Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

At long last, all of my SXSW Interactive recaps are up and running. For future reference, here are the links all in one place:

• Ahoy from SXSW Interactive!
• SXSW session recap: Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson.
• SXSW session recap: Jason Fried of 37signals.
• SXSW in the rearview mirror . . .
• SXSW recap: Kathy Sierra.
• SXSW recap: Bill McKibben on climate change and online activism.
• SXSW recap: “Self-replicating Awesomeness.”

While the recapping is done, the process of working through the ideas from SXSW is far from over. Stay tuned . . .

Front to back: Hugh MacLeod, Tara Hunt, Chris Heuer, Deb Schultz.
(Jeremiah Owyang is obscured behind Hunt.)

One of my favorite panels at this year’s SXSW festival was “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing,” which was chaired by my pal David Parmet, who does social-media-savvy p.r. work from the New York City area. (He also took the picture above.)

The panel featured three social-media pros whose work I read regularly — Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, Jeremiah Owyang — as well as two who were new to me — Chris Heuer and Deb Schultz. Whether before or since the panel, I’ve gotten to talk with all of these people at least a little bit; they’re good folks who know what they’re talking about when they talk about social media, social networking, and online community. My notes for this panel are long and a little freeform, which is probably appropriate since the panel itself was free-flowing like a good group conversation.

The first question that Parmet threw out to the panel was this: How do you market into a community without coming across as totally skeevy? Someone made that point that, most of the time when we say “marketing,” we actually mean bad marketing — the kind we don’t like having aimed at us. You don’t mind the good kind of marketing.

It’s Not about the Technology

Deb Schultz made the great point — which I think can’t be stressed enough — that marketing, even in its newer, social-media-enabled forms, is not about tools or technology, but about the way you look at your customers. She said that this regard for customers has to be in your DNA, such that you face the hard work of getting out in the trenches and embracing the feedback your customers give you to drive your marketing, customer service, and product development.

Chris Heuer said that he hates the idea that companies (including, occasionally, his own clients) would say, “Build me a community tomorrow!” He thinks that we need an attitudinal shift, to shift people’s mindset from “Stop trying to sell me!” to “How can you help me buy?” Like Schultz, Heuer also commented on the technology angle: he said that social media isn’t new just because it’s a new tech platform, but because it changes the ways that companies relate to customers, suppliers, employees, and local physical communities.

Turn Your Best Customers into Your Advocates

Jeremiah Owyang chimed in about what he’s found out by interviewing companies, Read more

Environmental journalist Bill McKibben gave a talk at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference about climate change, and about his new online aimed to combat it, 350.org.

The choice of “350″ requires some explaining, which McKibben did in his plainspoken lecture. The number refers to 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, which many climate scientists view as a safe upper limit to stave off climate-driven human disasters. The bad news is that the atmosphere currently has 385 ppm of CO2 in it.

McKibben and his 350.org colleagues want to promote awareness of the number 350 so that citizens around the world will influence their governments to support 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 as an official target in their policies.

In his talk, McKibben explained that, since he first wrote about global warming in The End of Nature 20 years ago, there have been three major periods in terms of our understanding of climate change:

1. In 1988, global warming was “in the nature of a hypothesis” — Read more
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Kathy Sierra has become a perennial hit at South by Southwest Interactive. She’s one of the prime movers behind O’Reilly’s Head First series of software books, and she’s won a large following with her smart application of neuroscience and psychology to the challenges of making software more user-friendly.

Although she suspending blogging at Creating Passionate Users last year, her archives are still available to inspire those looking for better solutions to usability problems. While I don’t write software, I love thinking about how Sierra’s insights apply to broader issues of teaching/training and to much broader issues of general management. Smart companies are increasingly turning to the insights of neuroscience to tease out better ways of doing things.

Some of what Sierra said in this year’s speech was old hat for her long-time followers, but who cares? Her talk was so popular that it filled Ballroom A at the Austin Convention Center, and then filled overflow rooms as well.

I won’t recap the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

• The goal of your products shouldn’t be to have users crowing about your company, or even about your products, but rather crowing about how they — the users — now “kick ass” by using our products. You want them saying “I kick ass!” (This is one of Sierra’s favorite lines, and always draws a laugh.)
• To do this, we need to make software applications that compensate for the missing “human-ness” in human-computer interactions.
• Why do people want to grow and get better? Read more
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. . . but with SXSW-induced thoughts very much in front of me.

