Greetings from #SXSWi 2012!  Once again I’m here in Austin, ear to the ground, livetweeting like a manic d-list celebrity, and keeping tabs on what’s going on in digital across industries.

After spending some time in an insanely long registration line, I got the party started at 2PM with the first panel of the year.   Titled “Brands as Patterns,” I was keenly interested in hearing a discussion on messaging patterns across today’s communications platforms. »

Day 2 was another marathon of sessions- some great, some not so great.  That being said, one can still learn something from a mediocre session- it just happens to be in the form of the discourse that’s happening on the event’s hashtag.

Monitoring a hashtag via a client like tweetdeck is a great way to discuss what’s going on with your fellow event attendees.  With the sheer numbers of tweets going back and forth, it tends to be fast and furious, but one is able to quickly get an idea of what public sentiment is like during the event.  Then again, public sentiment is one of Twitter’s most powerful uses, so it shouldn’t come as much of a suprise.

Social Shopping: The Future of Online Shopping #getcrafty

This session took a turn for the ugly, and I felt bad for the presenter.  She was having A/V issues, did not come off as prepared, and was covering the subject matter in a very, very, introductory fashion.  If the session had been marketed towards less savvy users then it would have been a non-issue, but the ballroom was full of hundreds of influencers and forward thinkers who know what the current state of online shopping are.  We were hungry for discourse related to what the future holds.  After the first 10 minutes, the crowd got restless, the tweets went south, and people left en masse.

It’s too bad, because the subject of social shopping is huge.  While we’re discussing, I might as well share my opinons on it:

Social shopping is already here to an extent, but it has the potential to be much more pervasive, helpful, and easy to use/implement.  Amazon already does a great job of applying your friends’ purchasing activity into its algorithms, and groupon makes participation an itegral part of the sale process. Some sites already let people share their purchases on facebook and twitter.

I believe, however, that the next wave of social shopping is going to invade traditional brick-and-mortar shopping experiences.  The key to it is the adoption of NFC Technology.  NFC tech will make many things possible and easy, including adding a social element to shopping. by swiping their phone to make a purchase, functionalities could be put in place to share these purchases to social networks automatically and easily.

Keynote Speech with SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch #gamelayer

Today’s keynote speech was fantastic.  Seth Priebatsch is the 22 year old ninja behind SCVNGR,  and I think the content of his speech encapsulates what lies in store for our digital futures. It seemed to build on what my good friend Colleen was talking about at her panel the day before.  Gamification.

Seth’s speech was mile-a-minute, full of great assertions, and covered quite a few topics.  If i could distill it down, it would be with the following bullets:

• -Gamification is the wave of the future.
• -Social Media laid the foundation for the gamified world. It takes engagement to the next level by adding problem solving, group coordination, and more significant action in the real world.  Calls to action are more effective when the user is emotionally engaged.
• -The school system needs to be revamped with game mechanic values in mind.  It’s currently a terrible game the is framed within the perfect game ecosystem (challenges, deadlines, conflict, social interaction, adversity).
• -Grades shouldn’t be based on a weighted average, but instead on a level-up experience points structure.  The distribution of performance would  be similar, but student’s wouldn’t be  penalized for having a bad day. Grades represent status while levels represent progression.
• -Citing Yale as an example, cheating could be drastically reduces using a combination of the honor system and having students themselves act as their own watchdogs.  Complicity equals responsibility.
• -Rewards structures in the social world devalue customer loyalty.  One-off benefits result in one-off visits.  Gamified deal structures can encourage repeat visits.
• -Communal gameplay and communal discovery can solve the world’s problems. Local solutions permeate virally in communal gameplay, resulting in quickly solved problems

As I said, he covered a ton of topics, and truly believes in the game layer as a new social structure that enables and progresses us.

Like the social layer, however, it’s sure to have negative effects as well.  Social structures tend to be reflections of the people operating under them.  Seth didn’t touch on it, but I wonder about how the game layer interacts with the significant negative portion of human nature.  If we think of gamification as a societal tool, then we need to acknowledge that how it’s used makes all the difference.  For example, a scalpel could save a man’s life or kill him.

Regardless, Seth describes a world that features a whole new dimension for innovation and commerce. More importantly, it offers chances for us as a people to improve ourselves and the world, and that excites me.

I’m sitting here in a corner of the convention center after having experience my first taste of SXSW.  I have been furiously tweeting ever since i reached the convention center, and it’s abuzz with frenetic, intelligent, geeky energy.

This convention is really a marvel of the business we’re a part of.  All sorts of people are here, representing different businesses, users, startups, and influencers.  They’re all here to share information and learn from each other.  It really is quite a sight to see.

I was able to attend 2 interesting sessions today, each involving colleagues/friends of mine who are each doing big, big things in their digital realms.

Colleen Macklin and #gamegateway

The first session, titled “Child’s Play: Game Design as an Educational Gateway” (hashtagged #gamegateway) featured a panel of 4 game designers/developers/evangelists who had focused work around leveraging the process of game design as an educational tool.  When i first read the description of the session, i incorrectly assumed it would be a panel of people talking about how the dymanics of playing video games actually helps educate people and hone certain integral skills.  This, however, turned out to not be the case.  This panel was on a whole other level.

I’m actually friends with one of them: Colleen Macklin.  As a professor of game design at Parsons (although currently on sabbatical,) she’s a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how people and games interact.  The discussion was extremely illuminating.  Games are at the core of our culture.  Colleen contended that games actually preceded written culture, which would imply that they helped shape our culture as well.

Colleen and the rest of the panelists had each been involved in some capacity with school programs that got kids (of various ages and in various countries) to actually take on the take of ideating, designing, testing, and perfecting their own games.  It was amazing to hear.  I truly believe that people learn at their best when they are engaged with the subject matter.  tying in game design as well as game play allows for just that as well as learning about the iterative process, logic, coding, and working off of the feedback of others.  It was a fantastic session and i was glad to sit in on it.

#NotMyJob: Content Strategy Smackdow with James Mathewson and others

The second session was one I was looking forward to.  Dubbed a “Content Strategy Smackdown,” it sounded as if there was going to be a good old-fashioned Jerry Springer type brawl among content strategists on stage.  While it turned out to be much less violent, it was a great session full of discourse and thoughtful ideas around what content is, who should manage it, how to implement it, and what challenges face today’s content strategists.  A friend of mine also happened to be on this panel: IBM’s ultimate content and search guru, James Mathewson.  If you’re one to read up on either of those concepts, then check out his extremely “relevant” book, “Audience, Relevance, and Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content”. I guess you could say he knows a thing or two about the role of content strategies within large organizations.

It’s no secret that big organizations with big websites face big challenges with it comes to properly implementing content strategies properly.  Poor content management and governance leads to a degradation in search performance, site traffic, online lead conversion, and consequently revenues.  While this connection sounds easy when I type it out in a blog, it’s much harder to convince C-level executives to adopt it across an organization effectively.  It’s easy for it to fall on deaf ears since content strategy seems to be viewed as a passive initiative.  Not the case.

If anything, my only complaint would be that the panel was preaching to the choir.  We all ate up their ideas and opinons because they were right.  The people that need to hear, it, however, are CMO’s who don’t understand the importance of managing their content resources effectively.

As the day has come to an end, its time to switch gears and share a few brews with all of these exciting, smart, and dynamic people.  No wonder they call it Nerd spring break- it’s the best of both worlds.