Ben Lavender’s Blog

I was blown away by SXSW 2008, the conference was incredibly useful, I met some great people and I loved Austin. I’ve written up extensive notes on all the sessions I went to. At the moment my rather basic WordPress template makes navigating it quite difficult, so here’s an index page. I’ve ordered myself WordPress for Dummies, so will be upgrading my blog when I have moment.

Respect! - How to work with clients, editorial teams and users to get the best work produced?

Design is in the details - some basic principles for interaction design

Opening Remarks from Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson- a discussion around the nature of knowlege and learning through social networking

Over 50 and not dead yet - how best to reach older audiences.

Mark Zuckerberg Train-Wreck - Sarah Lacey’s controversial interview

Analytics kills design? -  a debate on the question of whether analytics kills or cultivates great design

Social Design Strategies - Creating experiences that encourage social behavior and public expression in social networking sites.

Jared Spool - Magic and Mental Models - The importance of illusion in user experience design

Kathy Sierra - 20 ways to woo web users.

The Importance of Branding - How brand values are vital to your website.

Master of 500 Sites - Doug McClure’s 5-step model to make better decisions for your start-up in product and marketing.

Community & Loyalty: Gamers to Flamers - Fostering community in social networking sites

True Stories from Social Media Sites - Stories from SlideShare, Style Diary, The Budget Fashionista, Pistachio, Boxes and Arrows, OpMom & Electric Pulp

Casual MMOs - Why massively multiplayer online gaming

Portable Social Networks - How social networking sites can inter-operate

Corporate Blogging - Dell, LinkedIn and My PR Pro discuss the benefits and pitfulls of corporate Blogging

Jane McGonagal - on alternate Reality Gaming

Jane McGonogal gave a memorable keynote but more positive reasons than the Zuckerberg/Lacey debacle. She is an alternate reality games (ARG) designer, professor at the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto; an űber-geek with infectious sense of fun and an engaging speaker. She produced A World without Oil, which won this year’s SXSW award for Activism. Her latest creation is The Lost Ring, an ARG for the Beijing Olympics. In sixty minutes she offered a game designers perspective on the future of happiness.

She has a positive view on gaming, quoting GS Elrick (1978), asserting that: “an alternate reality is another way of experiencing existence” not an alternative to life.

Positive Psychology is now big business (link to news.bbc.co.uk). There’s numerous books on the subject:

• Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.
• Authentic Happiness by Martin E.P. Seligman.
• Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard
• Positive Psychology by Alan Carr
• Positive Psychology in a Nutshell by Ilona Boniwell

Out of it psychologists have created ways of measuring happiness, such as:

• The quality of life index
• The happy planet index

A future forecast for 2013:

• Quality of life becomes the primary metric for measuring success.
• Communities form different visions of life worth living.
• Value will be defined as a measurable increase, in real happiness.
• Happiness is the new capital.

What do we mean by happiness?

• Having satisfying work to do
• The experience of being good at something
• Time spent doing something you like
• Being part of something bigger

Jane proffers that massively multiplayer online games are part of the happiness engine as they have:

• Better instructions
• Better feedback
• Better community

We are witnessing a global mass exodus towards virtual worlds and game worlds. For many gamers it boils down to quality of life: virtuality is beating reality.

MMOs circa 2008 are like we’ve invented the written world but decided to produce only books. Her vision is to make the natural world more like the virtual world. Some MMOs already do offer that:

• ChoreWars - parents motivate the children to accomplish real-world tasks which give them points in the virtual world.
• Zyked - has a similar idea around motivating its users to exercise.
• Seriosity - Has virtual currency to increase productivity in the office.
• Citizen Logistics – People can see where you are, treating everyday reality like a game.
• Trackstick – a personal GPS stick which records where you are in the world
• SNIF – social network for dogs. Dogs are fitted with a GPS collar which records their location.

Games kill boredom, alienation, anxiety, depression.

Important factors in ARG/MMO game design are:

1. Mobbability – the ability to collaborate at really large scales.
2. Ping Quotient – the level of engagement
3. Influency – the ability to adapt to different individuals
4. Multi-capitalism – everyone wants a different return. Some want money, other want social capital.
5. Cooperation Radar - the ability to sense almost intitively would make the best collobarators on a particular task. 
6. Protovation – rabid motivation. Fail quickly and fail often to learn.
7. Open authorship – comfort with giving content away.
8. Signal-noise management – gamers handle so much noise deciding which out of the many available data-points they decide to act on.
9. Long broading - think big picture
10. Emergensight - ability to prepare for and handle suprising results and complexity

Important stuff

1. Soon enough most of us will be in the happiness business.
2. Games designers have a good head start
3. Alternate realities signal the desire need & opportunity for us all to redesign reality for real quality of life.

