Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

Yes, Facebook has an Analog Lab. Slide from Ryan Bigge’s SXSWi 2013 presentation.

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to “let it cook” as Liz Strauss would say, here are a few thoughts from the 2013 SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive tech conference in Austin.

Yes, I could have posted this more quickly, but part of the reason I didn’t is tied to an overall vibe at this year’s “geek Spring Break” nerdfest;  that it is time for humans to control technology, not let it control us.

Did I want to think for awhile, or did I want to rush to post because that’s what everyone else insists I must do for maximum page views and the chance to “go viral?”

Phooey, I say. Phooey is my new favorite technical term.

This 30,000+ person conference is my professional Super Bowl and I never miss it. 2013 was my sixth SXSWi and the third time that I was honored to host the conference’s Travel Meet Up. As an Advisory Board member I review and evaluate hundreds of panel proposals, plus attend some SXSWi social events throughout the year (not that this helps to get my own proposals selected – I’ve only spoken at South By one time, although I keep pitching.)

This year’s event experience was similar to my first one in 2007; lots of panels, almost all of the keynotes, very few parties, occasional spontaneous meetups and a good bit of trade show floor wandering.

The Latest and Greatest is …. Paper

The “next big thing” related to tech and social media is what I’ve hollered about for awhile; quit chasing your tail plus Facebook’s latest rule change and Google’s latest algorithm, and spend more time thinking about how these tools integrate with your overall communications strategy.

Tech-based platforms are a key part of your destination marketing toolkit, but do not think of them in isolation, or as a bolt-on to your offline marketing efforts.

This year I had a harder time than ever suppressing an eye-roll when anyone tried to show me a new app that is all about “sharing travel experiences with friends.” Geez, I already have that covered, thanks.  No one needs one more network to maintain; we need integration and synthesis.

Humans Re-learn to Appreciate Analog

Hey, you know what?

Digital isn’t the answer to everything.

Digital tools aren’t always the best tools.

Digital stuff is merely a part of all other stuff going on around the planet.

Well, DUH.

Except that it’s not so “duh.” Plenty of people get so wrapped around trying to jump onto the next thing that they forget the basics: it’s not about the tools, it’s about what you can DO with digital tools, or any tools, to further your personal or organizational goals.

Travel and tourism are a great fit for social media and mobile communications (especially social photography like Instagram) but what about hard-copy preservation of travel experiences? What about “collaging the physical and digital worlds,” as Ryan Bigge discussed in one of my favorite SXSWi sessions, “Creating Great Analog Souvenirs For a Digital Era.”

Ryan talked about the growing popularity of saving bits of our digital world as analog items.

There are several examples of tools that straddle the digital and analog air gap, like Polaroid camera printouts of your computer screenshots, and his own company’s creations “Txt2Hold” and “Tweet2Hold” which preserve either a text or tweet in a PDF that includes different colors based on the text/tweet sentiment (using Lymbix software) and is printed with directions for origami folding.

Txt2Hold origami at SXSWi 2013

“Paper holds a memory.” John Guppy, Toronto Origami Society

I was intrigued by the possibilities for tourism organizations to provide ways for visitors to capture those moments that you want to save someplace besides “the cloud” or the phone that gets dropped, lost or broken.  Why not paper? As I often joke, it always boots up.

Could your CVB or DMO use something like Txt2Hold or Tweet2Hold to help visitors turn their digital memories into physical ones?

There are three other services I can think of that also could do this, and they’re all tied to photography:

**  Postagram lets you mail a physical postcard with a photo from your phone, Facebook, etc.,

**  Cocoagraph makes chocolate gifts out of photos, and

**  Casetagram makes custom cases for iPhone, iPad and some Galaxy devices out of Instagram photos.

To flip that, Ryan also mentioned physical/analog objects that connect to the digital world, and not by using QR codes, either. How about the Evernote smart notebooks by Moleskine?

He noted that there were at least six other speakers and panels at SXSWi 2013 talking about “physidigi” topics as a trend, including Embracing Analog: Why Physical is Hot.

“….people tend to utilize digital tech for its ease, speed, convenience and cost. But the more we embrace the format, the more we miss the emotional qualities it has a hard time replicating.” From the follow-up blog post from Why Physical is Hot.

