Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 of type Core Conversation in Rio Grande A
Friday 11th March 2011
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Lighten Your Load: Successfully Leverage Volunteers and Interns
by Betsy Flanagan and Jennifer Selke
People are willing to trade time for work experience in every occupational field. Volunteers and Interns can be a fantastic source of creative energy and labor. Organizing and managing volunteers and interns can be a full time job. Can you take advantage of additional help? Learn how to recruit and manage workers while also providing a learning experience while getting real work accomplished.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Are We Not Men? Reaching New American Dads
Men's media has changed tremendously - almost as much as men and dads have. Today's dads are active in every aspect of the household, from parenting to chores, and yet, they are largely overlooked as readers and consumers.
New American Dads are thirsty for knowledge and a community that speaks their common language - that of the real man. The new language of men helps Jacks of all trades learn how to be better at all of them, retain their essential masculinity and perform well in a new paradigm of family, work and self. Traditional media outlets - those that espouse the virtues of supposedly manly interests ($10,000 suits, rare scotch and women, women, women) are missing an opportunity to serve this emerging male marked.
In order to speak 'Dad,' media must speak to the realities of his life, his priorities, responsibilities, aspirations and, above all else, be useful. The growing online media directed at the New American Dad understands that service journalism - that which seeks to inform as well as entertain - is the next evolution in the daddy blogger.
Blogs have their place, but in order to effect change in men's media, online resources must engage the reader in a conversation, one in which the consumer walks away feeling better informed than they had before engaging the site.
Service journalism - how-tos, how it works and best-of lists - have practical applications in readers' lives, thus engendering loyalty and creating conversations with a long overlooked population, while developing an audience for whom older media models based on supposed aspiration and stereotype have little meaningful impact.
Speak to dads in their language, encourage them to speak back, teach them something they can use and entertain them - this is the next evolution of men's media.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Breaking Taboos: Pros Get Real About Money Matters
by Marc Hemeon and Whitney Hess
Industry All-Stars tackle the subject that we're all most curious about but causes us the most discomfort: what, when, and how to charge for our work. Learn their inside tips on how to charge your clients, when trading work for equity makes sense, and how to avoid common client pitfalls. Stop cheating yourself and learn that you deserve to be paid in full for doing work you're passionate about. Our work has the power to make enormous amounts of money for our clients. Let's take a good hard look at the value we provide and how to ask for and receive value in return.
Negotiating your rate for a project is the difference between being a starving artist or successful freelancer or studio. Creatives fall prey to lowball offers, promises of future work, and other forms of wage penalties in fear of losing a potential client. Learn how the pros have created successful freelance businesses and startups by not compromising their rates and standards. Understand how they attract the big name clients and avoid the bad clients.
We'll also explore potential benefits and risks of working for stock.Lawyers, doctors, accountants and other professionals typically don't experience angst, guilt, or wishy-washy boundaries when stating their rates and neither should we. We see standard billing rates across many industries. We’ll take a look at the role a standard billing rate would have in the creative services industry and how such a standard would be upheld and implemented.
LEVEL: Intermediate
Saturday 12th March 2011
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Bridging the Geo-Gap to Empower Women in Technology
In the past several years, more organizations supporting women in technology have popped up than we can count and keep track of, each addressing the under-representation of women in the fields of science and technology in their own way, and working to improve that situation.
If you’re a woman in a developed country, groups and organizations for women in tech are everywhere. We’ve highlighted them at SXSW for years. We’ve experienced the improvements, and we see progress towards more.
However, in many parts of the world, these types of initiatives are either just starting – with varying levels of organization and support - or they’re non-existent…but they’re just as important as they are here.
Luckily, another increase that’s occurred in the past several years is the number of global connections around the world. Duh, so what?
It means the influence of these types of organizations can have global involvement, global support and thus global effects.
