Add an eventSessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 on Sunday 11th March in InterContinental Stephen F. Austin
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Consumer Patterns Revealed by Dating Site Insiders
by Brian Schechter, Laurie Davis, Sam Yagan, Shayan Zadeh and Julie Fields
Why is it that out of 40M online daters in the U.S., only 1.3M are on the largest paid site? Even dating sites that don’t brand themselves as catering to a niche tend to attract certain types of daters. And there are no universal rules. Take NY for example: 20something social go-getters favor HowAboutWe while professionals are on Match.com. 30something entrepreneurs crave Okcupid while the traditional-valued join eHarmony. Yet the same group of people in Austin will yield different results. How do users choose the site they’re on, what inspires brand loyalty, and how do companies uncover useful data on consumer decisions? The dating industry is a great case for this phenomenon, but the issue touches nearly every consumer-facing industry. The result? Companies are battling it out for users. What makes one person choose Foursquare over Gowalla, or Groupon over LivingSocial? In a never-before-seen meeting of the dating giants, we’ll delve into the enigmatic consumer mind.
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The State of Social Marketing
by Brad McCarty, Jesse Thomas, Joe Chernov and Tyler Willis
Brad McCarty, the North American editor of The Next Web, will give a 10 minute long, rapid-fire presentation on what he believes are the most important 3 changes in social marketing. Understanding what's said in these ten minutes could shape your marketing strategy for the next 12 months.
Brad's assertions won't go unchallenged, after his presentation, 4 award-winning marketing leaders will discuss Brad's point; debating and discussing how each item affects marketers and business owners like you.
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How Brain Science Turns Browsers into Buyers
by Brian Clark, Derek Halpern, Roger Dooley and AK Pradeep
Need to boost website conversion and sales? Want to accomplish more with fewer resources? You need to appeal to and engage your customer’s brain. The vast majority of your buyer’s decision-making is driven by emotion and unconscious processes, and if you are only selling features, benefits, and prices you aren’t maximizing your success. Learn how to apply cutting-edge neuroscience, neuromarketing, and behavior research in designing your site, crafting persuasive copy, and more. But don’t worry, this is a jargon-free presentation. The expert panelists, all from different backgrounds, will focus on techniques that produce bottom-line results.
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Social CRM Meet Up
by Rod Favaron
Get together with other social CRM experts for an hour of brainstorming, idea-buidling, networking, friend-making and career-enhancement. Or, attend this Meet Up to learn more about this segment of the industry -- or if you are looking to hire a social CRM expert for your company.
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Voices Carry: Why Authentic Brand Voices Matter
by Michael Dutton, Sarah Passe, Shawn Amos, Tim Stickelbrucks and Sharon Feder
A well thought out, authentic, and strategic digital content program is more important than ever for driving social media strategy, increasing user engagement, and building syndication relationships. This panel will debate and discuss the business case for well crafted editorial and video content as well as the necessity for authenticity, properly marrying a brand's voice with SEO and the defining line between farmed, borrowed and genuine expert Branded Content. The panel will feature executives from Amos Content Group, CAA, Associated Press and will be moderated by What's Trending co-host Melissa Rowley.
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We the People: Creating a Consumer's Bill of Rights
by Anne Bezancon and Shane Green
Who will determine the future of your privacy and digital life? Will it be Apple, Google, Al Franken, or you?Everyone's talking about all of the data people are creating and how it’s protected – or not. Key Internet players have faced lawsuits and legislative, regulatory and media scrutiny for how they track, share, sell, and retain consumer info. This has created a perfect storm for Congress to lead a charge to protect consumer privacy. But governments are as interested in access to consumer and citizen data as any big company.Shouldn’t we the people have a say in defining these standards? Absolutely.We’ll use this session to create a privacy bill of rights that tackles key issues around data, permissions, transparency, exporting information, and data deletion. We’ll use location based services as the case study, led by leading practitioners in the field.Together, in this interactive session, we’ll create 10 unalienable rights and vote to ratify it for the world to use.
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Brand As API: Connect Differently
by Glenn Platt and Peg Faimon
As brands finally begin to deliver on the promise of a 1-to-1 relationship with their customers (through social media, mobile, and data-driven tools), it is critical to develop a new foundation for that relationship. This requires brands to leave the “broadcast relationship” and, instead, build a relationship sharing communication, innovation, and the very product/service itself. Insight into this relationship can be found in the structure, language, and use of APIs (Application Programming Interface). APIs provide a set of rules – a language for connecting to data and services. To remix. To build. To leverage. To extend. Many API calls provide explicit metaphors for the ways brands can connect to customers. Generally, the API relationship provides insights into the role of brands in the customers’ life. This conversation will explore these metaphors, share case studies, and work to build a language for better connecting consumers with their brands.