A earlier version of the presentation is available on SlideShare.

During her presentation she mentioned she’d learnt the Soulja Boy dance, the audience shouted “Do it! Do it!”. “Ok” she said, “If you wait until the end, I will.”. She didn’t let us down. She popped and jived in time to Souja Boy to rapturous applause. If you want to learn the Soulja Boy dance yourself, check the instructional video below:

At LOVEFiLM we’re planning to launch a corporate blog soon so I found The Future of Corporate Blogs invaluable. The panel consisted of:

• Mack Collier - blogger of The Viral Garden
• Mario Sundar - Community Evangelist at LinkedIn
• Lionel Menchaca - Chief Blogger at Dell
• Kami Huyse - Principal of My PR Pro 

How to monitor the blogosphere?
Look in Technorati or Google Blog Search.

How do you measure success?

• Tonality of feedback - positive of negative?
• Engagement
• Analytics
• Subscriptions to blog
• Ratio of negative comments to total
• Sales
• Conversation
• Audience surveys
• Online focus groups

The panel believe logs are now a corporate necessity.

Dell
18 months ago 48% of the comments about Dell in the Blogosphere were negative. This led to a broader social media plan. They wanted identify the key issues, have a two way dialogue, with open conversations. The core strategy was simple:

1. Listening
2. Analysing
3. Taking Action

With the full support of Michael Dell they launched the blog Direct2Dell. They use Idea Storm, a combination of a message board and Digg.com, where the community votes issues up and down; so far they’ve had 600,000 comments. There’s real power in it, a single individual can influence a multi-billion dollar corporation. It’s now been running 18 months and negative comments have gone down to 20%.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn decided to start a blog with the aim of maximising use of the service. Up until then they’d been using LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo Groups. Their goals for the blog were:

1. Educating users – they created product demos and linked to them from blog posts.
2. Improving customer support – their customer service team had risen from 50
3. Leading a conversation rather than let community gossip drive it.

It’s now been running for almost a year and working well.

My PR Pro
Their goals were:

1. Decelerating the time between problem and solution
2. Engaging with their community

They were working with a well known Marine Park. The park decided to ban juice cartons with straws as they were worried about the straws hurting dolphins. Diabetes sufferers complained as they needed to have a quick sugar rush juice was best. A dialogue was facilitated through a blog, flip-top juice cartons were offered at the entrance to the park the next day.

Using blogs for SEO
If you only use blogs for self serving purposes you will fail. Focus on customers. SEO is good by-product but the wrong reason for starting a blog.

Summary
Social media accelerates the time it takes to respond to customer issues. There’s no buffer between you and the customer. When relationships are established, it really improves customer retention. By comparison phone and email are more expensive and less effective for communicating to large customer groups with the same issues. Make sure you plan your corporate blog or it will be a disaster. The message is clear “Get off email now!”

For further information see del.icio.us/kamichat/sxsw2008/ and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Blogs in Kami Huyse’s blog and her own account of the session.

Every time a new social network comes along if you want to join, should you have to enter all your information yet again? The session Building Portal Social Networks sought to answer this. The panelists were:

• Jeremy Keith of Clearleft
• Chris Messina, CEO of Citizen Agency
• Leslie Chicoine, Experience Designer from Get Satisfaction
• Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect from Plaxo
• David Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead from Six Apart

Sites such as Facebook, Dopplr and Plaxo are able to extract contacts from your email provider; this is done using specific APIs. Google provide the Contacts Data API for Gmail, Microsoft the Windows Live Contacts API for Hotmail; and Yahoo the Mail Web Service APIs for Yahoo.

For retreiving contacts and other information from other social networking sites use the Google OpenSocial API. Websites implementing OpenSocial, include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

There are some other options open to you but to my ignorant eyes these look more hassle than the options above:

Most social network sites follow a standard architecture which has a profile page for each user, often with an easy to remember URL. The information about a user on this page should be marked-up with hCard. Where you have additional pages containing other user information such as friends list you should link to them using the XHTML Friends Network (XFN) rel=”me” attribute in the address tag; this will tell any parser that the linked page is also about this user. Alternatively you can use Friend of a Friend (FOAF). Google indexes the public web for XFN or FOAF markup. Using Google Social Data API you can extract the relationships for a give page.

