HR exectutive) and Humana’s Director Learning Innovation Brian Foye explain how social media can map and measure the real corporation underneath the org chart.
  • Inside Out: Internal Social Media & Big Business – Industry leaders Brian Snyder, Jonathan Mast and Blair Klein join WCG Director Brad Mays to bring together the collective insight of some of the biggest corporate brands on best practices for using social media for internal collaboration and productivity.
  • Future of Location Marketing: Dummies Perspective – 2012 marks the three-year anniversary of Foursquare’s launch at SXSW.  Location-based gurus Aaron Strout and Mike Schneider will walk through the 5 golden rules of location-based marketing and how to leverage the “there” there.
  • Social Media Strategies of Top Tweeting Businesses – WCG’s Ricardo Guerrero understands the business of Twitter- if fact, he created most of Dell’s Twitter accounts, which generated $6.5M of revenue in their first 2.5 years.  During this panel Ricardo will examines the top 1,000 business Twitter accounts to analyze whether or not Twitter success translates across social media channels.
In addition to some of these potentially awesome panel submissions, I also have another seven I am excited to see. In no particular order, here they are:
  • The community revolving door: staying a step ahead – Welcome to the biggest challenge presented by community. From continuing to seek out new members, to finding the next evangelist, membership evolution can be an unexpected challenge, but so is content evolution and most importantly, strategy evolution (Heather Strout, Farland Group, Jim Storer, The Community Round Table, Mark Wallace, EDR and Mike Pascucci, Ektron).
  • Aristotle Shops @WalMart | CSR, Ethics & Community – Today, Aristotle would be a Wal-Mart greeter, or perhaps manage its online community. What happened? The company changed their vision when CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. launched a massive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaign to, in his words, “…create a better story”. (Kyle Flaherty, Breaking Point Systems & Alex Hahn, Vox Global)
  • The Facebook Customer Service Challenge for Brands – Managing customer service on a Facebook Page is a messy proposition, particularly for large businesses and brands. Increasingly impatient customers and fans are flocking to the Facebook Wall to fire off specific questions or complaints about product and service issues, with the expectation of receiving a rapid-fire satisfactory response and the threat of making a big stink across their social networks if they don’t.  (Bryan Person, David Berkowitz, 360i, Molly DeMaagd – AT&T, Eric Ludwig, Rosetta Stone).
  • No Wallet? No Problem. Enter Mobile Payments. – The days of having that lump of a wallet in your back pocket or forgetting your wallet at home are over. Consumers around the world could generate as much as $50 billion in sales through NFC-based mobile payments by 2014, according to Juniper Research. Google already has merchants like Macy’s and The Container Store are using Google Wallet, powered by NXP’s secure NFC chips, to increase engagement and offer deals to consumers (Allen Tsai, David Berkowitz, 360i, Rob von Behren, Google, Jeff Miles, NXP Semiconductors, David Messenger, American Express).
  • Will the social web build a world we want? – Social media is transforming politics, the Middle East, corporate behavior and social activism. But how far can it go? Can citizens and customers, armed with social media and connected by shared values, create the movement for change that our world needs? Or will political manipulation, corporate self-interest and consumer fatigue overwhelm them?  (Simon Mainwaring, We First)
  • Can growing a moustache change the world? –  Join Adam Garone, CEO/co-founder of Movember, as he discusses how Movember leveraged the support of a few daring partners and pockets of loyal fans to generate a global movement that saw 450,000 moustache growers in 2010. Learn how Movember captivated the attention of a demographic infamous for not discussing their health, converted them into evangelists by turning the brand over to them, and sent them off to build the campaign. (Adam Garone, Movember)
Did you submit a panel this year? Or is there one that you know of that should absolutely make it to the next round? If so, feel free to include the link in the comments along with a little plug.

 

How I Spent My “Geek Spring Break” (aka SXSWi)

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It’s been exactly a week since South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and I’ve had a little bit of time to let the dust settle. While this was definitely the most stressful of the three SXSWi’s I’ve been to, it was also the most professionally rewarding. Yes, you heard me right. I actually had a good time at SXSWi AND found value unlike others who complained that it’s become too big, too commercialized or too whatever. Rather than pile on, I’ll let my friends Kyle Flaherty and Jessica Smith and sister, Heather Strout’s posts speak to this point as they’ve really covered all the bases.

What I would like to cover in my recap of my experience at SXSWi are five things. I’ve bulleted the items below so you can focus on the areas you care about and skip the “who gives a shit” stuff.

