1. The Ecosystem of News Steven Johnson traced the development of tech and political news to show how they could be a model for the next stage of journalism in what was by far my favorite talk at SXSW. The author of The Invention of Air and Everything Bad Is Good For You presented one of the most well-reasoned, clear-headed, and frankly optimistic looks at how we’re likely to get our news in the future
2. Change v2 Since switching his main focus from copyright issues to reforming our political system, Lawrence Lessig has crafted an inspiring call to action for making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded. Our representatives are not corrupt and dumb, but working within a highly flawed system. The Change Congress system and Donor Strike movement is a practical, achievable way to change that system.
3. Behind the Scenes with Mad Men on Twitter Saddled with a terrible time slot opposite the Guy Kawasaki/Chris Anderson keynote, the people behind the Mad Men characters on twitter (@PeggyOlson, @bettydraper, @Roger_Sterling) told the entertaining story of how, without the support of Mad Men or AMC, they began talking to fans of the show and extending the lives of the characters online and between episodes and seasons of the show. Instead of fan fiction, they called it brand fiction.
4. Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused? Just because you share what appears to be a lot of personal information on Facebook or Twitter doesn’t mean there are things that you keep to yourself. Privacy isn’t all or nothing, and the business of what’s private and what’s shared can change depending on context.
5. HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! More accurately known as the Merlin Mann and John Gruber show, the duo mixed inspiration with humor and practical tips for getting the most out of what you put online. (Plus, Mann did a spot-on impression of Ira Glass (or maybe Alex Bloomberg).
6. UR Blog Sux and Print is Dead An entertaining look at Internet celebrities and the odd situations they’ve found themselves in. Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger and Christian Lander of the sharply funny Stuff White People Like stood out.
7. Entrepreneurship in the Belly of the Beast Representatives from IBM, Google, Microsoft and Kraft Foods demonstrated that you can think and operate like a small company while working within the organization of a large enterprise. Finding supporters, working under the radar, emphasize and recruit talent and having a process in place all contribute to your success.
8. From Blog to Book Deal: How-To You can follow in the path of Guy Kawasaki, Stephanie Klein and Hugh MacLeod, but you’ve got to hold up your end of the bargain by first creating something worthwhile. Once you become known, it becomes easier for other doors to open for you (agents, publishers, marketing).
9. My Boss Doesn’t Get It: Championing Social Media to the Man The panel offered practical tips from the perspective of the company, vendor and consultant in getting a social media effort off the ground in a large organization. Peter Kim, in particular, stressed the importance of having real-world metrics (that is, real connections to savings or revenue) as a part of the plan.
10. Comedy on Television and the Web One of several panels that was fine on its own, but didn’t match up to either audience expectations or its original description. A crowd showed up to see B.J. Novak of The Office, but the panel mostly focused on serious issues of how comedy has led the way in the web video boom.
11. Building a Web Business After Hours Inspiring stories and concrete examples of what to expect when you try to launch a business on your own terms.
12. Quality: The Next Online Video Opportunity Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu and an Austin native, smoothly navigated his way through a talk that was just this side of a sales pitch.
13. Nate Silver Silver seems like an interesting fellow (with a passing resemblance to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg), but interviewer Stephen Baker never quite got to heart of why and how the man behind political prediction site FiveThirtyEight.com found success.
14. James Powderly Another keynote hamstrung by bad planning and timing, a late start and long intro left interviewer Virginia Heffernan little time to explore why Powderly, the founder of Graffiti Research Lab, is such a compelling figure in the open-source art world.
15. Bruce Sterling As a part-time Austin resident and full-time sci-fi genius, Bruce Sterling deserves all the respect SXSW offers. But his message wandered and the audience found themselves laughing even when they were the object of Sterling’s barbs.
16. Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content A good lineup of panelists (Marshall Kirkpatrick, Louis Gray, Gabe Rivera, Melanie Baker, Micah Baldwin), but my interest faded as the talk moved toward the technical and more advanced ways to find the best content online.
17. We Have Been Objectified: Identity, Consumerism, and the Future of Designed Objects I’m looking forward to seeing the movie and loved director Gary Hustwit’s previous film, Helvetica, but the panel was low-key. Bonus irony points for pointing out the panel was being filmed on a Flip camera, a product that one of the panelist’s companies designed.
18. Is Web 2.0 Killing the Sports Business? In a word, “no”, but the panel didn’t project the kind of energy that would even make it a legitimate question. Sports, after tech and politics, is an area ripe for Web 2.0-ization, but there wasn’t much of a discussion on how that might happen.
19. New Think for Old Publishers The setup: Book publishing executives want to hear from what their loyal audience wants. The execution: More than half an hour of introductions and preamble before the crowd grew restless. Clay Shirky did the best he could to pull the most important points out of the clamor, but his talent was generally wasted here. An hour of Shirky on his own would have been much better

