If you are planning to attend SxSW in 2012, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Analysis paralysis: There are hundreds of talks, panels, core conversations and workshops to choose from on the Interactive track and you are guaranteed to feel like you are missing out. Deal with it. Consider choosing a theme: gaming, mobile, future of journalism, social media, marketing, design/development etc. and sticking to it. I found that six talks a day was my limit (9:30, 11:00, 12:30, 14:00, 15:30, 17:00). By 18:00 you are suffering from info overload – reset your brain with a good meal (see below), SxSW chit-chat with your many new friends (you will meet many) and great music (Austin by night is your oyster).
• (Wo)man with a plan: Each morning I would plan my day by choosing which talks I wanted to attend. Often there are two or three talks on similar topics. Researching who the speaker/panelists were for each event helped with the decision making process. Doing the research – Google is my friend – on those presenting, especially the keynote speakers, enriched the experience dramatically. It’s worth checking where the keynote speaker will be presenting and getting there early as space is limited and simulcast just isn’t the same.
• Stay connected: Data roaming charges will kill you, so be sure to turn it off when you reach US soil. AT&T and T-Mobile both offer great pre-paid deals with data bundles included. There is no RICA rigmarole, which makes life considerably easier. The Austin Convention Centre and all the campuses have free wifi. Be sure to check that your hotel has wifi before you book. Ivo’s hotel only had 250 connections for 209 number of rooms! If you are going in a group or know others who will be attending the conference, choose a group chat app like Beluga, Skype or Whatsapp to stay in touch. It makes organising dinner and party plans a breeze.
• Off the beaten track: When the crowds got too much I headed out to South Lamar and found some great fashion, music and second hand shops. Be sure not to miss Howl, Unbridaled, Moss, Cash America and Music Makers. The Warehouse District offers a great escape from Sixth Street and for a shopping fix go to The Drag on Guadeloupe. Here you will find old favourites like American Apparel and Urban Outfitters. Although I never got the time to try it out, milk + honey spa on 2nd Street in downtown Austin looked amazing. When you spend eight hours of your day sitting or running to the next presentation, a massage is just the thing to help you relax and unwind.
• Whole Foods: This store deserves its own article! For an experience of a lifetime, pay this grocery store heaven a visit. You won’t be disappointed.
• Avoid 6th Street at all costs, you will land up there anyway. Instead explore the hundreds of official and unofficial parties on offer all over town. The Ning Unofficial SxSW Guide can be downloaded as an app from the iStore and is a great resource for party seekers of all descriptions. Side note: The Frog Design party is not to be missed and neither is the Film Closing/Music Opening party. This year the surprise act was the Foo Fighters. Just a pity all the geeks were tweeting about it instead of enjoying the show.
• Food food glorious food: My favourites:
  • Uchi – if you like Japanese food (think fatty tuna sashimi, sea urchin and quail egg champagne shots and saba shio norwegian mackerel grilled with parsley and preserved lemon) don’t miss Uchi.
  • La Condesa – stylish Mexican food without the cheesy nachos, music or décor. They also serve the best martini I have ever tasted: watermelon and elderflower. Yum.
  • La Crepe – a great breakfast spot just two blocks from the Austin Convention Centre that serves what we South Africans would call pannekoek.
  • The Flying Falafel and Po Boy – with only four tables, no waiters and a stern warning to beware of the claws when you order the crawfish gumbo, this family owned restaurant was the best surprise. Dirt cheap, squeaky clean and a little confused (it serves both traditional Cajun food and Lebanese food) it is well worth the trek up to Guadeloupe.
  • And if it’s just a good ol’ American burger you’re looking for, go no further than the burger stand outside the Convention Centre. Depending on the time of day the wait can be tedious, but you will be sure to make friends in the queue.
• Accommodation: It ain’t cheap and hotels fill up fast. It’s worth staying more central or picking a hotel that is situated on the shuttle route ($50 for five days of unlimited rides). A king size bed, wifi, in-room dining and laundry service is key, but breakfast is not. This is America, swing a stick and you’ll hit three Starbucks’ where the coffee is good and the pastries are fresh. I stayed at the AT&T Conference Centre and Hotel, which was wonderful. Classy with impeccable service, free wifi and the fist stop on the shuttle route, it’s worth booking early. If you prefer to be a little more central, The Hampton Inn is only two blocks away from the Convention Centre and four blocks away from Sixth Street. If you are high up enough the street noise shouldn’t bug you.
• Getting there: It’s a long haul and time zones are a b*tch, but if you diligently chew your anti jet-lag tablets, avoid the alcohol, book an aisle seat (easy access to the loo), take a cushy pillow and load enough e-books on your iPad, you will survive. No doubt business class is the way to go, but we can’t all be that lucky. SAA will soon be offering direct flights from Johannesburg to Washington DC and from there it’s a hop skip and a jump to Austin, Texas. What ever you do, don’t take the route I did on the way home: Austin – Kansas – Washington DC – Dakar – Johannesburg. It’s not worth the R1000 you save on the air ticket!