By connecting women in tech at a global level, the same progress we’re seeing in the US can be leveraged for the purpose of empowerment, building relationships, shared resources and crowdsourcing, and ultimately the elevation of all women in science and technology.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Where Are The Women in Startups? Um, Everywhere!
by Carla Thompson and Meghan Casserly
There are thousands of women out there innovating and starting businesses across sectors; so why all the negativity in the media? Every week brings a slightly different take on the where-are-women-in-business article. Some look at venture funding, others look at women's representation in specific sectors, but they all have the same theme - women can't seem to get it together when it comes to business.
This panel approaches the issue of women in startups from two key angles. First, the assertion that woman are non-existent simply isn't true anymore. The real stories need to come to the forefront. And second, you can only complain about a problem for so long before it's time to deliver a solution.
Women in startups are simply tired of the bad rap media has stamped on them so, they're coming forward to talk about the real issues. Like, why are women inherently less inclined to sell themselves? There are multiple reasons behind this but the basic truth is that many of us need more urging to boast of our talents.
Overall, there are all sorts of factors that play into women's roles in startups such as the fact that many women entrepreneurs are also primary caregivers of children, household managers, family financial planners, etc. Not to mention, the age-old-truth that we are trained as a society to think women have a harder time with their careers. Let's face it girls - it's time for a change.
LEVEL: Beginner
Sunday 13th March 2011
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Bend Over? Surprise! Agencies Are Screwing You
by Lucia Mancuso and Meghan Warby
The agency model of billable hours, budget overruns and hierarchical team structures was built in the early 20th century. Although things have changed significantly thanks to technology, labor equity and innovation in other industries, this outdated model continues its vampire-like sucking of vendors dry.
Examining the traditional model, we’ll identify reasons why agency-contracted work is potentially perilous for your business. Instead of being results-oriented, agencies charge hourly rates regardless of (un)successful outcomes. Agency staff, constrained by the pressure to bill hourly are stifled creatively and prevented from serving clients as best they can. Should these time sheet zombies continue representing brands to the public?
Thankfully, many workable solutions exist: bring creative personnel in house, pay for quantifiable results, empower yourself to learn new necessary skills, insist on agency and vendor accountability, and more.
As the sun sets on the agency world, and the ball is in the court of business owners. Are you ready to adapt to the 21st century and make a jump to a new way of doing business?
LEVEL: Advanced
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Fail Big, Fail Often: How Fear Limits Creativity.
Failure is not an option--it’s a requirement. Like the mythical phoenix, creativity constantly springs from its own ashes to be reborn new and different.
The world is filled with excellent implementations of the same things, created by wonderful technicians who have the talent to recreate any style. This talent shouldn’t be discounted: it’s a necessary part of interactive design. We can’t diminish the importance of convention or usability when being creative, but the fear of opposing them can kill the creative spirit and hide our most promising work. It’s this fear of breaking conventions, of not being understood, of failing that dooms us to repeat what others have done.
This panel will focus on the idea of becoming fearless, and therefore, truly creative. We will discuss the concept of failure as a necessary part of creation. We will introduce the idea that even the most artistic expressions benefit from prototyping, restarting and reworking. We will discuss the concept that absolutely nothing is sacred, especially your own work. And finally--and most importantly--we will discuss how to get satisfaction and enjoyment from the process of failing forward.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Clients Are Not the Target Audience. Users Are
If you design for the client, they will be happy on launch, till they realize the audience isn't engaged. Then they will go looking for their next mistress agency. Know your client, and the value that they offer to users. Sometimes the client has a keen sense of this, but more often than not, a discovery / exploratory process is helpful to give focused clarity to this key issue. If in the beginning of the creative process we do not find the uniqueness of the brand, users never will either. Maybe? sort of? dig deeper. what drove the founders to start this business? what do they stand for? how are their products unique? who is their target audience? who are they ACTUALLY reaching? Let's move on to the all important user. Who will be going to this site? Why? To accomplish what? Success is based off of this measure, and this measure alone. Was the site USEFUL. Likes, retweets, mentions, awards, fwa's, blah, blah, blah mean nothing if the site is not useful. We are a service industry, not a beauty pageant. we're hear to help the client communicate their message, not fluff our creative egos. Know your audience. Their interests. Their background. Their desires. Let’s look at two large .com redesign case studys that I have had the honor to work as the design lead on: BurgerKing.com with Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and livestrong.org with Springbox. Let's be useful.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Breaking Glass Ceiling - Fearless Women Entrepreneur
by Amita Paul and Marylene Delbourg-Delphis
You don't want to simply break glass ceilings and start in a negative fashion that has yielded mixed results in the business world as there are only 13 women CEO's in the USA's 500 most publicly traded companies.