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Brands: The Cost of Being Human
Why do brands resist being human? Understanding the question, and its answer, reveals much as to the reasons why companies continue to struggle with the adoption of social business practices. Fear not! You can do something to make your company more connected, more human, and you can do it now.
This seminar is for all you enlightened brand strategists, hard working late night community managers, and social business practitioners. We will show you: how to build the business case for being human; how to properly measure the ROI and engagement value of each conversation; how to convince senior managers to give you more headcount; and how to prove that people can scale. At a more macro level, you will understand hidden fears of CMOs, and how to speak their language. You will walk away with real life examples, measurement models, and a plan of action. Let the humanizing begin!
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Customers Are Irrational: Stop Fighting It
by Colin Shaw
Why do people knock wood for luck? Why do people press elevator buttons 20 times, even though they know it won’t make the elevator come any faster? People are irrational. Why do people love inanimate objects like smartphones? Why do people cry when they see an artist’s work? People are irrational.Who are your customers? Irrational people. So why then do organizations design rational experiences? Emotions comprise more than half the typical customer experience. With the immediacy of information and social media, you must embrace that irrationality and use it to your advantage by building a deliberate experience. Effectively managing and engaging subconsciously with these irrational customers is essential.Join international bestselling customer experience author Colin Shaw as he presents new psychological research that reveals examples of irrationality, the mistakes organizations are making today, and how you can embrace irrationality and build an emotionally engaging experiences.
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Large Enterprise Social Media Professionals, Unite!
by Noah Kuttler
The social media challenges of a large enterprise are unique from those of a startup. For example: what are often "simple" person-to-person tasks at a startup do not necessarily scale when they are administered in a company of over 1,000 employees. This meetup is designed to bring both employees of large enterprises, as well as the agencies who work with them, together to share advice, tips and make connections.
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Brands with Benefits: Hooking Up with Good Deals
by Florent Peyre, John Caron, Sarah Fay and Tom Burgess
Are your customers in a long-term relationship with your brand? Do you get the feeling they are just looking for a one night stand? Or is it just…complicated? Today’s frugal consumer is increasingly likely to bounce between brands and stores to find the best deal, and competition for their love is heating up. How do you keep the flame alive with the “deal of the moment” consumer that has a bit of a wandering eye? If you’re looking for a short-term hook up with a hot little check-in app – try another panel. This session will cover long-term loyalty solutions that create the perfect marriage of today’s social, local and mobile strategies. Hear from leaders at Gilt City, Modiv Media and Linkable Networks about how brands and retailers are keeping customers loyal with in-store mobile commerce, card linked offers and daily deal programs that drive redemption. By offering your customers exactly what they want, when they want it, you can get the relationship back on track.
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Customer Experience Meet Up
Where is the Customer in Customer Experience? With the democratization of the web, customer experience is consistently a top meme. Now that ordinary citizens have a voice with large brands, what does the future hold for Customer Experience? Get together with other customer experience experts for an hour of brainstorming, idea-buidling, networking, friend-making and career-enhancement. Or, attend this Meet Up to learn more about this segment of the industry -- or if you are looking to hire a customer experience expert for your company.
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Designing for Awareness in the Attention Economy
by Brian Sullivan and Taylor Cowan
In today’s digitally-connected online world, everything competes for your attention. An attention economy exists for consumers. We have more information and easier ways to deliver it. Yet, consumers have a finite set of attention to "pay" to these competing messages.
Each person has many different types of awareness, which affect how they react and perceive situations. By understanding these different levels, designers and developers can create strategies to account for awareness to build more effective products.
In this talk, you will learn about the different types of human awareness, design strategies to maximize awareness, and examples of good and bad awareness designs from existing products. You will walk away with awareness guidelines to help you better design for awareness in the Attention Economy.
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F**k Privacy: Neuromarketing Is the Web's Future
by Joseph Carrabis and Shaina Boone
Consumers are uninformed, and consequently paranoid, about data collection and privacy standards. They presume marketers are peering into their personal lives and equate web analysts to identity thieves. What they fail to understand are the hidden costs to cracking down on privacy, for the capitalist and consumer in us all. Privacy restrictions will result in decreased sales, lost jobs, poor content, irrelevant advertising and shitty consumer experiences. It will set digital technology back a decade. One could argue this pro-privacy is almost rooted in anti-capitalism.
