• Emotion plays a big part in the customer experience. We need to take this account, not just the rational parts. 50% of customer decisions are emotional. We need to have emotional attachment in everything we do. Many of these things cannot just be asked to customers.
• Brand consistency and integration across channels is killing digital advertising. We need to release the shackles of “campaigns” and the need for consistent look, feel and messaging across channels. We do it today because it’s easy, but it does not work.

• Saw a great case study on how Harvard Publishing is implementing social and new tools to reinvent publishing on the web.
• Since people tweet in real time about activities from the exciting to the mundane, Twitter provides an incredible amount of data that can be used by marketers. A case study was presented where Twitter data was used to accurately predict movie sales. This could eventually replace the need for focus groups and surveys.

• Anonymity is authenticity as well. By allowing users to be truly anonymous, they do not have to be concerned about their online brand and can be completely authentic and free. 4Chan is a great example. This also allows is to emphasize the content over the creator.
• Content should allow for “creative mutation”. How do we allow users to riff back and forth on content? This also creates shared experiences. Many memes are created this way.

• Crowdsourcing is used extensively nowadays. Mechanical Turk allows you to crowdsource low level tasks. Crowdflower takes projects and parses it out to thousands of people. On the high end, hedge funds are crowdsourcing experts in industries. There are niche crowdsourced solutions such as Galaxy Zoo that classifies galaxies. Liveops is a call center in the cloud that can ramp up thousands of people in hours. Soylent will shrink a Word paragraph in <10 minutes using thousands of people.
• Companies need to be obsessed with saying “Thank You” and need to shock and awe customers in how they do this. Social Media lets you do this on an individual level and still scale. The way you thank should completely surprise users. For example, rather than give a user coupons for more of your stuff, look up their social profile and give them something they love that has nothing to do with what you sell. We are living at the beginning of the humanization of business. Caring is now scalable and you win by outcaring everyone else.

• Long tail content is where all the opportunity is for individuals. Big brands cover the fat part of the distribution. You create nanocelebrity by focuses on a niche.
• Viral videos and content are great but non-sustainable and too much work. You have to have an ongoing relationship with the same customers to create loyalty and a steady stream of users. You have to create content that promotes that loyalty.

• You should monetize a customer the moment you wow them
• The key to virality is making the audience the celebrity as much as possible and promoting their success. This diversifies your creative risk, too.

• Don’t overly focus on strategy and big strategic decks. Focus on making forward momentum daily.
• Adding philanthropy to business is good business and you sell more. People want to buy a story and passion. This also allows you to attract the greatest employees and partners in the world.

• Web 3.0 is all about what we do with the mass amount of data on the web and how we do it with respect to privacy
• I wrote a blog post about using NPS as a measure of social media so I wont repeat here

 

What did you think of SXSWi?