Despite gains, women business owners still have many barriers to overcome before obtaining truly equal opportunity in the marketplace. So, What are these barriers?
These questions and many more like this, mark every step of the path these fearless women in business take, every day. This panel will share the stories of joy and pain and habits of these wonder women.
So shoot for the sky and be innovative. This panel addresses inspired women who want to inspire other women.
LEVEL: Intermediate
Monday 14th March 2011
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How To Hire And Manage A Developer
This presentation focuses on breaking down the communication barriers that can make working with a developer more difficult than it needs to be. The presentation will cover Interviewing Your Potential Developer, Planning & Project Managment, Using A Version Control System, and Bug Reporting. The session will give the audience a reality check on how to go about working with a developer to get a custom Wordpress site (or any digital project) built on time and on budget.
LEVEL: Beginner
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Your Web Developer Thinks You're an Idiot
"What we have here is a failure to communicate." This famous line (spoken to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke) aptly describes the relationship that can develop between a Web site publisher and the site's developer. We'll examine real-world examples (some hilarious, others downright frightening) and discuss strategies to help non-techie entrepreneurs communicate effectively with their tech/development team.
This panel will help your bootstrapped startup avoid being taken for a ride.
LEVEL: Intermediate
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My Title Is Web Designer, Now What?
by Val Head and Chris Cashdollar
As agencies and professionals become more entrenched in their processes for creating sites, the role of the web designer has become more nuanced. The skillsets of people who call themselves web designers can vary greatly from one to the next. One may never touch code; one may have their hands in every step of building out their designs; others may be somewhere in between.
These days it's hard to know what kind of things you should be expected to do as a web designer. Should we continue to add skills outside of the traditional realm of design to our toolbox? Do we focus on becoming design experts? The way we answer questions will affect our careers and how we work.
In this panel we will discuss what we, as web designers, need to do to adapt to the new trends and ever-changing demands of our craft. We'll talk about what skills a web designer should have in their design toolbox and tackle questions like: should designers know how to code? Where do the skills of a graphic designer and a web designer overlap and where do they differ? And how does the differentiation of role expectations effect design processes?
LEVEL: Intermediate
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Understanding Humans: New Psychology and the Social Web
by Gavin Bell and Jyri Engestrom
The internet is now social, but the tools and theories we use to understand it are rooted in a pre-social past. Much of the psychology inspired interaction design draws on information processing models from desktop application design. Perfect for shopping carts, not so good for understanding the social web. Newer psychological theories like Activity Theory or Actor Network theory can help us understand our need for tools like Twitter and Facebook. This world of post-cognitive theories understand social relationship and move beyond the simple world of goal directed tasks with neat closure. The social object is a great framing device for current applications, but Activity Theory has more to offer us. Every act is social in nature. Using this as a starting point this talk will explore how relationships form and how our interactions with each other on the internet form part of our wider experience. Learn how to pick the key objects and actions for your application. Understand the important social aspects of the interactions you support and how privacy affects these exchanges. The coming distributed social web are based on social objects, activity streams plus much protocol glue to connect them. These post cognitive theories are the framework from which they were derived, but there is much more to them that you can apply to your own projects.
Tuesday 15th March 2011
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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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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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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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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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