Oauth provides a standard way of accessing third party authorisation systems (e.g. Gmail) while protecting their account credentials.

What the hell is a Casual MMO? A zero barrier to entry massively multiplayer online game; examples are sites such as Puzzle Pirates, Webkinz, Gaia, NeoPets, Club Penguin, Kart Rider, Barbie Girls, PMOG and Facebook applications like Food Fight, Zombies, Vampires and Pirates. Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Venture Partners hosted a session entitled Casual MMOs: Serious Revenues with the following panelists:

• Adrian Crook - freetoplay.biz
• Nabeel Hyatt - conduitlabs.com
• Michael Acton Smith - moshimonsters.com
• Joe Hyrkin - gaiaonline.com

For casual MMOs graphics don’t matter, you don’t need complex 3D worlds, virtual worlds are possible in HTML. To date MMO’s have targeted kids, teens and young adults 7 to 24. The big growth area is 25+. They can be big business: NeoPets has 250M users, Kart Rider has 100M, in contrast with PC application MMOs like World of Warcraft which has 10M.

So how how do you make money? The top 10 revenue models are:

1. Virtual items sales - Gaia make $1M a month with this.
2. Merchandise - Webkinz made $20M in physical goods sales.
3. Information Sale - Food Fight Food Fight offers surveys for Vcash. Potential: 36K users daily, Avg 2 surveys/user, 25c per survey, $18K/day. Annual: $6.6M
4. Advertising - anners, PPC, Video, Sponsored Items
5. Auctions/Player Trades - Live Gamer, Entropia, Station Exchange
6. Subscription Tiers - RuneScape, Club Penguin (700K subscribers), DR
7. Event/Tournament Fees - Shot Online (Golf), Ultimate Baseball
8. Real Estate/Land Use Fees - SL, Entropia
9. Affiliate - TrialPay, $uperRewards
10. Donations - Kingdom of Loathing

Adrian Crook has produced a good Powerpoint on the subject which is posted on his blog.

Guy Kawasaki chaired a panel entitled True Stories from Social Media Sites with:

• Rashmi Sinha from SlideShare
• Patricia Handschiegel founder of Style Diary
• Kathryn Finney founder of The Budget Fashionista
• Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting
• Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn and Boxes and Arrows
• Erica O’Grady of OpMom
• Aaron Mentele of Electric Pulp

Rashmi Sinha told a story about a furious Australian Professor who rang her at home at 3am to say that someone was impersonating him on SlideShare by posting a photograph of him. He emailed every email address she has ever had and somehow found her home phone number. It turned out this was by two former students of his living in Mexico. When found they were banned.

Kathryn Finney told a story about Oprah, Sarah Jessica Parker and a dress. Steve & Barry’s sent photographs of SJP’s new Steve & Barry’s clothing line to The Budget Fashionista. This was reviewed an the photographs were published on the site. Steve & Barry’s demanded that the photographs were taken down, threatening legal action, as they were for information only and Oprah had an exclusive. Rather than taking them down they asked the community whether they should. Eventually they caved into pressure on an injunction. SJP even blogged against them. However when SJP went on Oprah, with minor media coverage around it their site traffic increased five-fold. You can read the whole story here.

Laura Fitton, Twitter poster-child, espoused it’s benefits. She used it to find tech support for her Blackberry and came across someone who claimed to be the executive producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm. She thought, “Yeah, Right”. He fixed her Blackberry problem and turned out to be the executive producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Erica O’Grady bowed to pressure to launch OpMom early. She got an angry call from the VCs in bed the next day to say the site was down. The lead developer had just got married and was not answering the phone. The MD eventually had to drive around to his out and drag him from the bridal bed to get the site back up - the MD has never been forgiven. The moral of the story is don’t be pressured to launch early. It’s better to launch a site late that work than to launch early and have problems. Initially they were getting 10 signups a day but later became Yahoo site of the day and went up to 5 sign-ups a minute.

Tips for making your social network a success:

Christina Wodtke - “As long as you take care of your community they take care of you.”

Patricia Handschiegel - “When building a social community you need to think about who my audience is and how do you want them to engage.”

Kathryn Finney - “Don’t focus on yourself, focus on the community. Focus on making peoples lives better.”

Laura Fitton - “Be useful”.

Erica O’Grady - “Don’t focus on being cool. Concentrate on the target market.”

Aaron Mentele - “Plan less. Plan for iteration. Don’t over think.” and “Look at other examples [of social networking sites] but make sure it fits your community.”

Rashmi Sinha - “Take a vacation before launch! Have a private beta. Allow private sharing before launch.”

