Although I spent 45 minutes in line to register and then went to one session, Try Making Yourself More Interesting [podcast] (sadly missing David Rees), on Friday, I consider Saturday as the real start of SXSW Interactive. My first session of the day was Tips for Making Ideas Happen [podcast] with Scott Belsky of Behance. I knew Behance from their Action Pad, but Scott began his seminar with a review of Behance Network, a gallery site that allows designers to highlight their portfolios and projects. It’s a nice community resource for some inspiration.
Scott’s presentation centered around his company’s interviews with creative people. The research showed that ideas were realized in environments with a good combination of organization, communal forces, and leadership capability. He suggested that we try to generate ideas in moderation because a constant stream of ideas, no matter how good, will mean that no one idea will ever be pursued. He also suggested that you share ideas liberally, even before you think they are “ready.” If you share ideas then the people you share them with will hold you to them. (And you’ll see what sticks.) Finally, make sure you value the team’s immune system — the system (or person) that kills ideas is not worth pursuing. Bad ideas distract you from taking action on the good ideas.
The presentation reminded me to do two things: publicize my productivity and overcome the stigma of self-marketing. Together I think both of these ideas will seriously help in achieving my current work and freelance goals. Self-marketing has always been difficult for me as I’m oddly uncomfortable when someone compliments my work. Actually promoting my work and my killer skill set seems completely foreign to me. I’ve always worked under the assumption that my good work will be rewarded. That hasn’t always been the case so I think I’m ready to see where this new self-promotion path may lead.
Curating the Crowd-Sourced World [podcast] with Jen Beckman of 20×200 as the moderator was one of the sessions I really wanted to attend. Also on the panel were Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City), Nion McEvoy (Chronicle Books), Dustin Hostetler (skinnyCorp/faesthetic), and Gina Trapani (Lifehacker.com). Beckman moderated the panel by asking a series of questions about crowd-sourcing experiences. Although I still have reservations about the value of crowd-sourcing, I came away from the panel thinking that the panelists think crowd-sourcing is an interesting and worthwhile development in the online community. As Beckman mentioned, a lot of people doing a little bit can do more than a single person doing a lot. But while each panelist was allowing crowd-sourced ideas and work to influence their thinking, they all curated the crowd at some point; nothing is purely crowd-sourced. I enjoyed this panel although I would have liked to see more specific examples from 20×200 or threadless. Someone who could have presented an in-depth example of a crowd-sourced project would be the Brooklyn Museum’s Shelly Bernstein. Among other projects, she was responsible for organizing Click!, an entirely crowd-sourced museum exhibition where the audience selected the photographs that appeared in the exhibition through a social media voting system.
Afterward, I realized I should have asked about Internet surf clubs like Club Internet, Spirit Surfers, and ffffound. [I'm missing the best known example. I'll add it if I can remember the name.] I’m not sure if these groups are specifically “crowd-sourcing” but I think they are far more relevant to this discussion than all the “questions” that were “asked” by idiots hyping their own projects during the Q&A session.
Paddy mentioned a new project which she recently launched, a crowd-sourced map-off between James Turrell and Alice Aycock to see which artist has the largest number of public sculptures captured on Google Maps. People who have seen art by either of these artists will nominate the work for inclusion in to the map and after a set time period, the artist with more work on the map will be declared the winner. This project is a perfect example of the “a lot of people doing a little bit can do more than a single person doing a lot” philosophy that Jen Beckman mentioned. The project is now complete (James Turrell won) and Paddy has a summation of her experience with the project.
After lunch and missing Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com on purpose (although everyone raved about his presentation), I headed back into the fray for From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small [podcast] with Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog Studios), Roger Black (Roger Black Studio), Kristina Halvorson (Brain Traffic), and Whitney Hess. I only stuck around for about 30 minutes, because I wanted to get in on the action at the BikeHugger BBQ, but I was very encouraged by what I heard. I like the panels that remind you that you’re heading in the right direction and to just keep working hard.
I wasn’t planning on taking notes but I whipped out the notebook because all the panelists were on topic and full of words of wisdom:
- People who don’t pay are normally not good clients. (Advice against taking on free clients.)
- If you have the confidence to do really good work it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy in a good way.
- Start small.
- Talk to people. Listen to people.
- Twitter/Write/Blog.
- Talk about your process. If you have a process then your potential clients will have more confidence that you know what you are talking about.
- Don’t reflect what you think they want you to think.
- Set your rates at what you’re worth.
I returned from the BikeHugger bash to catch another panel I had high on my list, Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam [podcast]. In retrospect I should have been much more wary of this panel as last year many of these same panelists appeared on a panel titled Pimp your Non-Profit Web Site dressed as pimps. This year’s panel forced the panelists into presenting their programs and ideas in verse with three other panelists “judging” their presentations and programs. To write that it was a horrible idea would be nice. I want to blame Beth Kanter as she was involved in both of these panels but she also has a big, big following in the online non-profit world so she must be doing something right. The entire session was hard to follow and I couldn’t capture any new ideas from the panelists which was very frustrating. I kept hearing how social media was good for community-building and communication but not actually raising money. Also, most of the judges’ comments were directed at how the organizations needed to track success better even though the title of the panel suggested we’d be learning about how these organizations did track their ROI for these projects. I don’t mean to suggest that the panelists don’t have their hearts in the right place. I can remember how stressful and frequently unrewarding non-profit work is and it’s always good to have some fun but the “main” non-profit panels of the past two years have been amateur hours. Hopefully next year if this group of non-profit professionals presents a panel again, they’ll take their session seriously and focus their time on preparing their remarks in a more professional manner instead of trying to format Dr. Suess style rhymes. The gimmicks are distracting and misrepresent their and their community’s hard work in the non-profit world.
For this panel, the best comment award goes to David Neff of the American Cancer Society who stated that “hopefully contact through social media is the first step in building a real-life relationship.” And the best site award goes the the American Red Cross Disaster Online Newsroom, a blog that combines official news from the Red Cross with Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and podcasts from the community and volunteers in the field during disasters. In providing first-person reporting from the scene of a disaster, the Red Cross provides an invaluable resource in helping people connect with each other and with any assistance they may need. The Newsroom doesn’t try to force some new dynamic out of these products and instead uses social media services as tools for connecting people in times when connections are vital.
