The Toolbox Studios delegation hit the recent 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival
(sxswi) with several ambitious goals—to engage with other thought
leaders in the interactive design space, to share best practices, to
create new youth media collaborations and to validate a few
technological hunches based on evidence we've been researching.
We fanned out, employing the divide and conquer technique, given the breadth and depth of this year's offerings. We
made ample use of Twitter to liveblog our findings, comment on
sessions, and have a little fun as well.
Initial reports suggested a 38% increase in attendance at this
year's conference—many sessions were filled beyond capacity and the
creative energy was palpable.
Toolbox creative director / youth
media account director Paul Soupiset has been distilling his notes from
the five-day event and has shared the following six takeaways for youth media publishers, designers, game developers and marketers:
6. Teens [still] don't Tweet.
While Twitter was hands down "the" tool at this year's SXSW Interactive
(and one we recommend be part of any company's corporate communication
plan... see more at #5), the 140-character micro-blog trend isn't being
as eagerly adopted by teens. Anastasia Goodstein's YPulse teen panel
again validated this hunch: You're just not going to reach a majority
of 14-to-18 year olds with the über backchannel. Better to occupy the
mobile space and MySpace. Facebook is there as well, but the "I wanna customize my
space" fave MySpace is still top dog among this cohort. Should be interesting to see how this trend develops as Facebook and Twitter
continue to dominate and grow the microblogging/lifestreaming space.
5."Not making plans is so totally Web 3.0." — this line from Caroline McCarthy,
a CNET News staff writer, framed a second, related truism—Twitter was
clearly still the rockstar and darling of sxswi. As McCarthy pointed
out, when lines to get into parties at the Austin confab got too long,
flash-mob intelligence via Twitter created new meetups, new parties, on
the fly.
With a multitude of third-party tools and add-ons, Twitter
offers increased freedom and mobility to stay on top of news and events
in whatever niche you're interested in following.
And to those
following the youth crowd, just because they aren't all on Twitter (yet), that doesn't
mean their socializing isn't happening on the net—teens are
embracing MySpace and Facebook, but moreover, they're embracing the relationships emerging from those connections. As Harvard
fellow and youth media scholar Dana Boyd points out, "We have this
belief that kids are just addicted to social network sites. If
anything, they’re addicted to their friends. This “addiction” to
friends is precisely what makes social networks so important,
especially for tweens, who are more limited in their socializing
options (until they can drive). There’s school, extracurriculars and
the movie theater on the weekends, but with social networking they can
be sure not to miss a single OMG moment.”
4. Get out of the way and let your audience explore. Interestingly,
this reminder came out of an interactive game development session, although it
was emphasized in later Web 2.0 panels as well. As one gaming expert
stated, "the complexity of our gaming interfaces should level up with
our users as they proceed [with gameplay]." The key idea here seems
completely intuitive, but it found new currency with me at the Playing On! Interface Lessons from Games
session: when we design games, instead of front loading the game with
tutorials or a discursive set of rules, we should allow the player to
start gameplay and learn progressively.
In the 2.0 panels, this
prioritization of the audience surfaced more in the context of public
relations and customer management. With social media, we all know you can't exert
control over everything online as you once could. You can't play by the
same rules, either. You have to learn to listen to the conversation,
insert yourself/your company genuinely, and be okay that you can't
predict or dictate the outcome. You can only monitor and react to it.
3. Design is still king. Evidenced everywhere I
turned. Good design creates context. Good branding creates curiosity,
loyalty, buzz and desirability. Too many examples to name. Okay, maybe
one: Alex Bogusky's B-cycle (bicycle sharing) initiative.
2. It's all about R&R. Not rest and relaxation, but rewards and reputation. A fascinating seminar borrowed from the language of game playing mechanics and found parallels to be brought to bear in all of our social media apps. Rewards will need to move beyond simple point-tallying and actually show bling
for levels attained (exemplary games display which level a user has
achieved, which in turn earns him/her instant street-cred). The best of these apps
incorporate some kind of collecting mechanism as well—a
metaphoric trophy case—to show off those accumulated points. Whether
it's medals on an army officer's uniform, merit badges on a girl
scout's sash, or a collection of karate level belts, humans collect visual
indicators of our advancement. Finding creative ways to do this on the application level rewards your avids, and offers a clear path for noobs who want to
engage with your brand.
1. A Social Vote for Change Probably the most
memorable session I went to was a lunch at Stubb's BBQ, where the topic
was "Social Media for Social Change" — a lot was said about the
distinction between using social media for charity and using the same
tools to effectuate actual social, systemic, societal, or institutional
change. 700 people RSVPd for this lunch. I was lucky to arrive early,
which means I got in the door, actually ate a great brisket lunch
(ironically/awkwardly eating my BBQ sitting next to two new friends who
work at PETA2), and settled in for the conversation. The panelists
included pioneer Beth Kanter, David Armano, Scott Goodstein, Stacey Monk, James Young and Randi Zuckerberg. For an engaging overview of the conversation, read Kanter's brilliant summary blogpost here.
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