I’m so glad that I made it to this session; it made me want to spend more time thinking about integration and ways to combine online and offline experiences in tourism and travel.

Ryan’s slides are below; just below it is a direct link to the deck on SlideShare if you can’t see the embed box.

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SXSWi 2013 badge and guide

One of the 5000+ events at the SXSWi (South by Southwest Interactive) tech conference in Austin, Texas is a series of Meet Ups so that people with similar interests have a chance to find one another in the 20,000+ person mob that is “South by.”

Today is the Travel Bloggers Meet Up, but it’s really for anyone interested in travel, so there will be an interesting gaggle of people showing up….last year the guy who writes the TSA Blog was there, along with the founder of Matador Travel Network and the lovely people from Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama (where I ended up going a few months later to teach a social media workshop, yet one more example of the business opportunities at SXSWi.)

I’m the Meet Up’s “official host” for the third year, but my job is to welcome everyone, then sit down, shut up and let them mingle.

It’s an honor and a thrill to get one whole hour with a bunch of other travel fanatics.

People will ask me my best advice for SXSWi, and I’ll tell them these things:

**  The keynotes are usually pretty enlightening, so try to make it to them. They’re livestreamed as well.

**  Pick one panel to attend that looks intimidating….you have no idea what they’re talking about and are convinced it will be “over your head.”  That’s how you learn!

**  Go through the schedule, tick everything that sounds good (yes, you’ll have 14 choices all for one 3:30 p.m. time slot) then about 30 minutes before a session, do a ruthless triage deciding which to attend, based on your location and mental state.

**  Follow the #SXSWi hashtag on Twitter.

**  Be prepared for complete mental overload by Sunday afternoon of the conference. Then realize that there are two more full days to go. Also, your feet will hurt.

**  A huge pile of irrelevant business cards will never beat collecting one or two really great contacts each day of the event, then following up later with each of them.

**  Eat BBQ, Tex-Mex and breakfast tacos till they come out of your ears. Check out this year’s new SouthBites food trailer gathering near the Convention Center. Have a drink in the bar at the iconic Driskill Hotel and toast the digital creative madness that is Austin in March.

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If you have great ideas, stories or case studies to share, there are two speaking proposal deadlines coming up this week….

**  SXSWi (South by Southwest Interactive) digital/tech creatives conference in Austin, Texas in March 2013. It’s only the biggest technology-related annual conference on the planet….20,000 of the most interesting geeks you’ll ever meet.

The unique PanelPicker process peer voting means that you need a really punchy title and great description for your presentation, in addition to – DUH! – knowing what the heck you’re talking about.

Proposal deadline: Friday, July 20, 2012.

**  140 Characters Conference/State of NOW Small Town in Hutchinson, Kansas on November 8, 2012. This event is a series of short presentations (no slides – yay!) on how the social web intersects with small towns and rural areas.

Proposal deadline: Friday, July 20, 2012.

Will I see you there?

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After a thoroughly enjoyable day speaking and participating in Dell’s pre-SXSW Unconference for Small Business, I was asked at the after party why we at Tourism Currents feel so strongly that technology and social media can be helpful for tourism and hospitality.

Here’s my answer (despite bronchitis!) in less than 2 minutes:

(Direct link to the video on Dell’s Vimeo channel if you can’t see the embed box below)

Thanks, Dell, for bringing us into your “house” to talk business and make new friends.

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The topics are all over the map at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin every year, but even in the 20,000 person geek madness, it’s still possible to find one’s “tribe.”

If you are a travel blogger, travel writer, travel or tourism industry person or just thinking about becoming one of these, please join us for this year’s SXSWi Travel Blogger/Writer Meet Up, on Saturday, March 10, 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Central at the InterContinental Stephen F. Austin Hotel on Congress Avenue downtown.

I’m listed as the Presenter, but I assure you, my main function is to say, “Hello,” and “Welcome” and then shut up so that people can mix and mingle.

Would love to see you there …. and bring your business cards!

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On the first day of the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference in Austin, I was part of a video interview project led by Nancy Spears and the genConnect team out of Colorado.