  • Key take away’s from the Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit on Thursday
  • Location-based services – my $.02
  • Speaking at SXSWi and what I think it takes to get on a panel
  • The @Redsoxgnome photo meme
  • Parties: which ones I liked and why (including our very own Powered Inc. party)
SOCIAL BUSINESS SUMMIT
Fortunately or unfortunately, I was not able to attend very many panels this year. Believe it or not, it was not a lack of want on my part but rather a lack of time (thus the stress) between meetings, briefings, client events, prospecting, etc. I did have the good fortune of sitting on two panels this year (more on that under bullet three) and did get a chance to catch my friend / mentee, Sydney Owen’s panel, “GenY Wants to Work with You, Not for You (my friend, Elysa Rice was also on the panel — both did a wonderful job). I also caught the first half of Twitter founder, Evan Williams’, keynote. Like many folks, I was underwhelmed but found a little additional value in moderator, Umair Haque’s blog recap/apology.
The reason I’m providing this prologue is that I didn’t feel as bad about not attending panels during SXSWi because I had a day of great inspiration on the Thursday prior. (A big thank you to Peter Kim / Jeff Dachis for inviting me). You can visit the agenda to see a list of all the speakers and topics but the highlights for me were the breadth and depth of what was covered. In particular, I really liked Charlene Li’s (Altimeter Group) talk on open leadership, Jaime Punishill’s (Citi) discussion of operationalizing social, Kate Niederhoffer’s (Dachis Group) primer on social psychology,  Frank Eliason’s (Comcast) focus on social’s impact on cultural change and finally Jackie Huba’s (Ants Eye View) highlighting of why the “one percent-ers” matter. Don’t get me wrong, all of the speakers were fantastic… these just happen to be the handful that really stood out.
LOCATION-BASED SERVICES

One of the biggest takeaways for me at SXSWi is that location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla are here to stay. Those two may or may not be the dominant players in the long run (I like both companies but my money is on Facebook for winning this game in the long run) but they definitely got their day in the sun at SXSWi. Author, Alan Wolk and 140 Conference founder, Jeff Pulver, shared some interesting thoughts here and here on what LBS lack and why they played a bigger role at SXSWi than Twitter.

As someone that’s spent more time than is healthy experimenting with location-based services — I started using Brightkite in early 2008 — I had the opportunity to experience the good, the bad and the ugly of Gowalla and Foursquare during SXSWi. For one, Gowalla and FourSquare helped me find out where the best panels, lunches, dinners and parties were during the conference. In particular, a simple check up on the whereabouts of Mssrs. Chris Heueur, Brett Petersel, David Armano or Robert Scoble more often than not let me know where the action was.

Using FourSquare and Gowalla was also particularly useful in trying to track down friends and colleagues when we got separated (which happened fairly often). Lastly, I was also able to figure out who was in the blogger’s lounge at any given time (to that end, big ups to Porter Novelli, TechSet, Brian Solis, Stephanie Agresta and Windows for making the BL possible). The Bloggers’ Lounge continues to be one of my favorite places to hang out during SXSWi.

On the bad/ugly side of LBS, there are privacy issues that are starting to arise. For one. FourSquare has developed a feature that automatically includes other “friends” that are checked into a common location when a user decides to cross-post on Twitter. Normally, this is no big deal but increasingly is starting to cause confusion or even trouble. As an example, think about this use case… I check into the Iron Cactus for lunch. As the day wears on, I get caught up with work and forget to check into another location. At 3:30, a female friend that I’m connected with on FourSquare checks into the Iron Cactus and says “doing tequila shots.” The problem is, unknowingly the aforementioned female friend’s tweet might look something like this, “@SusieQue is doing tequila shots w/ @aaronstrout at Iron Cactus (225 Fourth Street http://4sq.com/4r8adF).” While I may, or may not care
whether I’m being accused of doing tequila shots, if my boss and/or wife are watching Twitter, they might see this tweet and wonder, “what the hell is Aaron doing with Susie Que at 3:30 in the afternoon when he should be working?

On a side note, one of the bright spots of SXSWi for me was a social network / platform called Plancast. I covered this with my podcast partner, Jennifer Leggio, a few weeks ago on the Quick-n-Dirty podcast show and will be interviewing their CEO, Mark Hendrickson sometime in April. Even if you are not socially inclined, it is a great way to discover events (and keep track of events that you have signed up for). You can also find out more from the interview that my friend, Simon Salt, did with Mark here.

SPEAKING AT SXSWi / GETTING ON A PANEL

As I mentioned earlier, this was my third year attending SXSWi. My first year here, I was just in awe of actually coming and did not submit for any panels. For 2009, I submitted for a panel that made it all the way to the finals before being nixed. And then there was this year. I only submitted one panel and that was on behalf of my colleague, Kathy Warren. It was to include Kodak client, Tom Hoehn, and friends, Shawn Morton of Nationwide and Peter Fasano of Coke. The focus was how businesses were generating ROI using social (I mean, who would want to see that panel, right?) Unfortunately, that panel did not make the cut but my friend, Tim Walker’s panel on using sports metaphors in social did. I was also lucky enough to be asked to join a panel on Digital Identity Theft by my friend Beth Gwazdosky at CSIdentity.