See you next year.

Gaby interviewed Brandon Evans Founder of CrowdTap.com at SxSW:

Brandon Evans, founder, CrowdTap

Can you explain what CrowdTap is?

CrowdTap is the first on-demand consumer participation network. We make it as easy for brands to collaborate with consumers, on demand, as it is to launch Google Adwords or Facebook ads. As marketing shifts to be more about direct communication and individual peer networks, it’s important that brands have a scalable and measurable way to partner with consumers throughout the marketing process.

2. When can we expect it to open up in South Africa?

Good question, we just launched in the US and have many requests to go international. I don’t think it will happen this year but after that, we will evaluate all opportunities.

3. What sort of client base are you working with?

We are working with leading PR agencies, advertising agencies and digital and social media agencies as well as some brands directly. The brands utilizing CrowdTap are largely Fortune 500 companies, across virtually all industries including retail, consumer goods, technology and media companies.

4. What is your impression and understanding of technology in Africa?

To be honest, I am not that informed about the technology sector in Africa. I do feel like the world as a whole is adopting technologies at a much more rapid pace then ever before which is narrowing the gap between nations.

There seemed (to me) to be a recurring theme at SxSW 2011. In almost every session on design and development that I attended, the issue of retention was raised.

If you look at the pace at which online business is born — witness the recent group discount craze in South Africa — how do you ensure that you keep your users or customers engaged in your offering? Last month it was Wicount & Groupon, this week it is Zappon, next week, who will it be? Angry Birds is out, Tiny Wings is in. As a friend of mine David Iannone says, “America’s favorite flavor, is me, and NEW.” 

LinkedIn recently reported that it has over 100 million users. Twitter accrues 460 000 new accounts per day. Foursquare is headed toward 10 million users by August. Facebook squats happily on its 600 million (and growing) user base. MXit has 10 million active South African users, and the new kid on the block, Motribe, is gobbling up 10 000 users per day.

Sadly though, Comscore reports that MySpace unique visitors declined by 14.4% (from 73 million to 63 million) between January and February 2011, leaving it with just half the audience that it had last year. MySpace has become the reference for a troubled site (although, but from a South African perspective bear in mind that their uniques are still above 60 million!).

In his presentation, Five Steps to a Bulletproof UX Strategy, Robert Hoekman Jr, author of “Designing the Obvious”, revisited the Joshua Porter (Designing for the Social Web) product lifecycle: Awareness, Conversion, Engagement, Retention. Break retention up and what you get is “Do users come back? Are users passionate users?

Some tech companies and brands have got this right — globally at least — and if two solutions became apparent to me at SxSW, retention lies in the successful deployment of game mechanics and stories.

In his keynote talk, the CEO of SCVNGR, Seth Priebatsch had this to say: “The next decade is the decade of he game layer. It is about influence and individual motivation.”

Obviously you would expect that out of a 22 year olds mouth but he went on to validate why he is the very successful 22 year old Princeton dropout who secured $4m on his 21st birthday from Google Ventures to grow his business. Much like Blake Mycoskie (Founder of TOMS Shoes and another keynote speaker) his intent and motivation is to challenge current models and the way in which we perceive things like the education system or global warming. By introducing game thinking, how can challenges be addressed and problems be solved? His focus isn’t just on getting a super user badge. 

