Spent all day Monday shuttling between ballrooms at George Washington University’s Marvin Center to hear a range of speakers, some great, some meh. Thanks to the mad team at Green Buzz for hustling and pulling the event together, and for inviting me to co-present with Melodie Jackson from Harvard Kennedy School.
A few takeaways in no particular order…
Go native. Digital native. It’s about our capacity to adapt, to use information technology to engage, inspire and improve the world. Keep up or risk irrelevance! The landscape is littered with companies that can’t or refuse to pivot. Hand me a #Gatorade (Are you tracking me, Mission Control?) Courtesy B. Bonin Bough, Pepsico, @boughb.
Take the smartcut. Kids today. They want to game this game called life, but it’s less about shortcuts and more about smarts and resourcefulness. “So, how do I get to the next level?” “Wait, you just got here.” “So?” “So, this is a job, not a game.” “Oh. (blinks) How…boring.” Courtesy Allison Hillhouse, MTV, @mtv.
TV has always been “social.” What’s all the hype? In the age of Yoots and DVRs, appointment viewing is now a thing of the past, as precious as granny’s dusty cameo. Getting viewers to share and connect, independent of place, is bound to increase, and the efforts will be expensive. Courtesy of Sabrina Caluori, HBO, @sabrinacaluori.
Can we gamify everything? Should we? What if we gamified service design, education, the retail experience? Imagine the possibilities but anticipate gaming fatigue, natch. (Read the rest of this post and earn the blue badger badge to badgeville, which will unlock a hidden link to an exclusive, never-before-seen blog post, ha.) Courtesy of Max Clark, Vitrue, @vitrue.
Lunchboxes fail to motivate. Don’t try feeding the beast with sub-par boxed lunches. Step it up next year, please. Folks were, um, restrained in their Tweets, to say the least. Courtesy Green Buzz Agency, @greenbuzzagency.
The fix is in. Understand how the “screening of our lives” and this “culture of interruption” feeds our need for speedy affirmation. If getting a text is like a hit, how can we keep the real-world, in-person conversation one that’s worth having? (Overheard at the water cooler following the “Let’s Play” panel.)
Kan we kalculate your Klout? As we engage more consumers beyond insights generation toward innovation and influence, knowing their impact–and whether we can trust them– will get easier to track and gain import. That a job candidate will put his/her Klout score on said resume still has me scratching ye olde noggin. Brave new job interview, indeed. Courtesy Tim Mahlman, Klout, @tmahlman
Optimize thy video. The metrics are off, way off, as most campaigns fail to drive key brand metrics, favoring impressions and/or click-thru rates instead. Do not pass go. Go back and re-examine your campaign objectives first. Courtesy Mark Rotblat, TubeMogul, @tubemogul.
Brands of the future will be ‘sustainable brands.’ Twenty-first century brands will go to market with practical or functional benefits, but they will also embed into their DNA how they’re making the world a better place, and how they connect us to ‘tribes’ of like-minded and like-hearted consumers. Courtesy of me, BBMG, @whichmitch.
Visuals rawk! You know the cliché: a picture is worth a thousand words. So why aren’t more presenters following TED’s model: tell me a story, say it with dynamic visuals and video. Don’t torture me with 10-point type and undecipherable charts and graphs. Courtesy of Death by Powerpoint, no Twitter handle at press time.
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So what were your takeaways? Lemmeno. And don’t be a stranger. See you at SXSW Interactive.