Kathryn Finney - “Move offline.” She’s authored a book of the sire: How to Be a Budget Fashionista

Laura Fitton - Get “Face to Face” power like Seesmic.

Christina Wodtke - “Stay two steps away from volunteer burnout. Watch out for new talent.”

Erica O’Grady - “There will be Flame Wars. Create a platform. Find out what they love.” and “Get named by top bloggers. Get people talking about you.”

When running an online community, you must consider the different personality types that inhabit it. Rebecca Newton from Mind Candy and Jennifer Puckett from Walt Disney Internet Group ran a panel entitled Community & Loyalty: Gamers to Flamers, Lurkers to Workers covering exactly that. Personality types to consider are:

• Snob
• Veteran
• Noob / Newbie
• Competator
• Flamer / Griever - the intial instinct is to get rid of them. However try giving them their own space, where they can do what they like with their own rules. They’re not going to go away but if you give them somewhere to go, they’ll have fun and it will not disturb the rest.
• Lurker - Don’t seem to be active. Participate without words. For every one active user, they’ll be twelve lurkers.
• Worker
• Hall Monitor
• Expert
• Shy but loyal
• Evangelist
• Self Promoter
• Trolls / Disrupters - show everything down
• Spammers
• Problem children

Communities are self organising. Don’t try to disturb them unless you have to.

After people have signed up, how do you turn them into active participants and make them spread the word? Give them exclusive access to features and new features, getting them to submit feedback. Encourage them to participate as much as possible.

Not everyone wants to participate in a community. Give them baby steps: checkboxes / radio buttons, to allow them to participate.

Rebecca & Jennifer produced some brief notes on the session which you can download here. They recommend two listserves on community issues:

• e-mint@yahoogroups.com - international group of community and interactive type folks, with a healthy mixture of practical and theoretical types.
• onlinefacilitation@yahoogroups.com - a little more academic and more of an emphasis on facilitation.

There is a third listserv for community managers, available from www.communitymanagersgroup.com however they don’t recommend it due to high volume of “me too” and inside jokey chat.

Had lunch with Bryan Hurren from LiveMocha today. He was raving about a great session he went to this morning: Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!. It covered a simple 5-step model you can use to make better decisions for your start-up in product and marketing. The speaker he was most impressed with was Dave McClure who has a great blog Master of 500 Hats. Searching SlideShare it looks like he’s given the presentation before, you can see it here. Another I’ve found which looks interesting is Designing Marketing Plans.

Bryan quoted truism from Dave McClure: “Requiring a downloadable application will reduce registration by 90%”. In the case of BBC iPlayer streaming beats downloads by 8:1. At LOVEFiLM we offer 2,000 movie downloads, certainly a good justification for offering streaming; we’re working on it.

Lea Alcantara’s presentation on The Art of Self Branding covered how brand values are vital to your website; perception is almost everything. She based it around the top 5 aspects reported in the 2007 Interbrand Markets Report. The top 10, as resulted from the study, are listed below in order or importance:

1. Consistency (36.0%)
2. Understanding of Customer/Target (18.2%)
3. Message/Communication (14.7%)
4. Creative/Design/Brand ID (12.8%)
5. Relevance (12.4%)
6. Differentiation/Uniqueness (12.0%)
7. Key Stakeholder Buy-In (10.9%)
8. Positioning (9.7%)
9. Clarity (8.9%)
10. Connection to Customer/Target (8.9%)

Lea used the metaphor of the ‘Nice Guy’ who doesn’t get the girl, with the ‘Guy’s Guy’ who gets all the girls. She contrasted two personal finance websites, Wasabe in the role of Nice Guy and Mint as the Guy’s Guy. They’ve received roughly the same amount of start up funding ($4M), Mint started a year later but now has 6,000 times the traffic and customers of Wasebe. Looking at the top 5 aspects in reverse order of importance:

5. Relevance -  Staying the same means staying stagnant. In the last two years Wesabe’s blog has not changed at all it’s still a basic WordPress template without consistent branding with the site. Mint’s blog started out with the same basic WordPress skin but in the same time period have evolved to be an integrated part of the site.

4. Creative/Design/Brand ID- Branding is the sum of the parts. People attribute personality to products and how they interact with them. The Nice Guy does match the brand, The Guy’s Guy strives to match. Wesabe is hard to remember, hard to spell and sounds like Japanese spicy sauce - not a great correlation with finace; and their blog looks nothing like the main site. Mint has many positive conotations with finace, it’s easy to remember, easy to spell; and their blog is an integrated part of the site with consistant branding.