His opening remark was reinforced by Nadya Direkova, Senior Interaction Designer at Google, in her fantastic, well-prepared presentation, Design Patterns for User Engagement. She opened with little story about the familiar “I can has Cheezburger” (LOLcats) site. You would think a site like that would lose its flavour over time, but not so when they introduced game mechanics. Their registration went up by 200% and they recorded 63 million user actions. That type of growth would probably explain the $30m injection of funding it received from The Foundry earlier this year. 

As a tech company this is what you are looking for, according to Reid Hoffman, whom I think has his hand in every pie in the Valley. “High growth rates, high numbers, high high margins.” He echoed the same sentiment as Priebatsch and Mycoskie “Is it going to affect or revolutionise an entire industry?” 

So with our playbooks in hand we go off and craft mechanics into our offering (start-up or brand) but what of retention through stories? I absolutely loved Robert Brunner‘s very slick presentation, Designing Ideas not Objects. Brunner, the former Director of Industrial Design for Apple and now a partner at the Ammunition Group, he posed the thought that “relationships are the sum of our experiences”.

Retention is by definition about keeping a relationship going. Therefore it makes sense that retention is about creating experiences. New experiences. How that unfolds as a tech company could be in how new features or functions are strategically and timeously rolled out. Apple is the master at manifesting desire (and long queues) with their iterations, rollouts and releases. The same thinking needs to be applied to upgrades.

Hoekman, in his presentation, when referring to apps, said there was nothing more annoying than a weekly update. So how stories are told and unfold is important too. From a brand perspective it could include creating content that is relevant to your community and strategically and timeously deploying that content. 

In the session, Critical thinking for UX Designers – or anyone really, Russ Unger, User Experience Designer at Happy Cog, suggested that to truly test a design or retention strategy a tech company or brand should hold a funeral for their product and ask themselves the question “Why did this product fail?” 

It’s a tough question, because no one wants to be a MySpace.

In his recent post, Does PR have a future?, David Armano, senior VP of Social Business Planning at Edelman Digital, predicts that as business becomes more social, job descriptions will change. Each employee will become the face of the company, acting in part as the marketing, communications and sales agent for their organisation every time they engage publicly, especially on social networks.

Employees have been doing this for years at conferences, launches, client meetings, functions, and on the shop floor, but with the proliferation of social media platforms (both online and mobile) this expectation and requirement of employees has certainly increased. Now everyone is a brand ambassador, online and off, in and outside of the organisation.

What does this mean for the role of the public relations department and agency?

In his post, Armano asks if PR will cease to exist if everyone is a spokesperson to some degree. He answers: “It’s probably not that simple since the reality is that ‘communications’ will not end up as a free-for-all activity, but as something which evolves into more than just communicating but also interacting. In my mind — the key is relationships. Manage the relationships between all critical stakeholders who can make or break your business, and you hold the key to a more sustainable way of doing business. Sound like PR?”

Armano, together with Richard Brewer-Hay, Chief Blogger for eBay Inc., lead what is referred to as a core conversation at SxSW Interactive entitled Why PR’s Future May Not Look Like PR (#FuturePR if you want to look it up). What struck me from the conversation was that it would appear that the PR industry in the US seems to be facing many of the same issues as the South African industry, namely: What role does PR play in the communications mix? When will PR do its own PR? Who should lead the charge for social media strategies and fulfill the role of community manager? When do we stop calling it PR?; and how do we convince clients to justifiably increase budgets?

It being a core conversation where everyone was invited to contribute, I shared with the room that MANGO-OMC is increasingly finding itself in the position of lead agency. Clients tend to brief us at a business strategy level, we develop the key messaging and communication strategy, identify the channels for dissemination and subsequently brief the designers, photographers, website developers, mobile developers and copy writers. We also draft the content strategy, liaise with the media and bloggers, build the Facebook and Twitter pages, set up the online and offline tracking accounts, monitor the conversations, respond, activate, seed, lobby, educate, manage perceptions…the list goes on.

Only one other person in the room related, and commented on what I was saying. Everyone else wished they could relate.