Here are their thoughts on 10 people at SXSW you should include in your social network, which includes a sidebar viewer with all of the videos. I’m rather honored to see that my interview ended up between Rick Murray’s (head of Edelman Chicago) and Jay Rosen’s (renowned journalism professor at NYU.)

In my roughly 3 minute interview (complete with an offstage shout-out by passing Hawaii social media goddess Neenz Faleafine) I described what Becky McCray and I do with social media education at Tourism Currents, how destination marketing today demands more personal interaction with visitors (including online) and how strongly we believe that most tourism pros can already do the really important stuff, which is a lot harder to teach than technology:  creating a compelling portrait of their destination in the eyes of visitors.

The vision and story….you already have it and that’s the hard part, not Facebook, Twitter, blogs et al.

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Most of you know that I’m really big on getting “the ungeeked” to go to one or two tech-related conferences or events per year.

There is no more effective way to figure out how people are using technology and mobile devices right now to communicate; it’s the best market research you can do and it will put you way ahead of competitors who are still scratching their heads over Twitter (which really burst on the scene at SXSWi 2007, the South by Southwest Interactive tech conference, one of the world’s largest.)

I recently wrote a guest post about this on the BlogWorld and New Media Expo blog – Go Where the Geeks Are: Why Tech Events Matter for Tourism and Travel - in support of the all-day tourism workshop that we’re doing at BlogWorld on October 14.

Meantime, the Panel Picker is now open for SXSWi 2011 in March – one of the unique things about “South by” is that part of the panel selection process is pubic voting and commenting on the proposed panels. You can give your feedback whether you’re attending SXSWi or not; there is a quick and painless registration process to do so.

I’ve proposed a panel with myself and two other speakers – my Tourism Currents business partner Becky McCray and travel/tourism entrepreneur Andy Hayes.

It’s titled Tourism Catches On: Old Industry Meets New Media.

Issues we plan to talk about include:

1. How does story and relationship work with new marketing online?
2. Can destinations work with online review sites or is it all out of their control?
3. What roadblocks hold tourism organizations back and how can they be overcome?
4. How can small staff groups possibly implement all these new tools when all this old work still has to get done?
5. What’s coming next in tourism and destination marketing?

If you have a moment, I’d really appreciate your votes, comments and feedback on our Tourism Catches On panel proposal.

Technology is for everyone – we want more mainstream industries and interest at SXSWi and we hope you do, too.

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There is a fascinating discussion going on right now regarding roles, authenticity and marketing on the social Web.

It’s being shouted and whispered, and no matter what anyone says (including big mouth me) no one has the “correct” answer yet, if indeed there is a “correct” answer to be had.

Warning – in this post I’m going to use the term “blogger” to mean, “A person who creates original, unique content on the social Web.”   I am well aware that not every digitally-savvy person has an active, vibrant blog (maybe they only rock Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or some other platform) but the term “blogger” seems to have become accepted terminology for someone who knows how to communicate on the Web and builds/sustains some sort of community there.

Okay, here’s the question

At what point does an independent blogger who interacts with brands lose some element of his or her “authenticity?”

To be blunt, at what point is a blogger simply another node helping a company do marketing and outreach?

Again, I do not yet fully know the answer to this question for myself, much less for the rest of the planet (so put down those pitchforks, brothers and sisters.)  What I do know after finishing up this year’s South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference is that businesses and brands want what bloggers already have, and they want it badly.

They want blogger authenticity; what pioneering political woman Shirley Chisholm called being “Unbought and Unbossed.”

Why?

Because business-as-usual advertising and marketing is seen as inauthentic (or at least, all about rah-rah good news and therefore not the whole truth) so people are turning to the “digital back fence” – word of mouth from their friends online, because it is seen as unbought, unbossed and authentic.  In other words:  the truth.

There’s a PR/marketing term for getting talked about in a positive sense without having to pay for it:  earned media.  It means that your product or service is so good that it earns your business free publicity. People will talk about it of their own volition, which is seen as more authentic than paying them to say good things, i.e. paid media or advertising.