Pending the refinement of those thoughts into something more useful, here are a few notes:

• Joshua Porter offers an interesting take on the tenor of this year’s SXSW, and on what it means to embrace social media in business. His basic premise: it all goes back ten years, to The Cluetrain Manifesto.
• Kathy Sierra is a rock star for the SXSW Interactive crowd, and her keynote this year didn’t disappoint her fans. I didn’t think it was quite as good as her talk last year, but that’s comparing it to a very high standard. Rex Hammock has a quick but complete recap of the session; Banky pulled out some key tidbits here. When I talked to Kathy briefly after the session, she hinted that she might make a return to blogging, which will bring great joy to readers of her (so far erstwhile) blog Creating Passionate Users.
• Sunni Brown is the sister of my Hoover’s colleague (and all-around good guy) Rocky Brown. She captured several SXSW sessions in real time with her amazing illustrated notes. Here, for example, is her version of the opening keynote session featuring Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (which I recapped here).
• My friend David Parmet chaired a panel called “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing.” I thought it was excellent, but then again I’m such a fan of the folks who were on the dais — Tara Hunt, Hugh Macleod, et al. — that I’m probably biased on that score. I will definitely be writing more about the ideas in this panel later. Meanwhile, there’s a good overview here, and detailed notes here. I was particularly pleased to get to talk with Deborah Schultz and Chris Heuer after the panel — wasn’t familiar with their work before, glad I am now.

More anon.

(Photo by pittsinger.)

Another good idea for a SXSW session: Get somebody as swift as Jason Fried to share his views on how to do business.

37signals makes online collaboration software such as Basecamp and Highrise. The company punches way above its weight: despite employing about 10 people, it has developed a large and devoted following, both for its sweet-and-simple products and for its blog, Signal vs. Noise.

From listening to Fried, it’s easy to understand where 37signals gets its devotion to simplicity: he talks in clear, declarative sentences that hammer his points home. His presentation was lucid and down-to-earth — just like his products.

The point of this session was to share the business lessons that 37signals has learned since it started up a few years ago. Here were some of the best points that Fried made:

–Entrepreneurs and makers of new products will always face “The great unknown” - the cloud of the unknown that usually scares people away from doing something new. But you don’t need to worry about what you don’t know. Just build something and see what happens.

–Don’t ever worry about what-if questions like “But what happens about when we have 1,000,000 customers?” Fried says: “Who knows, who cares.” The decisions you make now don’t have to last forever. If things need to change, you change.

Read more

Good ploy: get two very smart people on stage, put them in front of a smart audience, and let ‘em run.

Smart person #1 = Henry Jenkins, professor at MIT:

Smart person #2 = Steven Johnson, potentate of Outside.in and author of several books including Everything Bad Is Good for You:

The thrust of their conversation: there’s a ton of learning going on among “these kids today” — but it’s not the same kind of learning (esp. book-learning) that’s happened in the past.

Choice tidbits:

• Jenkins got a laugh with this: “Never underestimate the desire of parents to see their children as dumb.”
• Jenkins says he hears a lot from parents who want reassurance that their kids really aren’t slackers; they want reassurance in the face of fear-based messages from the media.
• Johnson wants people to develop empirical measures for the new skills that kids are compiling — measures that will legitimate their real learning, like IQ tests and the like have done for traditional learning.
• Jenkins sees a big disconnect between the classic model of the autonomous learner & today’s ethos of collective learning.
• Jenkins: People don’t do things without a cause, or do things that are totally devoid of meaning to them. The challenge is to figure out why people engage in the stuff that’s totally devoid of interest to us personally.
• Jenkins: It’s sad that so many obviously intelligent people are forced to look for creativity outlets like fan-fiction as remedies for the lack of creativity they’re able to express in their “pink-collar” jobs. The challenge: how can we harness this intellect and creativity toward more serious things, e.g. political reform?
• Johnson: Today’s young “digital natives” are the least violent, most entrepreneurial, and most political generation since the 1950s. Pretty good, huh?
• The two of them discussed how Barack Obama’s political rhetoric (”Yes we can”) resonates much better with this generation than older politicos’ “I”-based language (”I feel your pain.”) Jenkins says that kids today say “we” much more than “I”.
• Jenkins thinks that Obama is catalyzing a movement of collaboration in the mode that Goldwater catalyzed conservatives in the early 1960s.

(This is the first of three quick-hit posts to catch up on the good sessions I attended yesterday at SXSW.)

After a not-too-horrible wait in line for credentials, I’m up and running inside the Austin Convention Center, looking forward to some light festivities this evening before the panels etc. get started tomorrow.

If you see me around the conference, please stop me to say Hi. If you’d like to meet me at SXSW, drop me an e-mail at twalker AT hoovers DOT com or tweet me at Twalk.

(Photo of an ocean of SXSW swag bags by Richard Moross.)