This got me thinking. Here I am in a room filled with America’s top PR professionals, all of whom are facing the same issues and very few of whom have thought it possible that PR could and should lead the charge. I refer to an article I recently wrote for a trade media publication in South Africa:

“In years gone by, PR practitioners all too often allowed themselves to be pigeon-holed into a traditional media relations role. They would be brought on board to conjure up publicity for pre-planned campaigns, often without being briefed on the bigger picture. Now companies are beginning to understand that communications skills need to be incorporated from the word go and be applied across all the relevant channels. In essence, the communication campaign should be guided by the business objectives.

So, whether planning a new campaign, communicating a business decision, or fire-fighting community backlash through a crisis communication plan, the communication industry’s skills are essential to understanding an audience’s motivations, correctly packaging the message to be best received across various channels, and managing ongoing engagement to achieve the desired outcome.”

I ended my comment to the audience by saying that PR is about collaborative advantage as opposed to competitive advantage, and it seemed to resonate.

In the past, clients often veered away from inter-agency collaboration, expecting the result to be bitchy in-fighting and a distinct lack of co-ordination. More recently, as the media continues to fragment and brands frantically try to position themselves consistently across all the channels to reach their customer base, inter-agency collaboration has become a necessity.

As someone at the #FuturePR core conversation mentioned, the future of PR is moving from a traditional spokesperson model to a scalable ecosystem model that is able to manage multi layered and complex relationships. The big question PR agencies and internal communications departments have ask is, how do you scale and leverage those relationships — both internally with staff (marketing, sales, R&D, customer service) and externally with consumers, third party suppliers, investors and government?

Guy Kawasaki said it well during his presentation on The Art of Enchantment: “The nobodies are the new somebodies.” While standing in Whole Foods in Austin – arguably the best grocery store in the world – I was faced with analysis paralysis. All I really wanted to know was whether the olive bar was included in the price of the salad bar. I approached an employee to ask. When she heard my accent the conversation naturally drifted to where I was from and how, in South Africa, nothing like this exists. The woman proceeded to tell me about when the store was opened, how it is the flagship store, how many other stores exist and are being opened and how she had even been on a site visit. She lived the brand, could tell me all I wanted to know and sold me on the philosophy. She was the PR, marketing, sales and customer service liaison all rolled into one.

That is the future of PR: micro-interactions.

The onus is now on us to assist our clients in empowering their networks and building meaningful relationships in an interconnected world.

So how exactly do you get to South by South West? By car, by plane or by bus? One of the most interesting discoveries this year at SxSW was The Startup Bus. Conceived by Elias Bizannes, an Aussie living in San Francisco, he created an opportunity for start-up types, designers, developers and the like to apply to win a seat on a bus. Thirty-eight teams leave in six buses from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, and New York. Their job: to conceptualise, prototype & design a website for their start-up, with people they have most likely never met before.

Bizannes believed that “Learning how to focus on what matters is a key reason why I chose a bus and not another transport mechanism. The goal was to put a set of constraints on people so they can think about the things that mattered and focus their time on the work that has the highest impact.”

And yes there is a “win” attached to it. This years winners:

TripMedi

WalkIn

Zef hits the silver screen — Ninja and Yo-Landi, better known as Die Antwoord, premiered their first short film at SxSW Film in Austin, Texas. It were gangsta.

People you meet at #SxSW — Gaby Rosario continues her quest for snap interviews with interesting people.

South Africa inspires TOMS Shoes — Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS Shoes and the One for One Movement it pioneered, delivered a keynote address today. Toby Shapshak was there.

Be Evil: Does corporate social responsibility matter? — You just know, with a title like that, it’s going going to be good. Ivo Vegter was a moth to Siva Vaidhayanathan’s flame.

Nuclear Tacos waiver — SxSW is incomplete without a Monday evening supper of astonishingly hot tacos. Some of us enjoyed it more than others.

Viral marketing with The Oatmeal — Alistair Fairweather on the funny, unassuming Mathew Inman, the man behind some of the web’s most popular viral memes.

Things to love about SxSW — Catherine Lückhoff and the M&G’s Chris Roper note down some random observations in an attempt to capture what makes SxSW — and Austin — so great.

