Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 of type Core Conversation on Tuesday 15th March
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How Technology is Revolutionizing the Way We Eat
by Chitra Agrawal and Jaspal Riyait
We are in the midst of a food revolution and technology is the catalyst. This is the age where chefs have Facebook fan pages, food bloggers are landing book deals, grandmas are uploading their cooking videos and single Twitter updates hold entire recipes.
We’re more adventurous in the kitchen from reading cooking blogs that make lesser known cuisines and ingredients accessible. We no longer shy away from cooking techniques that seem over our heads thanks to cooking shows on YouTube. We’re now more resourceful with iPhone apps that help us make meals out of random and leftover ingredients.
Food bloggers have become the newest trendspotters and online food communities are thriving on sites like Epicurious and Serious Eats. Restaurants live and die by reviews on Yelp while others are discovered on Foursquare. And we love to chase food trucks via Twitter!
What does this mean for the restaurant and food industry, cookbook publishers and food critics, for traditional chefs and food bloggers and the new breed of home cooks and foodies whose appetites are wetted by what’s new and unknown?
LEVEL: Beginner
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How to Bring Teams Together to Move Mountains
by Karen Hudgins and Beth Hallmark
Every organization wants to do the best job possible, often by providing terrific customer service and producing killer web content. And it usually starts out that way –– in the early stages. But after your ideas and concepts bounce from team to team, they often become watered down and ineffective.
Bringing people with different viewpoints and backgrounds together can be a challenge without taking precise steps, making sure each employee understands –– and is understood –– and how to effectively communicate and “on board” your teams toward your organization’s vision.
Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be the case. By bringing teams together and creating shared goals and communication plans, strategic visions can exist in eternal harmony.
This discussion will focus on methods to put your workplace’s teams on common ground with shared strategic vision and core competencies that result in a happy workplace, with high-performing, Zen-inspired employees.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Internet Evolution: Hyperconnected, Hyper-real
What are your fears and hopes for the future of the Internet?
People who do not understand the potential threats may never get to benefit from the possible opportunities. Most technology experts foresee: wireless devices embedded in everything - including us; nearly invisible cameras recording activity in all public spaces; databases cataloguing our online actions; massive data centers that allow that information to be sorted and understood in new ways; changes in work and home environments as the Internet of Things and everyware applications become widespread and immersive, invisible, ambient, networked computing makes us available to more people in more ways. And what about the implications of a direct brain-to-computer interface?
Join in a discussion aimed at illuminating the concerns that should be addressed today to prepare for the potential future scenarios predicted by experts as documented by Pew Internet & American Life Project surveys and other current research. Top trends already illuminated in expert surveys will be covered, and the audience will be invited to participate. We’ll also use an interactive element such as twtpoll.com to allow the group to speak out about best practices for the best future possible.
LEVEL: Advanced
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Know Your Opponents, Grow Your Fans.