3. Message/Communication - Emotion is an experience which needs to be communicated in the brand. Nice Guy the messaging is unclear, the Guy’s Guy the messaging is clear and appealing. Wesabe home page messaging says:

• Why join wesabe?
• Save Money,
• Spend Wisely and
• Reach Your Goals.

Mint’s home page says:

1. You’re always up-to-date
2. You know your spending
3. You find real savings
4. You’re safe and secure
5. … and it’s free!

Both sites offer comparable services and both are free. Wesabe doesn’t communicate it’s free and is impersonal. Mint uses personal pronouns and clearly states it’s free.

2. Understanding of Customer/Target- Nice Guy targets everyone, whereas the Guy’s Guy is more picky and targets a niche. Wesabe is available is 30 countries; in the list of features there’s a slide-show link that goes nowhere (sounds like rhetoric); it says it supports 300 credit cards does say which ones. Mint is US only, benefits are clearly outlined and linked; the list of banks and credit card details they support are easy to find.

1. Consistency -the most important aspect. Can we expect the same quality in everything? Nice Guy is all over the place, Guy’s Guy is consistent. The quality of Wesabe is not consistant through out the site, Mint is.

Lea says achieving quality is more about persistance that it is about talent. Quoting Richard St John: “Persist through Failure. Persist through CRAP (Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure).”

Whilst I was Googling the quote to find where it was referenced I came across a 3 minute video Richard St John, did for TED covering his 8 principles of sucess, where the quote is taken from. Click here to watch it.

 The 8 principles are listed below.

1. Passion - Do it for LOVE not MONEY
2. Work - Its all HARD WORK. Nothing comes easily
3. Good - To be successful you need to be GOOD at what you do.
4. Focus - You need to focus on one area
5. Push - You got to physically and mentally push, push, push. Remove the self doubts.
6. Serve - You need to SERVE others something of VALUE to become successful.
7. Ideas - You need a good idea to succeed. Listen, Observe, Be curious, Ask questions, problem solve, make connections
8. Persist - Persist through Failure. Persist through CRAP (Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure). 

Lea’s published several articles regarding this on her site www.artofselfbranding.com, she’ll be posting todays presentation up there soon.

Kathy Sierra gave an witty, fast paced presentation titled: Tools for Enchantment - 20 Ways to woo users. The aim of which was how can we enable our users to kick ass?

1. The hi-res user experience - have a constant changing improving environment.
2. The difference between fantastic - we need to put the effort in to achive mastery.
3. Use telepathy - You have to see peoples faces when they use your site. You can infer alot through their facial expressions. You need to feel your users pain.
4. Serendipity - Brains love pattern matching. There are people who think their iPod shuffle is psychic. Lesson: Add randomness or psuedo randomness but not chaos. Create a Pick of the day, etc.
5. The dog ears principle - the ears move after the head - iPhone scrolling bounces at the top; it subtly creates joy. Create joy and the brain finds it playful and makes learning and acceptance easier.
6. T-shirt first development - What does it say about someone that they are one of you users?
7. Easter Eggs - Create them. It’s fun. Inside references make people feel they belong.
8. Tools for evangelism - allow your users the tools to sell to other users.
9. You are a … - reduce the stress in the UI
10. Exercise the brain - the best way is take exercise. Keep your body fit and your brain will be fit.
11. Give users super powers quickly - Get people enabled to do something cool.
12. Learn to do knowledge acqisition and respresentation - Give people patterns
13. ?
14. No best practice - let the off the hook often. This is the different between “Oops” Vs “Bastards”
15. Help reinvestment of mental resources into new happenings - allow people time to focus. The non-expert checks off the boxes. The expert never shrinks the list. Attention offsets. If you do something that steals people’s attention, then give something that will give them more attention or focus.
16. Create a culture of support - get people being mentors quickly. No dumb questions. No dumb answers. Encourage peopel to start asking and answering questions.
17. Do not insist on inclusivity.
18. Practice seductive opacity - turn the brain on. Mystery, anticipation, curiousity. Apple is for people who want to wait to open their presents at xmas. “It’s not secrecy, it’s theatre” - Diane Acerman. We love real things, not just digital things.
19. Atom is not old school. i.e. Make magazine. It’s not boomer nostalgia.
20. Do what this guy does? Gary of winelibrary.com does all this stuff. Make your views entertaining.

Everything she covered in presentation, you’ll find at her excellent blog Creating Passionate Users. She’s written a tonne of books on Java programming.