Anonymity is Authenticity — 4chan — One view of Monday’s keynote by Christopher Poole, the founder of “the dark heart of the internet”, 4chan.

Distrupted, again: the next chapter in news — Matt Williams, the CEO of digg.com, lists the many ways in which the news business is changing. Catherine Lückhoff reports.

People you meet at #SxSW — Gaby Rosario continues her quest for snap interviews with interesting people.

Can banks innovate? — Mark Griffioen is a banker. That’s sad, but at least he’s a geeky sort of banker. Ivo Vegter looks at what he’s been up to.

Networking at #SxSW — It’s all about who you meet, who you talk to, who you close that deal with, at SxSW. Gaby Rosario is good at meeting people.

How the web is changing Dutch Politics — A fascinating look at the politics of talking to voters who are spoilt for choice, and spend more time online than watching TV. By Ivo Vegter.

4chan 4ever — Alistair Fairweather’s look at the Christopher Poole keynote address. The “dark heart of the internet” was clearly popular here on #sxswsa.

It wasn’t quite Oscar night, but it was a classy old cinema called the State Theatre, in Austin Texas. It had a marquee and lights and red carpets and popcorn and everything. And beer. Beer in a cinema is Die Antwoord.

Ninja and Yo Landi, the Zef-rap duo who go by that name, play caricatures of themselves in the world premiere of a short film called Umshini Wam. People, says Yo Landi, aren’t taking them seriously anymore, so they have to keep it gangsta. They do. They drive wheelchairs, wear pink and yellow furry suits, smoke astonishingly large joints, and play with their Uzis the way most SxSW folks play with their iPhones: all the time, and with reckless disregard for the safety of bystanders. It’s gang$ta nommer een.

The Austin State Theatre fills up prior to the premiere of Umshini Wam

It’s unclear to me what international audiences see in Die Antwoord. The custom plates that say FOKOF GP or WATKYKJY GP, or exclamations like “Poes!” and “Vat hom, fluffy!”, all require a certain context for their humour. That said, the theatre was almost full, perhaps in part because of the reputation of director Harmony Korine, who won the main prize at the Toronto Film Festival late last year for Trash Humpers.

Die Antwoord made its film debut at Austin's State Theatre

A group of Americans we caught up with on the way out thought the film was both funny and absurd. However, they had no idea that Umshini Wam — conveniently translated to “bring me my machine gun” — has a fairly significant context in the person of one Jacob Zuma, nor that this Jacob guy is the president of South Africa.

My own opinion? Fok, piele!

Miles Sims and Andy Jones of www.smallworldlabs.com

Miles Sims and Andy Jones of www.smallworldlabs.com

Gaby Rosario: SWL is based in Austin and you are veterans of SXSW, what has been your impression about this year?

Andy Jones: The size this year, there is a change in the dynamic, it is more diluted where previously it has been more tech focused. Now we see more corporates, brands and agencies.

GR: So what value does SXSW have for you?

AJ: It’s all about the networking, it would just be great to have a structured networking process.
MS: Change dynamic more tech

GR: What is your understanding of technology in Africa?

MS: Sadly we don’t get to hear too much, but it is a market for us. We have the general impression or stereotype that the States is ahead of the game, but would like to see work that proves otherwise.

South Africa has provided the inspiration for the next phase of TOMS Shoes One-for-One-movement, its founder Blake Mycoskie said in a keynote at SxSW.

TOMS is an American shoe company that gives one pair of shoes to children-in-need around the world for every pair bought by its customers. It’s an inspirational story of how a business can succeed when “you incorporate giving into your business”.

Started in 2006, TOMS has given away over a million pairs of shoes to children, often in developing countries in South America. It began after he saw the hardships faced by kids growing up barefoot in Argentina when he competed in The Amazing Race TV show in 2001. He came second. “We lost $1 million by four minutes, and it was all my fault. I epitomised the cliché that men will never stop and ask for directions,” he joked.

During a holiday back to the country in 2006, the 34-year-old Mycoskie, for whom TOMS is his fifth start-up business, he thought up the idea for TOMS, using the Argentinian alpargata shoe. Worn by farmers for hundreds of year they are lightweight, made of canvas and easy to manufacture. Sold in bright colours, they stood out.