by Alane Boyd and Pat Lynch
This presentation will teach audience members how to learn what their competitors are doing to not only get customers but keep their business. By using tools that are available to everyone on the internet, such as Google Analytics, SpyFu.com, and other helpful free and pay tools, I will take the audience through a step by step example on how to do the following:
. Where and how to collect competitive data
. Where and how to locate your target market online
. How to leverage this data and view the "big picture"
. Initial steps that should be included in all marketing plansThis presentation will teach users how to access tools and learn from their competitors mistakes when it comes to marketing to customers. Based on the information obtained the business will then be able to look at how their efforts compare to the efforts of their competitors. This will allow members of the audience to build an effective strategy for their business, and continue to monitor not only their own efforts but the efforts of their competitors.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Landing Your Next Job Through Unconventional Personal Branding
by Anna Tauzin and Maira Garcia
Finding a new job or making a career change can be daunting and is becoming more competitive with the current economic climate. Using the web to market yourself through personal branding is well-known idea, but how do you rise above the rest and get an edge on the job market? This panel will discuss trends, tried and true methods, and provide expert opinion on making the most of your job search. Job seekers have to examine the online and offline, conventional and unconventional means of promoting oneself. Online personal branding means more than just having a Twitter account with a few followers. You have to think outside the box when it comes to making a big impression on web. These steps include making effective social media profiles that get you noticed, commenting on blogs of companies you are interested in working for, having your blog and site stand out, and using Google and Facebook Ads to target potential employers. Offline impressions are just as important. Know what a creative resume and portfolios specific to your industry looks like, use unconventional tools to promote yourself, learn how to make the great elevator pitch, and get tips on networking etiquette.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Learning 2025
by Jillian Darwish and Erika Gregory
The emerging future confirms that the current educational system, with all its industrial-age assumptions, is not one that can be, in good conscience, simply passed on to our children. Instead, the emerging future demands that today’s multiple dimensions of complexity be addressed by innovating new processes, skills, and capabilities to radically augment and/or replace our current approaches. This type of radical innovation will not result from treading, yet again, the well-worn path of traditional educational reform. Changes in action will not be enough; mental models, the way people think, must be changed. Together, we will explore a process that identifies the needs of future learners using theories from the fields of user-center design, systems and scenario thinking. In addition to identifying the needs of future learners, this process allows for the identification of the system that must be in place to provide for the needs of all learners regardless how the future unfolds.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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The Luxury/Digital Paradox: Taking Luxury Brands Digital
by Phillip Jackson
Luxury, by definition, is built on exclusivity. The web is inherently democratic.
In the past, this contradiction caused luxury brands to be hesitant about moving online – but in the face of the internet’s ever-increasing ubiquity and print advertising’s decreased returns, more and more luxury brands are making the transition to on-line advertising and e-commerce.
While many luxury brands have accepted that a digital presence is essential, they are still figuring out how to maintain the cache, allure, and exclusivity that underpins their brand perceptions while simultaneously balancing the “democratic” rules of the digital landscape.
This presentation will show how luxury brands can participate in the digital-sphere through case studies of luxury brands that have effectively communicated their 'brand story' online by leveraging the following territories:
1. Communicate the dream of the luxury brand
2. Digital as a piece of the larger puzzle
3. Tell a great story
4. Be a cultural tastemaker
5. Provide a trusted guide to lifestyle enhancement
6. Use history as a way to push forward
7. Encourage the spirit of competition
8. Talk to younger luxury consumers
9. Offer incomparable service
10. Use digital to convey exclusivityBy using these strategies, luxury brands will gain just as much, if not more, from embracing digital than any other category.
LEVEL: Beginner
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A Conversation with Randall Poster & Richard Linklater
by Richard Linklater and Randall Poster
Filmmaker Richard Linklater sits down with prolific Music Supervisor Randall Poster, to talk about the importance of music in film. Poster has worked with the greats, including Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and Jason Reitman.
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Career Transparency: Why Personal Branding Is Bullshit
'Personal branding' is bullshit. Diplomas are bullshit. Your network is bullshit. It's not about who you say you are, it's about who you are. It's not about being an 'expert', it's about being accountable, making mistakes and getting shit done.
Self-management used to be about self-improvement. If you wanted to be calm, you learned to meditate; if you wanted to be a better designer, you studied Paul Rand and William Morris; if you were looking to advance your career, you got a Masters.
Just like a corporate brand, your personal brand needs to embody who you actually are and what you represent. If you position and promote yourself as an expert, but don’t have the knowledge required to be one, you will fail.
Take Mr. Branding Expert. He spends hours over his blog, stuffing it with keywords, building profiles, shmoozing movers and shakers. He spends his savings on a Ben Sherman wardrobe and goes to SXSW. He lands a meeting with the Product Manger of a large company. She asks to see Mr. Expert's work and the successive ROI. Mr. Expert shares case studies from Lorna’s Consignment Shop, Park Ave Diner and his Uncle Bob’s plumbing business.
Ms. Product Manager then proceeds to laugh in his face and share all this with her 25k Twitter followers. Mr. Expert? Get ready for a career in sales.
This talk is not about networking or fans or Twitter. It's about transparency. It's about honesty. It's about hard work for little money. It's about being real.
