360DigitalInfluence

I’ve got a lot of thoughts about SxSW.  Frankly, I’m not sure how I’ll synthesize them all into a longer-form post with a modicum of value (perhaps I should hire one of the unbelievably talented Ogilvy Notes artists).

Starter for 10, I pulled a slightly incomplete word cloud based on my Twitter output from Friday-Monday (courtesy of Wordle).

What it tells me … I obviously liked it.  Clearly I met a lot of  great, funny people.  Apparently the iPad was on my brain.  Austin made a big impression on me.  I liked a lot of people, places and things.  I responded to @virginiamiracle quite a bit.  My outfit of choice was jeans.  And I crowdsourced a new word for when someone accidentally takes your drink at Starbucks - Starpluck (I am on an Urban Dictionary kick lately).

Again, I’m still trying to sort out what resonated with me.  Broadly speaking, here are the themes that sparked second and third thoughts, and which I hope to explore in the near future:

Video: I sought out and loved a few sessions on video.  How to make it compelling.  How to make it interactive.  How to make it beautiful.  There is some unbelievably creative stuff going on right now on YouTube, and the future promises to blow our minds.  Check out what the Fine Brothers are doing with ‘choose your own adventure’ style videos.  The opportunities seem endless.

Experimentation: Something I heard everywhere - regardless of the topic at hand - was that experimentation wins.  It’s faster.  It’s more agile.  It often leads to bigger breakthroughs.  Idea to execution in the shortest time can be a winning approach.  Duh, Ian.  I know, but hearing it so many times in so few days is very reinforcing.

Humor: Between the Oatmeal and Baratunde I had plenty of laughs.  Humor entertains.  And entertainment can be a form of engagement.  There’s a right and wrong way to be funny in, say, 140 characters.  What intrigues me is the permission (or not) brands have to be funny (or try to be funny) in social media.  Get it right - you’re beloved.  Get it wrong - get the gong.

Relevance: Our own relevance, that is.  Lots of discussions.  How do we stay relevant?  How do we stay passionate?  How do we discover the next great thing?  How do we innovate - for ourselves, our agencies and our clients?  How to we keep learning?  One answer I heard over and over  (and over and over) was delving into side-projects.  Little things with friends or colleagues.  Not necessarily to make a buck, but rather to make something cool and energizing.  The lingering question … how willing are employers to give their people the white space to experiment?  3M and Google have thrived off this model.  Are you willing to follow that path?  Check out Method & Craft for a really inspiring example of passion-turned-side-project.  Wonderful stuff.

Branded Content Creation and Curation: The role of brand as creator and curator of content was a pervasive theme.  Besides one very dogmatic journalist I saw, everyone seemed to agree that brand as content creator is an unstoppable force. Fraught with issues yet to be sorted?  Sure.  But it’s happening and only promises to grow.  The topic of brand as curator wasn’t as widely discussed in the panels I attended, but I’d argue that’s where the debate should be taking place (best-practices, editorial obligations, rights issues, etc.).

That’s all I’ve got for the time being.  By the way, having been on the outside looking in, I know how ‘noisy’ SxSW seems via Twitter.  I can assure you the madness and mayhem of SxSW has been grossly exaggerated.  It’s quite manageable, sane and enjoyable (with a little planning, and plenty of flexibility).

As you’ll likely hear in every wrap-up post, it’s the people that make SxSW amazing.  So many old and new faces.

Dive in next year - I’m happy to hang with you in a quiet bar over a beer and BBQ.

As mentioned in last week’s column, this past weekend hosted the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas.  Over just a few short days, members of the interactive community came together to discuss new technologies and trends, and this year we saw the introduction of health focused sessions in the world of social media.

On the whole, I found the sessions to be filled with great content from people across different areas of the industry who are innovating in their areas across the healthcare spectrum.  While many of the sessions ran concurrently and I couldn’t attend them all, below are a few key takeaways I left with:

• For healthcare, the Internet is about access to information - something that was reinforced to me over and over again is that we turn online for health information. What the information we’re looking for is varies by audience - whether it be new clinical data for physicians, to let a patient know “what can I expect next in my journey”, to find support from others in similar situations, or to find out “what treatments are available for mom who has just been diagnosed with X disease,” it’s about information. Marketers looking to get involved in social need to keep this in mind if they want to provide their audiences with something of substance that they will find of use.

• There is a role for Pharma in social media - in sessions with patient focused groups such as Patients Like Me and Chronic Babe, something that was reassuring to hear was, “yes, there IS a role for Pharma in social media.” While their sites (which are both doing amazing things) are patient focused, both reinforced that they welcome and encourage participation by Pharma, noting thet they and Pharma have the same goals in the end. They also echoed our own belief that for Pharma to get involved in social media, companies need to be transparent in their role and provide opportunities for communities to self regulate.

• Pharma needs to get past the “adverse event” red herring - one of the major hurdles that keeps healthcare companies from entering the social media space is concern over online reporting of adverse events. As we’ve seen over and over again, patients are not turning to social to report AEs, yet it remains one of the top barriers to getting involved. In discussing this point with a member of a marketing team from a top 10 pharmaceutical company that is very active in social media, and has been for years, he told me they have never had a single AE reported in any of their social media channels. Unlike many of their peers, the company has always allowed commenting in their social properties. This drove home to me what I had long seen myself: patients aren’t looking to social media to discuss AEs. And if a patient does need to report an AE, companies already have existing channels by which to report them.

• Everything is going mobile… and health is no exception - from sessions throughout SXSW one message was very clear: everything is going mobile. As smart phones increase penetration in the market (in the US and abroad) consumers and looking for access and user experiences on their mobile devices that are comparable or exceed what they can do from their desktops. In many cases, such as health, we heard examples of how mobile technology is actually advancing the healthcare industry , such as in Africa, where images of blood samples can be captured from cell phone cameras in high resolution and sent instantly to a specialist hundreds of miles away for analysis. For marketers such as myself, it’s important to keep the role of mobile in mind when developing new platforms and campaigns if we want them to last.

Overall there was a lot of great information presented, and like my colleagues, I’m teaming with ideas about how we can use these learnings, and emerging platforms to help communicate with our client’s stakeholders.

I’m curious to hear what others through of the health track this year. What were your impressions?