The nation’s premier convergence of experts in original music, independent films and emerging technologies is the South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conference in Austin, Texas. Stone Ward’s Emily Reeves, Director of Account Management and Research, attended all five days of the interactive portion of the conference.
But actually, the verb “attended” is a misnomer. While there, Emily posted entries on her blog, www.msadverthinker.com, sent hourly tweets on, updated the Stone Ward Facebook page, contributed to Talk Business, an Arkansas online business news venue, provided guest blogs on Innovate Arkansas and granted this live Skype interview for KTHV, the Little Rock CBS affiliate.
No doubt that Emily was in her element in Austin, surrounded by hundreds of other social media experts, including Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter. After five days of social media boot camp, Emily returned to our Little Rock offices weary, but content and armed with even more knowledge to share with clients as she coaches them on how to successfully incorporate social media into their marketing mix.
Here are Emily’s “Top Five” conference insights:
#1 Connection
Until five years ago, 80% of communication was non-verbal. Now most of our communication is done online, without the assistance of non-verbal cues, which, at times, can make communicating effectively more difficult. The next iteration of social media will be about improving human-to-human interfaces rather than human-to-computer interfaces. As a result, video will continue to increase in popularity, especially live, streaming video. By 2013, 97% of Americans will own a mobile phone and 47% of them will have Internet on their phones. With that kind of penetration, video can be delivered anywhere, anytime.
#2 Community
While we have seen online communities developing for years through blogs, Facebook and Twitter, communities will become more niche with opportunities from crowdsourcing and from brands engaging directly with consumers. With crowdsourcing, both the brand and the contributors benefit. The benefit to the “crowd” is the opportunity to engage with a community on a level playing field, where it doesn’t matter what a resume looks like, and the opportunity to contribute to something larger. As more brands are engaging directly with consumers, they are giving like consumers a place to congregate and share. However, the community is not about the brand, it is about the people within in it. The communities will exist without the support of the brand, once they have been introduced by way of the brand. Businesses will need to keep this in mind as they reach out for the wisdom of the crowd, help foster that community and become part of it.
#3 Sharing & Trust
The ability to share of information has become super abundant: information is now being shared freely, so there is no reason to limit access to it. This is both good and bad. The bad is that frequent social media users are being conditioned to share inappropriately as the privacy filter has disintegrated. People understand that making their information available is necessary for social bonding. They recognize that they make themselves vulnerable by putting information online, but need to reveal that vulnerability to ultimately build trust and relationships. However, people are now thinking through when to make something private versus when to make something public; information is public by default and private through effort. As businesses engage with consumers and ask for their participation, care must be taken in asking for and sharing any kind of information, whether that be as simple as asking for a Twitter handle or an email address.
#4 Design
Consumers are busier than ever and doing more with less (money, time, energy), so they need and want information to be easy to consume and pleasant to experience. Enter functional design. From information presented graphically and interactively to digital magazines designed for reading on a tablet computer, functional interactive design will be increasing in importance this year.
#5 Location, Location, Location
Location-based services and associated social media applications are going to explode this year. Location-based applications are services that allow the user to update his or her status (much like Twitter or Facebook), but attach a very specific location to that update, either with a dot on a map, a longitude and latitude reading, or a location defined and named by the users (a restaurant, retail location, ballroom at a convention center, etc.). Popular applications include FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt and Google Latitude. To emphasize the demand and opportunity for location-based services, a startling statistic was revealed at SXSW: approximately 55% of all text/SMS messages sent are some variation of “where are you?”. That equates to almost 650 billion location-based service text messages in 2009. To further demonstrate the potential, it was revealed that of the 200 million mobile subscribers in the United States, 18.5% are smart phones with built-in technology for geo-location. The opportunities these location-based services present to businesses are broad. The future of location-based services includes location aware advertising and location aware marketing/couponing. Businesses will be able to drive traffic when potential consumers are near and encourage loyalty through frequent check-ins.
More about Emily:
Emily Reeves, who describes herself as “crazy curious,” has been with Stone Ward since 2001 and today is responsible for all agency client marketing programs, covering a full gamut of national, regional, and local accounts. Best known to those of us in the business as “Ms. Adverthinker,” Emily’s blog, www.msadverthinker.com, is highly popular. She has emerged as one of Arkansas’s most talented social media experts, having originated and led social media meetings last summer for college students who were thirsty for knowledge. A University of Arkansas graduate, Emily is a native of Shreveport, Louisiana. She’s one cool, beautiful and smart Geek!
Contact Emily any number of ways:
Email: ereeves@stoneward.com
Telephone: 501.375.3003, Cell 501.772.6142
Facebook: www.facebook.com/stonewardagency
Twitter: www.twitter.com/reeves501
Skype: emmers2001
Blog: www.msadverthinker.com