He chose shoes to counter soil-transmitted diseases in developing countries, “which can penetrate the skin through bare feet. Wearing shoes can help prevent these diseases, and the long-term physical and cognitive harm they cause,” he says on his website. “Wearing shoes also prevents feet from getting cuts and sores. Not only are these injuries painful, they also are dangerous when wounds become infected.”

And, he says, “many times children can’t attend school barefoot because shoes are a required part of their uniform. If they don’t have shoes, they don’t go to school. If they don’t receive an education, they don’t have the opportunity to realise their potential”.

Once, when he returned to Argentina on his first “shoe drop” – where he physically put the shoes on the children – he took his mother. “When I first went to Argentina to put the shoes on those kids, my life changed,” he said at SxSW. “Five months before, it was just an idea. When I saw my mom on her hands and knees, wiping kids’ feet clean and putting shoes on their feet, I just lost it. I was crying so hard that I scared away all the kids who were around me.”

“When I got on my hands and knees and starting putting these
shoes on these kids’ feet. I was filled with complete joy. I was elated.”

He told the story of how after they had given out the shoes, an emotional mother of three sons came up to thank him.

Through a Spanish interpreter she explained her sons only had one pair of shoes between them and took it in turns to go to school. Now all three could go every day. He said the interpreter, himself and his mother all cried. Twitter was filled with messages from attendees who were crying after he told the story.

“If you incorporate giving into your business, it gets marketing. It attracts the most amazing people into your company.”

“The greatest competitive advantage is to allow you employees to do something that makes them feel like they are giving back.”

TOMS got lucky when the first shoe store he sold the shoes to put a notice in the window. It became a national newspaper story and later it was flighted on TV.

“TOMS did not have to focus on advertising, but on giving,” he says.

He had intended to sell 250 shoes in his first year, but sold 10 000.

Then he had two pieces of luck, he said. The first was fashion legend Ralph Lauren offered to design a range of shoes for his Rugby chain of stores. It was the first time Lauren, with his $3-billion a year business, had designed anything for another brand in 40 years.

Then AT&T used him in an adverting campaign, he says it was “an authentic story”, of how he used their network to stay in touch and work on the go.

“When you incorporate giving into your business you attract most amazing partners,” he says of these two pieces of good fortune.

“It would never have happened if we were just a shoes company, but because we’re a giving company. We sold and gave about an extra 100 000 shoes because of that.”

Mycoskie, who has a wild shock of curly hair, told a story of how, in the early days, he saw a woman in airport wearing a bright red pair of TOMS. He pretended he knew nothing about them and asked her. She related his whole story back to him. He then thought he had to tell her who he was, and her first response, to his brush cut, was to ask him: “Why did you cut your hair?”

But, he realised from this: “Giving doesn’t just feel good, it’s a really good business strategy. When you incorporate giving into your business, your customers become your biggest marketers.”

After telling the remarkable story about his firm’s origins, he explained how he is always asked two questions after he gives talks about the importance of giving in business.

“The first I always answer, the second I never answer,” he told thousands of listeners in the packed auditorium, and thousands more who watched it simulcast around the 10 venues that make up SxSW.

“The first (question) is who is Tom? The truth is there is no Tom. I wanted to call them Tomorrow shoes, but you can’t fit that on the little label so I shortened it to TOMS,” he said to riotous laughter. “I had no idea every single person would want to meet him. There is no Tom, it’s an idea for a better tomorrow.”

The second question, is “what’s next for TOMS?”

He says he’s known since 2007 when he came on a shoe drop to South Africa what that would be.

“I went to South Africa and saw how people experience extreme poverty and their many needs not being met.” After giving away 50 000 pairs of shows, “I realised TOMS’ one for one model was working. If it was this powerful for shoes, it could it meet other needs”.

Not that he’s telling. He showed off a large container on the stage. “The next one for one product is inside this mystery box will be opened on June 7th.

The truth is this: what’s inside this box is not near as important as what is represents. TOMS is no longer a shoe company, it’s a one for one company.”