Today was Day 2 of SXSW Interactive and I watched what happened at three events by following the associated event hashtags. There were tons of events today and I decided to focus on three that I thought were important to share. The events I followed were The Era of Crowdsourcing: Guiding Principles, Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way we Live and Do Business and Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs.
The Era of Crowdsourcing: Guiding Principles (#eraofcrowdsourcing)
Presenters:
I will keep this one short since Scott Belsky and Jeffrey Kalmikoff made it easy to attend this presentation virtually by tweeting a link to the slides.
Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" in June 2006. For those of you not familiar with crowdsourcing, it is the "act of taking a task that is usually designated to be completed by an employee and outsourcing it to the general public in the form of an open call." Jeff is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and started his own blog about the topic called Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. It is the practice of letting customers state their opinion and come up with ideas for your company for free. Brilliant! I have actually used crowdsourcing many times when getting ideas for blog posts. It's a great way to truly connect with your audience and find out what their interests and needs are.
Common misconception - Crowdsourcing equals access to free labor only
Example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia or Behance. They actually used wikipedia in their slideshow to describe certain key terms.
Crowdsourcing Models must have 3 Components:
1. Must foster community by creating an incentive for conversation, learning and a sense of collaboration
2. It must tap collective wisdom - Basic idea that the whole is great than the sum of its parts
3. It must nurture participants - participants should be building relationships, resources can't be wasted and the work benefits reputation
The difference between community and crowds was also addressed to analyze the sustainability of crowdsourcing. The message was that in order for it to work, it needs to come from a community, not a crowd of people.
Crowd - Comprised of people with a common purpose, based around an event and there is interpersonal isolation. "With crowds, sourcing only exists in sprints."
Community - Conditions affect the identity of the participants and cohesiveness comes from various shared conditions and commonalities.
Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way we Live and Do Business (#socialnomics)
Presenter:
In this presentation, Erik Qualman discussed how social media impacts the way we live and do business on a daily basis. Pretty basic information but it's a nice summary of proper social media netiquette.
-We are going from word of mouth to world of mouth
-We don't search for news anymore, the news searches us
-Next generation wants collaboration in all aspects of their lives, in part because of the social media tools they grew up with
-Engage! That is why it is called social media not "sales" media - People need to get to know eachother, develop a relationship and then they can think about doing business with one another
-Social Media escalator is back to the basics: Listen first, interact, react, sell
-Must eliminate product redundacy
-Live your life (online) as if your mother is watching - I thiink this is a great point. Anything you say online can be found so make sure only to publish content that you believe in and are willing to have anyone see it
- Your CEO should be getting a regular social presence report
Inbound Marketing: Get Foudn using Google, Social Media and Blogs:(#inboundmarketing)
Presenters:
Brian Halligan, Co-Founder and CEO of Hubspot - @bhalligan
Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder and CTO of Hubspot - @dharmesh
First off, if you haven't already bought Brian and Dharmesh's book Inbound Marketing: Get Found by Using Google, Social Media and Blogs go buy it now. It has a forward by David Meerman Scott and explains how to strengthen your inbound marketing strategies. I am a big fan of Hubspot.com and their seminars have helped me grow efficiencies and develop great marketing plans for my clients. I also like to watch Hubspot's live webinars hosted by @mvolpe and @karenrubin on #hubspottv on Fridays at 4:00pm EST. I always learn a lot and would highly recommend watching them.
Key Points from the Presentation:
Strategy - Write a blog, not a business plan and when you post ot your blog think about SEO, titles and keywords that will be optimized for your users
Keywords - When dealing with keywords, don't pick a fight with a ninja unless you are a ninja. Settle for second place for starters and work your way up. Use the free site websitegrader.com to see where your strengths and weaknesses lie.
Polarisation works, target them - Do not get discouraged by people who dislike what you are saying. For every person that hates you online with a passion, there are a dozen that love you.
Page titles - Dharmesh said friends don't let friends make their page title "Home." - I couldn't agree more. Page titles should be optimized for target keywords. Don't get lazy with titles and meta descriptions.
They also said that "all of you (audience) has a superpower-find it and exploit it!"
Have a great Saturday and I hope you are enjoying learning more about what's going on at the SXSW Interactive festival.
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