LEVEL: Advanced
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Creating a Career in Digital Product Design
Digital Product Design -- the craft of designing interfaces for digital products like the Apple iPhone or an interactive web application like Yahoo! Mail -- promises to be one of the hottest job design prospects for the next century. Nearly every product type we know about has gone or is going digital, from content rich websites like CNN.com to mobile task-based applications like Gowalla to products for the digital home like Microsoft's Kinetic. As such, designers for these digital products need to be well equipped with advice from a designer who has been in the trenches since the early days of mainstream software product design. In this session, Andrei Herasimchuk, the lead designer behind the Adobe Creative Suite and the creative lead behind the current redesign of one of the internet's largest web-based applications, Yahoo! Mail, will divulge lessons learned from the trenches, and in doing so will pass on the keys to successful digital product design not learned in the classroom. and in doing so, he'll inspire a new generation of digital product designers to take the profession to the next level.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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GeekFit: How to Embrace Technology and Healthy Lifestyles
by Robert Jolly and Derek Featherstone
As interactive designers and developers, are we working ourselves to early graves? To put it mildly, our work is largely sedentary. This panel will explore some of the long-term health risks associated with our obsession with all things digital and too little time maintaining an active, healthy lifestyle.
Learn from your industry peers about the health problems they've experienced and how they've embraced a more active lifestyle—with and without the use of technology—to reap truly amazing personal and professional benefits.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Locationpalooza! Leveraging Geo-intelligence to Engage Hyper-Local Communities
by Evan Cohen and Lisa Brander
Location, Location, Location. Former Forrester Analyst Lisa Bradner, President of Geomentum, leads an exploration of the trends and opportunities of taking a hyper-local marketing approach to creating more relevant consumer engagement in micro-communities across the nation. What's the opportunity for marketers? How does this impact marketing performance? Why are we seeing a rise in hyper-local platforms such as Groupon, AOL Patch, FourSquare and Facebook Places? Consumers expect a more relevant experience and technology now enables marketers to provide that, delivering greater returns on every marketing dollar spent. Learn how marketers are becoming part of the community, and why it's important to become part of the neighborhood.
LEVEL: Advanced
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Online Learning and the Classroom of the Future
Facebook's highered roots have certainly extended well beyond the Ivy League, but to what extent have social technologies become a staple in the classroom? Today, over 10 million students are registered in an online course while more than 1600 institutions offer online degrees. This panel will address the opportunities and challenges for bringing schools online and take a closer look at the profile of today's web--savvy student.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Succeeding as Distributed Virtual Team
by Josh Cramer
Do you sometimes feel like you could get more done without the distractions in the office? Is your company considering allowing some employees to work from home occasionally? Do you collaborate or work with others who live in a different city, state, or country? Do you have trouble finding the ideal employee in your local area? Find out what it takes to succeed as a virtual, distributed, telecommuting work team. Experts in this field talk about what works, what doesn't, and the state of affairs for online collaboration. Some of the topics covered in this session will include:
- essential tools for distributed work teams
- dealing with time zone differences
- requirements for your home office
- skills and personality traits critical for success
- finding and hiring remote talent
- great communication without face to face
- leveraging coworking spaces to the fullest
Telecommuting is becoming more and more common in our society every year. The development of new tools and techniques are fueling this transition and moving the traditional corporate walls right into our homes. Today's worker is increasingly attracted to the flexibility and opportunity provided by telecommuting. Come to this session to learn how you can take part in this ongoing revolution of work.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Why PR's Future May Not Look Like PR
by eBay Ink and David Armano
When You Think of PR (Public Relations), your first impression may be of the silver tongued "flack" spinning a corporations' news, putting a positive slant on everything. With advances in networks, online communities and the ability of the average individual to become their own content producer and influencer - the face of PR is changing, shifting the focus from communications to engagement in increasingly public spaces both online and off.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Cage Match: Social vs. Video
by Russ Somers and Natanya Anderson
Social media and online video battle for mindshare among marketers. Which one totally rules? We’ll lock Russ Somers, Director of Marketing at Invodo and Natanya Anderson, VP of Content Strategy and Delivery at Powered, in a cage (metaphorically – or maybe literally) to lead a Core Conversation on the pros and cons of each. On the video side: Russ leads marketing for Invodo, a company at the forefront of the eCommerce video industry. Invodo produces video and technology to drive conversion for online retailers including Toys R Us, Verizon Wireless and Golfsmith. On the social side: Natanya leads content strategy for full-service social media agency Powered, guiding the development and delivery of creative content to clients including HP, Sony, iVillage, Atkins and RadioShack. Natanya and Russ provide industry insights and lead what will be, with your contributions, a spirited discussion.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Employee Wellness: Farce or Untapped Potential?