The panelist whose story most closely matched with my employer’s was Lionel Menchaca of Dell, who created the Direct2Dell blog 18 months ago. That site now gets a million page views per week and has helped reduce the negative perception that Dell was battling among its customers.

In addition, Dell has created IdeaStorm, where people can suggest ideas for Dell products and services, have others rank them, and then Dell takes the best ones under consideration.

The panelists agreed that the first step in meeting (and exceeding) customers’ expectations through an online tool like a blog is to listen first to their problems, then analyze that feedback, then take action. Taking action, of course, is key, but it’s also meaningless without having real feedback from customers to act upon.

Companies often express fear at jumping in to the social media arena, but the alternative (doing nothing) allows the conversation to go on without any attempt at having an impact. Becoming a part of the conversation with your customers almost always decreases the time between their problems and a solution.

Mason and Nelson studied theater troupes, orchestras, a restaurant kitchen, a magazine and a screenwriting collective to find out how these creative groups work well together, and found some common themes:

1. Cross-train the entire team. Everyone on the team should get experience with all the other related disciplines and administrative tasks. This gives you empathy for others’ experiences and allows you to understand what’s possible in other realms.
2. Rotate creative leadership. This creates a sense of security, with people knowing that at some point they’ll have a sense of ownership
3. Actively turning the corner. The corner here is from divergence (brainstorming) to convergence (decision-making). Moving from one to the other at the appropriate time is key.
4. Know your roles. Once the corner is turned and you move into the production phase, everyone should know what they’re meant to do — what they can make decisions on and what they can’t.
5. Practice, practice, practice. Give time to improve individual skills as well as group skills, so that you can repeat the process each team. However, you have to find the right times to practice (not on deadline or at crunch time)
6. Make your mission explicit. It’s important that everyone understand the end result and define a purpose among the team.
7. Killing your darlings. Find respectful ways to remove material that doesn’t support the mission.
8. Leadership is a service. Being a leader is the ultimate support position. You’re helping others represent themselves and giving people the space to be creative. You’re a facilitator, not a dictator.
9. Generate products around the group’s creative interests. Identify tasks with what staff is actually engaged in to give people more ownership.
10. Remember your audience. Think about whether something is just part of your creative vision, or whether it would serve the audience. Consider how you will emotionally relate to your visitors and learn to anticipate the feedback.

They also threw in a bonus item: celebrate failure. There’s always something in a project that can be done better next time. People should know it’s OK to fail.

Singh, who works in the New York office of Avenue A/Razorfish, points out that today’s online shopping experience is not a linear process. We need to take advantage of the social influence — input from friends and family, comparison across sites — as we shop collaboratively with other people.

In today’s world, customers are influenced by each other more than ever, and less than ever by traditional marketing messages. Research from Forrester Research and eMarketer shows that online shoppers trust recommendations from consumers more than any other type of advertising, and that most people look at from 4-7 customer reviews before buying.

The corporate site isn’t a destination for customers any more, he says. You have to tap into the immersive and social power of the web to create great experiences with consumers wherever they live in the digital world.