What’s the moral of this story? One, it’s an arbitrary process from what I can tell and two, make friends with people who have a good shot of getting their panels approved. Oh, and keep trying because as frustrating as it is to submit and fail, you don’t have a shot (unless you’ve got the right friends) unless you try. For summaries of the Digital Identity Theft panel I did with Bill Morrow, see my sister’s post (referenced earlier). My friend, Christine Major, did a nice wrap up of the sports metaphor panel that Tim and Kyle Flaherty were kind enough to include me on.

THE REDSOX GNOME

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that couldn’t be more true when it came to this year’s photo meme. For those who are wondering “what’s up with the gnome,” the short version of the story is that my good friend, Jim Storer (the photographer responsible for many of the photos in this post) decided to start a photo meme last year called, Sad, Mad, Glad. This year, our goal was to one-up that meme so we solicited suggestions from Twitter. Former colleague, Susan Koutalakis, teed up the idea of taking pictures with the Red Sox Gnome ala Travelocity. I’ve included a few of my favorites below but be sure to head over to Jim’s Flickr stream to see all the victims participants in the meme.


THE PARTIES

I could wax poetic on this last topic for a while. But I won’t. Mainly because I don’t want to reinforce the perception that SXSWi is all about the parties. Don’t get me wrong, there are A LOT of parties. But for anyone that really “gets it,” you realize that the networking is what’s important and that can happen in a number of different ways including breakfasts, hallway conversations, the Blogger’s Lounge, car rides to the Salt Lick, etc.

With that said, here are my five favorite parties/events from SXSWi in no particular order:

  • Allhat II at Guero’s (thrown by Richard Binhammer and David Armano): Great people, great venue, great music and great food. Have I used the adjective “great” enough yet? (photos)
  • Firefly Fandango at Molotov (thrown by Jason Falls, Tim Hayden, Tom Martin and Chillie Falls): all the right people on a roof deck with enough room to move around. (photos)
  • TechSet at Speakeasy (thrown by Brian Solis and Steph Agresta): this party always tends to be one of the “Bells of the Ball.” Fun accessories like Kyle Flaherty’s boa (pictured at the top of this post) and funky white shades. Got a little crowded mid-way through but fun nonetheless. (photos)
  • Flash Party at Belmont (inspired by Chris Heuer): sometimes the best parties are the ones that happen spontaneously. I think this was the most fun because of who showed up and that it wasn’t on anyone’s calendar. Chris just made it happen. (photos)
  • The Powered Party at Scholz Garten (thrown by my company, Powered — props to Drillteam and Beth Lopez for making this party kick ass): If the venue, people, food, weather etc. made Allhat II great, add actor/comedian, Brian Posehn, to the mix and you had a perfect mix of funny and chemistry. Thank you to everyone that showed up for this party. It meant a lot to me/us. (photos)
  • Honorable mention: The group that Peter Kim and I got together at the Salt Lick. (photos)
  • Also honorable mention: the Chevy party thrown by Christopher Barger at the Salt Lick. And yes, I got my share of BBQ during SXSWi as evidenced by the Porky badge I earned as a result on FourSquare.
So that’s a wrap. Longer than I wanted it to be but missing a bunch of things I wanted to talk about. Isn’t that always the way. An additional shout out to some of my peeps that I hung out with during SXSW including: Joe Jaffe, Doug Wick, Bill Fanning, Sydney Owen, Mason Nelder, Zena Weist, Adam Cohen, Selina McCusker, Zane Aveton, Bill Johnston, Jaime Punishill, Anna O’Brien, Frank Eliason, Deb Micek, Aaron Brazell, D’Ann Faught, Alexa Scordato, Keith Burtis, Rocky Barbanica, Brett Petersel, Reem Abeidoh, Heather Elias, Hadley Stern, Martha Hayward, David Smutek, Liz Phillips, Marlooz Veldhuisen, Jeremy Tanner, Maria Ogneva, Greg Narain, Ginger Wilcox, Derek Overbey, Andy Kaufman, Jeremiah Owyang, David Berkowitz, Maggie Fox, Lionel Menchaca, Greg Matthews, Shawn Morton, Chuck Hemann, Bryan Person and about a thousand other people I’m going to piss off by not mentioning here.
Special thanks to Jim Storer for being my partner in crime and making the conference incrementally more fun with all his awesome photos. And special, special thanks to my loving and supportive wife, Melanie and my three awesome children for letting me be an absentee husband/dad for nearly six days.