by Fran Melmed and Aaron Sklar
Wellness programs are popping up everywhere in Corporate America. To stem the ever-rising cost of health care, more and more companies are throwing points-based systems, incentives, and discounted weight, tobacco cessation, and fitness programs at their employees. Meanwhile, dubious employees aren’t snapping up these benefits. And employers are miffed.
Should they be? Or is the problem housed in the current piecemeal approach to wellness? Explore and debate a more expansive approach to employee wellness, one where the workplace becomes a driver of health for the emotional, physical, and financial benefit of both the organization and the individual.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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How to Build Your Tribe
Do you really need a tribe? Or is it the latest gimmicky buzzword? When Seth Godin told me that leading a Tribe could be more valuable than money, I challenged him. Then I interviewed 200+ business and non-profit founders. I discovered that the successful ones took off because they had tribes. They may not have used the word "tribe" (they used words like "blog readers," "email subscribers" and "fans"), but a tribe IS what helped them take ideas and turn them into movements. So how do YOU build YOUR tribe? To answer that question, I'm going to invite founders who built strong, supportive tribes to join me on this panel. You and I will lead them in a discussion in which they'll teach how they did it.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Post Recession Recruitment - What Now?
A discussion from experts in online recruitment, online branding, and social networking about how looking for a job has changed. The panel will consist of agency recruiters, company recruiters, advisers and job seekers to give attendees an in-depth understanding of what each party in the equation is doing differently today and how it might effect them. The panel will describe how things have changed from years past: how new graduates and those entering the work force have much different expectations that those more experienced; how employers are now looking more for fit rather than pure skill set; how the role of recruiters has changed and how job seekers themselves need to take a much more active role in managing their job search.
We’ll discuss innovative solutions to particular issues within the technology and interactive space but focus on providing detail on how recruitment has changed and suggest some tools, technologies and solutions that exist for job seekers, employers and recruiters.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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The Death of the Brand Website
by Gary Nelson
It’s likely that your consumers check Facebook, Twitter, newspapers and other online sources every week, if not every day. But how many times a week are they coming to your website? Today’s brand sites do a great job of communicating a message, but what most sites lack is fresh content that keeps visitors coming back. Major brands can take a lesson from blogging sites that do an excellent job of keeping content fresh by creating stories around their products, adding video, and integrating social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This session will examine the smaller brand sites that are already starting to structure their sites more like blogs, and the audience will walk away with actionable ideas for turning their big-brand site into a place where people want to keep coming back to. The session will also explore how to carefully add on-brand community features to your site in order to your consumers a place to interact with one another and with the brand.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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What Exactly Are We Doing on the Web
by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura
Nearly 20 years into this industry, one that we mostly just made up as we went along, it's time to ask what exactly is our craft. What do we do and how well do we do it? We'll ask questions about a professional ethos, our values, and ongoing growth from the early days to now and the future. We'd also like to point out a few things along the way, like how maybe it's time for us to have a little red sports car.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Career Longevity: Build Your Brand The Rockstar Way
"I can work 'til I'm dead," is the unfortunate battle cry of digital workers from Millennials to Gen Xers. These days, we can expect to hold at least 10 jobs, have 3 career changes and get laid off twice before we retire. That's a whole lot of career change coming our way—and after the worst recession since the Depression, expect it to get worse before it gets better.
How do you sustain? That's what career expert, Allison Hemming will deliver in her presentation, "Career Longevity: Build Your Brand the Rockstar Way"—so you don't burn out or fade away.