In the traditional model of communicating to customers, the message has come from the marketing and sales groups. But in a Web 2.0 model, every group within the company (Marketing, Sales, Research and Development, Strategy, Human Resources) has their own customer, and each one of those groups needs to be talking to their constituents and external stakeholders.

Some key points:

1. Become your consumer
2. Aggregate information for your consumer
3. Articulate product benefits better
4. Amplify the business stories
5. Participate where your consumers are
6. Don’t do it all at once

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This year’s edition, titled “Top 10 Lessons Learned in E-Commerce” was a leisurely walk through the big-picture items that have given Zappos some of the most loyal customers around. Here’s a copy of his presentation:

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Breaking it down, here are the Top 10 Lessons:

1. The e-commerce business is built on repeat customers.
2. Word of mouth really works online.
3. Don’t compete on price.
4. Make sure your website inventory is 100% accurate.
5. Centrally locate your distribution.
6. Customer service is an investment, not an expense.
7. Start small. Stay focused.
8. Don’t be secretive. Don’t worry about competitors.
9. You need to actively manage your company culture.
10. Be wary of so-called experts.

Among those participating were folks who do accessibility work for federal government agencies, the Federal Reserve Bank, Dell, the State of Texas, and several mid-size and smaller firms. After a brief introduction, I led them through a list of questions and topics. Among some of interesting tidbits to emerge:

• Practically no one had resources dedicated solely to accessibility. It was always included as part of the mission of another group (user experience, human factors, developers)
• Nearly everyone had used additional benefits to help sell the idea of accessibility to business owners and clients. Among those benefits were: better search engine results, enhanced browser support, better support for mobile devices and improved findability of content.
• Business owners and clients tended to think of accessibility as making a web site available to visually impaired users, and needed additional explanation of the wide range of areas that could fall under the umbrellas of accessibility (including older users, low bandwidth users, and international users)

One other item: On Saturday, I did a brief preview of this presentation at another Austin tech gathering: BarCamp Austin III. That also went well and gave me good feedback for the SXSW presentation the following day.

I attended some other great sessions, and I’ll post the notes I took here in later posts.

I recorded my part, then discovered that Moby has offered several instrumental tracks at mobygratis.com for independent and non-profiit filmmakers to use for free with their projects. I asked if the same applied to audio, and got my approval the other day. So now I have the Moby track “radio station” playing as the intro and outtro to the podcast. Thanks, Moby!

The SXSW site will soon post the podcast there, but if you can’t wait, I’ve made it available here as well.

That’s a huge coup for event organizers. Facebook has blasted into the mainstream in the past year, growing from a college networking site to a worldwide phenomenon with more than 60 million users.

BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy will host the on-stage interview, which is set for Sunday, March 9 at 2 pm.

The session, “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?”, won’t be in a panel format, however, but will instead be a part of the new Core Conversations program at the event. Here’s how SXSW organizers describe the new addition:

Here is how this concept works. You will be given a one-hour timeslot in the Core Conversation room. You will be seated at a table that is surrounded by chairs. The rest is up to you. But instead of a panel, you are leading an informal discussion on the “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?” concept. You may have 10 people show up to listen to (and participate in) your talk — you may have 50 or more. In addition to your discussion, there will be five or six other Core Conversations on related topics going on in the same room at the same time. Attendees are free to move from table to table, according to what interests them most.

And here’s the description for the topic that I submitted back in the summer:

How accessible does your site have to be?: Section 508 and W3C guidelines give you the blueprint for making your site usable by people with disabilities. But designers don’t have to give up all of their creativity to meet those standards. There is a way to accomplish both goals. So really, just how accessible does your site have to be?

After talking about design and convergent devices at the past couple of conferences, I’m looking forward to this new topic. I’ve got some great resources to draw from at work, and I’ll reaching out to some other folks to get their input as well.

I’m going to be creating a short podcast about “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?” and I’ll post it here and at the SXSW site early next year.