7 Reasons You Know You’re Experiencing SXSW Withdrawal

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There’s no doubt that by the end of South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), we are all tired, brain dead and a little overwhelmed… yet we all seem to have a big ole’ permagrin on our face (not to mention hundreds of new Twitter, Plancast and and Gowalla followers). This is partially due to the fact that there is just nothing quite like “South-by” as locals call it. It’s just such a perfect mix of sun, friends and a deeper understanding of what makes “social,” well… “social.”

As a three time veteran, I feel the need to let other South-by attendees that they aren’t the only ones to feel that twinge of remorse as their planes touch down, especially those that have to go back to colder climes. What better way to empathize than to share my seven reasons you know you’re experiencing SXSW withdrawal with my friends.

Drumroll please…

7. You can’t stop using the world “douchebag”… including with your kids, grandmother and your boss.
6. Checking into every room in your house using Gowalla and Foursquare feels perfectly normal.
5. You find yourself daydreaming about BBQ… ALL THE TIME
4. Neighbors look at you funny when you ask them which parties they are going to tonight.
3. None of your co-workers know where or what the “Blogger’s Lounge” is.
2. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll randomly bump into Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuck or Guy Kawasaki  in your local Starbucks.

AND THE NUMBER ONE WAY YOU KNOW YOU’RE GOING THROUGH SXSW WITHDRAWAL…

1. You keep looking at the @RedSoxGnome‘s Twitter stream to see which wild and crazy guy or gal he’ll end up with next!

Great seeing everyone. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to visit more. A more serious wrap up SXSW post will be coming soon!

Photo Credit: my main, techmology man, Jim Storer. (respect, respect)

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 33: Reunited Edition!

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It’s been a few weeks since my podcast partner in crime, Jennifer Leggio, and I have been able to do a Quick-n-Dirty podcast together. For two weeks in a row, travel prevented me from joining her on our weekly show. Fortunately, we had a couple of more than capable substitutes in Brian Solis (author and principal of FutureWorks) and Greg Matthews, director of innovation at Humana. Write ups from the shows with Brian and Greg can be found here and here on Jennifer’s ZDNet blog.

This week, Jennifer and I were back in the saddle again with me broadcasting live from Jackson Hole, WY (yes, I took one for the team). We had an action packed show starting with our featured social network of the week, Hollrr. Neither Jennifer or I had had much of chance to play with Hollrr but saw some decent potential in this site that Mashable likens to “Foursquare for product discovery” (full review here). Both Jennifer and I appreciated Hollrr’s off-the-shelf integration with other social networks like Twitter and Facebook and I personally look forward to getting product recommendations from friends and connections. Oh yeah, they have a pretty cool logo too.

Next up was our featured guest (and former “Twitterer of the week,”) Simon Mainwaring. If you don’t know Simon, you should. Officially, he is a branding consultant, advertising creative director, blogger, author and speaker. A former Nike creative at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, and worldwide creative director for Motorola at Ogilvy, he now consults for brands and creative companies that are re-inventing their industries. During this week’s show, Simon shared some fascinating updates from a recent trip he took to the Middle East as a guest of the Brookings Institute. The focus was on social media and foreign policy, two disciplines that traditionally don’t share the same space. I won’t pretend to do Simon’s interview justice so just this one time, I’m MANDATING that you listen to at least Simon’s portion of the show (starts about 7 mins in and runs for aproximately 25 minutes).

Speaking of “Twitterers of the week,” this week’s choice was principal of The Community Roundtable (and close friend), Jim Storer. As I mentioned during the show, nobody has done a better job at taking community management skills to Twitter than Jim. Regularly mixing helpful tips, humor, love of bacon and Red Sox commentary into his stream, Jim is a “must add” to anyone’s Twitter follow list irrespective of what industry they are in.

Last but not least, our point/counterpoint focused on one of Jennifer’s recent blog posts, Twitter: Becoming Nothing Special. Jennifer’s post theorizes that the recent announcement of Yahoo’s partnership with Twitter pushes them from “new shiny object” into the merely “ordinary” category. While Jennifer didn’t see this as all bad, she wondered aloud if this might hurt Twitter’s future potential. Taking the opposing side of this issue, I argued that this is exactly what Twitter (and social media) need. Making Twitter and other social networks like “electricity” — something we don’t ever even think about in spite of the critical role it plays in our daily lives — is a good thing. To me, this means that it’s so ingrained in our daily lives, personal and professional, that we can’t live without it.

Looking forward to next week’s show, Jennifer and I will switch places and I will be working with friend and founder of Oneforty, Laura Fitton, as my guest host. Jennifer will be attending the RSA Conference and thus will be out of pocket for this week’s Quick-n-Dirty. I’m sure she’ll want to listen to the show (as will you). Fortunately for her, our shows are archived here and on iTunes (search on “quickndirty”).

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