From "Remembering your Fans (and Personal Brand)" to "Always be Producing," Hemming will take you through the roadmap to manage your career for the long-haul. And through the lens of rock legends from Bruce Springsteen and Bono to Thom York and David Byrne, motivate you to be intentional, adaptable and accountable so that your career is sustainable.
Powered by a DJ spinning rock classics, Allison Hemming will deliver a fresh, irreverent, and informative presentation that will put you on track to have the rockstar career you deserve that's guaranteed to last decades into the future.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Creating a Unique Social Experience
"What is good social strategy" is fundamentally changing. Instead of everyone wanting to match competitor's social strategy (they have a blog & facebook so I should have a blog & facebook), we should be creating unique social experience that differentiate us from competitors. Apple wants their products to be unique from other computers and Abercrombie wants their shopping experience to be different from other stores....Why shouldn't we want social experiences to be different enough from competitors that the experience itself becomes part of the brand?
Powerful example = NBC's O&O local TV stations where they swapped out comments on news articles for a custom feedback system where people register their mood for how an article makes them feel. This exponentially increased interactions and gave people a new way to find local news. Instead of browsing random categories like "around town"; NBC visitors find "news in my city that people are laughing at" or "news...people are furious about". The unique interactions have rocketed NBC's numbers in a commodotized space (same boring stuff on ABC, CBS, local newspaper, radio) In just 12 months they DOUBLED registered users to 12 Million and TRIPLED traffic in an industry that is lucky to get a 10% increase: http://bit.ly/bd2dpD
LEVEL: Beginner
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Rebranding: Tales of a New Identity
by Maureen Sullivan and Christian Dwyer
Strength of brand is potentially just as powerful as the product itself. In this discussion, we'll talk about the ups and downs to refreshing a major brand and share opinions on when and why it's appropriate to create a new identity.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Right Brain to Left: Art of Persuasive Presentations
by John Harne
Why do so many creative professionals in the interactive design and agency business struggle to sell their concepts, executions and creative work to the business decision makers. What are the potential issues of communicating concepts containing emotion and aesthetic content to analytical thinkers. How are some creative professionals able to sell just about anything to their clients. John Harne is the Executive Creative Director for Definition6. With over 20 years of interactive experience he began his career as an artist and animator and has successfully lead several of the largest interactive agencies since 1998. His team recently won Adage Small Agency Campaign of the Year with the viral“Coke Happiness Machine”. His experience with leading creative presentations for a wide variety of media spans identity projects like the WebMD identity to 50 million dollar accounts like Virgin and TheHomeDepot to film projects for TLC and Matchbox20. Just last week he showed a major hotel how his team would transform their brand through creative consumer insights. He credits the win to building part of the concept in an iPad application and handing it to the clients during his pitch. In this presentation he will give concrete and examples of how to pitch ideas to boards to games to campaigns and how to ask for the business. Learn some valuable techniques to understand the prospective client, how to read the room and how important story-telling is in the process of creative presentation.
LEVEL: Advanced
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Taming the Monkey Mind: Yoga and Creative Focus
by Christa Avampato and Jennilyn Carson
The perfect way to wrap-up your SXSW experience: a lively and carefree conversation about how yoga can help you easily access your creativity and imagination at will.
We all know this feeling of being under the gun with a deadline, needing to access our most creative ideas at a moment's notice. When we really need our creative muse to show up, she somehow has the uncanny ability to hide like a needle in a haystack and then show up at 3:00am as we bolt upright out of bed, making our way in the dark to scribble down the ideas she's handed to us. For too long we've accepted that's just the way creativity and imagination work - unpredictably.
Yoga - physical postures, breathing techniques, and visualization - helps us tap into our imaginations at will and with ease, exactly when we need them. A regular yoga practice keeps our minds sharp, helps us make connections between seemingly disparate bits of information that may otherwise go unnoticed, and imagine solutions to complex challenges. It gives us a way forward.
This session is helpful for everyone who needs to tap into their own creativity on a regular basis - from performers to programmers, in all mediums.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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