What is the best way to, well, earn this “earned media?”  One of the current answers seems to be to connect with digital influencers and bloggers at events like SXSWi.

From Jay Baer’s excellent post 13 observations from South by Southwest (SXSW) we have this snippet:

“There was also a lot of talk (especially among the big brands) on operationalizing social media, and creating true best practices for how to thrive in a real-time world where every customer is a reporter.”

Um, “operationalize?”

Yes, that basically means to take social media seriously and use it to drive sales and increase business, while measuring your Return on Investment (ROI) from those efforts.

Congrats, blogger, you are now part of a marketing plan; a node to drive sales and increase business for a brand.

Nerds As Nodes

I’m not saying whether this state of affairs is good or bad, only that it is what it is, and we’d better continue to acknowledge and talk about it.

There has been a power shift.

Brands have money, but bloggers hold most of the marbles.  Yes, you, blogger – the one trying to figure out how to pay your electricity bill – you hold most of the marbles in the new balance of power.

Brands want access to what you’ve worked so hard to build at 3 a.m. in your T-shirt and sweatpants:  authentic influence and community.

The question is, how many marbles do you trade with brands in order to pay the bills?  Is there a way to make money legitimately without you or your community feeling that they’ve bought your voice?

You’d better be thinking about these issues.  When you’re comfortable with the answers, go for it, but please do take the time to think, and I mean till your head hurts.

Or, don’t think about it. Fine. Take any and all goods/offers and run all the way to the bank, but don’t be surprised if you wake up one day with a pile of freebies and toys and a reputation (that you can’t shed) as a shill.

Respect what you’ve built online and always, always guard it fiercely.

Ask the brand and ask yourself the uncomfortable questions before unwittingly finding yourself in the Fire Swamp battling Rodents of Unusual Size.

Brands Are Not the Booger Man

Brands and businesses, please know that I understand your position, too.

You have products and services that you’re proud of and you want your business to grow, because it’s a good business, right?

I’m in the same position;  as a trainer and consultant myself, I have no problem telling our Tourism Currents clients that outreach to bloggers can be an integral part of their destination marketing – we call it “finding your online champions.”  I myself have been the target of such outreach efforts by tourism organizations, and they resulted in a few blogger press trips where I did a lot of thinking about my own comfort level as a “node.”   :)

Here’s my takeaway for brands….if a blogger is excessively accommodating, you’ve just been had.

Guard your brand’s reputation fiercely, too, because you’ve worked hard and you don’t need to toss it all away on “buzz” and “viral” crapola from a greedy digital snakeoil salesperson.  They can take their marbles and go home, in that situation.

I do not know all the answers, but I know enough to ask questions. Thanks for listening, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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One of the world’s biggest and best tech conferences is South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) held every March in Austin, Texas.

I recommend it for anyone who wants to be immersed in the future of communications as it is happening right now.

Remember….Twitter was first truly introduced (hyped?) at SXSWi. Cutting edge shows up there first.

I spoke with fellow writer Pam Mandel at SXSWi 2009 about travel blogging; our panel was livestreamed on Qik by Todd Lucier and got some favorable coverage from UpTake, the Austin American-Statesman, attendees in the room and those watching the hashtag on Twitter.

This year, I proposed two different panels to be considered for inclusion in the conference schedule.

At SXSWi, response from the community-based Panel Picker voting public “….accounts for about 30% of the decision-making process for 2010 SXSW panel programming,” according to the SXSWi Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs.)

So, if you’re interested in my ideas, particularly if you might attend SXSWi, please register for free on the Panel Picker site and take a look at these possible panels (and any others that interest you….)

• Can They Buy Your Voice?  Blog Disclosure Ethics:  We’ll talk about “best practices” for disclosing sponsor help in a blog post and how companies can reach out to bloggers ethically with products and service demos, among other knotty questions. Will include a discussion of press trips.
• Drawing the Line Between Free and Paid: Are there some “rules of thumb” to know when it’s smart business to let one’s brain be picked for free, and when it’s smart to announce rate sheet fees? How can you turn the conversation from a free discussion to a paid consultation without being “that guy?”  Content DOES have value.

Thanks for your support, and hope to see you in Austin in March 2010.

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