As marketers and advertisers, we only stand to lose. Advancements in neuromarketing and analytics are making great strides to give those very same consumers truly personalized digital experience across all mediums. We envision experiences that put their needs before those of brands and actually improve lives.
If there was ever a time to fight ignorance, it’s now. Join us for a heated debate over this brewing topic.
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Don't Just Sell Things: Change the World
by Cindy Gallop, Margaret Keene, Matthew Bishop and Neil Powell
Our world is changing: the planet is warming, the population is growing, the water supply is being threatened and financial systems are suffering. Traditional ways of conducting business and developing products are evolving and the belief that earning a profit for profit's sake is becoming dangerously irresponsible. Hosted by Matthew Bishop from The Economist, the session will bring together Neil Powell, founder of The Information Blanket; Cindy Gallop, founder of If We Ran the World; Margaret Keene, executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi LA, the agency helping Toyota harness the power of their brand with programs like “Ideas for good” and “100 cars for good;” and Leo Premutico, co-founder of Johannes Leonardo, to explore the intersection of ethics and economics and look at why driving for social good has become has the guiding principle for the world's leading innovators.
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Personal Identity Management: Why It Matters
The marketing ecosystem as it stands is unsustainable. Consumers don’t trust marketers to respect their privacy, and unfortunately, marketers have done a poor job explaining how data is collected, managed and applied to improve the customer experience.
Meanwhile, as consumers leave behind an exponentially growing digital footprint, they’re also becoming increasingly aware that marketers use and sell this data for financial gain. As a result, a nascent industry is developing around consumers’ desire for transparency, portability, privacy and tangible benefits.
In this session, we’ll share results of research aimed at understanding consumers’ motivators, concerns, and awareness of this ecosystem. We’ll make sense of terms like “VRM,” “data locker,” “personal cloud” and “trust framework,” and provide an overview of the Identity Ecosystem, including the operating models, the frontrunners in each, and how interactive marketers can get ahead of the curve.
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Skynet vs. Mad Max: Battle for the Future
by Mel Exon, Tom Uglow and jeremyet
Forget the hype surrounding the social web for a moment, what about something a little further out? This talk will paint a picture of two possible futures, along the way asking the audience to help decide in 2012 if either has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming a reality. Choose between:
1. Brands and users operate in a future-perfect environment of algorithm-driven, sublime relevance, where no nanobyte of data is wasted. Brands display artificial intelligence - becoming, in effect, self-aware - able to determine without human intervention how best to serve their customers. This leads to a glorious future of zero spam and delightful indolence amongst humanity as AI machines do all the work.. for now.
OR
2. Brands and their users seek to fight for discovery and serendipity. Attempting at every juncture to circumvent the algorithmic tramlines laid down for their own good. Co-creating an open web with benevolent, politically neutral technology partners and real-world spaces where tech simply does not penetrate, this is the Wild West, 2050.
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Social Business Meet Up
Get together with other social business experts for an hour of brainstorming, idea-buidling, networking, friend-making and career-enhancement. Or, attend this Meet Up to learn more about this segment of the industry.
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Big Business: The Future of Marijuana Journalism
by William Breathes and Patricia Calhoun
Gawker says William Breathes, the nation’s first medical marijuana critic, has the “best job in journalism,” which may be why he’s been featured by the New York Times, CNN and The Daily Show. Meet him at our panel about how to cover the medical marijuana industry. Breathes and Patricia Calhoun, editor of the Westword, are based in Denver, Colorado, the Wild West of “MMJ,” where there are more dispensaries than Starbucks'. We'll show you how to report on and earn revenue from the medical marijuana industry in your community in a way that's useful to all involved. We'll share advice about handling MMJ politics, culture and how the multi-million dollar industry sprang up around it. And yes, how to cover pot culture without pandering. MMJ still remains a taboo subject for the old guard of journalism, who at best cover pot with a wink and a nod. And finally, we'll talk about being a pot critic – which may not always be the best job in journalism, but it sure beats writing obits.
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Maintaining Sanity and Profitability in Adult
by Connor Young, Jay Kopita, Lynn Raridon and Sid Grief
From modeling to producing and website building to marketing, there are many many ways to make money in adult entertainment... and many many ways to lose your mind. Whether pursuing the industry as a hobby for some extra pocket money on up to dedicating your life to its powerful forces, trappings, and high risk / high reward opportunities, this panel of experts will provide you with a survival guide to keep your bank account, and sanity, in check.