Editor’s note: T3 is already gearing up for SXSWi 2010, and we’ve submitted four speaker proposals for this year’s event. We’ll be highlighting our panel submissions during public voting, and we hope you check them out and vote.
Images, icons and buttons guide our perception of mobile devices, street signs, and computer interfaces, because as humans, we are wired to recognize shapes and colors before we read words.
During our proposed “Images and Icons: Creative Thinking Never Looked So Good” panel at the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival, participants will learn ways to harness this natural predisposition to create more effective digital experiences.
Discover techniques that you can use immediately to strike the right balance between visual and written cues, identify the things that you should always check for when finalizing a design, and find ways to improve your signal-to-noise ratio while still creating a badass design. Each technique will be accompanied with the actual science behind it, and real-life case studies to help you see what it works.
In this session, Erin Young, T3 Information Architect, will lead a diverse panel of digital and visual practitioners in a discussion that will uncover ways to know when the rules of design should be applied (and when they should be broken.) Leave this session with tangible tactics that you can apply immediately.
If this interests you, please vote in the SXSW PanelPicker, and comment below to tell us what you’d like to see if we get selected.
When Number 26 on Forbes’ list of Most Influential Women in Media has a bad experience with your product, you have a problem. When she shares that bad experience with her Twitter followers — all 1,145,058 of them — you have a pretty big one. Maytag now faces a customer-service-meets-social-media crisis of the magnitude of the United Airlines busted baggage jingle or Domino’s Pizza viral video, thanks to one unhappy, high-profile customer.
Heather Armstrong, a.k.a Dooce, is the most popular mommy blogger ever — arguably the most popular personal blogger, period. She chronicles life as a stay-at-home mom in colorful language, sharing detailed accounts of everything from post-partum depression to her relationship with her Mormon family to natural childbirth. It’s hard to find numbers on her site traffic, but her posts draw anywhere from 300 to 1,000 comments, and advertisers on her blog include several blue chip companies. And her Twitter following is just as big.
When she was unhappy with the way Maytag responded (or failed to respond) to her almost brand-new, $1300 broken washing machine, she took it up with the same vivid gusto as any other topic.
It’s caused a big stir in the social media space, because when “Dooce” issues the call “DO NOT BUY MAYTAG,” it’s the Web 2.0 equivalent of a boycott. Her readers and followers have been supportive and amused, while others have called her a bully who’s been irresponsible with her media power. Either way, following #maytag makes for a pretty fiery read.
Maytag has put a toe in the social media water with a couple of Twitter feeds, neither of which is particularly active. But the company now finds itself thrust into the space — with zero control over the dialogue. Without an established social media forum to speak from, Maytag is at the mercy of Dooce, her supporters and her detractors to convey how Maytag may or may not be addressing the situation. Maytag has issued no official statement yet, but Dooce’s tweets on the subject indicate they are working quickly to resolve the issue to her satisfaction.
However Dooce and Maytag settle the issue of the broken $1300 washing machine, it’s yet another cautionary tale for brands that a meaningful social media presence is an essential element of public relations.
I have seen the future, and it includes print. The evidence is a video-in-print ad scheduled to run in the September 18 issue of Entertainment Weekly.
The Pepsi Max/CBS ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to New York and Los Angeles subscribers. It’s the first video ad to be embedded in a print publication, not unlike a talking birthday card, only with video. And to think I was about to give up on print.
The sad truth is ad pages and attendant revenue are down and heading south. Venerable titles have disappeared. Still, I think print has a role to play, and this video-in-print ad should act as a heads up to publishers. Only rarely have magazines earnestly attempted to bridge the digital and print worlds, but that’s exactly where they need to head. We’re past “out of the box” now. Print’s survival hinges on blowing the doors off the entire model.
The plan. How does the print world bridge the digital/physical gap? In addition to the promise of video-in-print, there are a number of smart ways:
Slug everything with 2D barcodes. Every article, every ad. Publishers can build mobile microsites to capture traffic and tell an even deeper story behind each article or ad. And they can report on this: visit volume, traffic source, time spent, actions taken. Sure, only 1% of phones have barcode readers right now, but I guarantee you there’s an “app” for that. If every page of every magazine has codes, adoption of the code reader will follow. The magazine has to become the preview of a much deeper, richer world. How many times have you been waiting for your haircut and have to abandon an interesting article? With barcoded articles, I could simply snap a quick picture and I’d have the link. Epicurean titles would almost certainly benefit from this, but I could also see sports, celebrities, business and news benefiting from barcodes. To me, this is a potential keystone in the digital/physical bridge.
Spread augmented reality. This is still very nascent technology. Mini Cooper used it very effectively last year to render a Mini in 3-D from webcams to an otherwise blank ad. Someone needs to blow this technology out, and not just advertisers. Publishers have to start believing this is part of a magazine’s content. This is crucial – publishers, not advertisers, need to drive behavioral change and take responsibility for changing the way readers interact with their product. But they’ll need to make the jump way beyond the Mini ad by figuring out a way to stream video, create pushable buttons and provide 3-D graphs. Better yet, give me 3-D video of the catwalk to go along with that fashion show article. And let’s not forget to add a little billboard that says “Sponsored by…”.
Light up the Kindle. I don’t understand why there aren’t more magazine titles on the Kindle yet. When the color Kindle comes out, there will be no excuse. The infrastructure is there: great resolution, complete connectivity and portability. I can’t decide if the Kindle will kill print or save it. But an ad that links directly to purchase on Amazon.com is a no-brainer. And again, publishers, not advertisers, need to drive this. This needs to be packaged up and ready to go.
Prove it works. Here’s the sad truth: most clients still probably optimize to click on their digital campaigns. Just proving that print drove traffic might be enough for a lot of advertisers, but let’s do our best to shed the mistakes of the past, because on a cost-per basis, print might not hold up well against typical CPC deals. This means print has to prove more, to quantify interaction. We have to pull out all of the stops. We need a plan for how we’ll hook this up with Omniture, Webtrends and Hitbox. I want to know how many times the ad was shared and how long people spent with it. I want to know if this generated buzz in the blogosphere. I want to know about the kinds of people who interacted with my ad. I want to know how many people clicked straight to Amazon from their Kindles and how much revenue that represents.
I want print to live, but print has to want to live. It has to leapfrog ahead and re-take the reins of its own destiny. And it needs to start today.
