Austin, Texas, during the South-by-Southwest Interactive festival.
(Editor’s Note: Rob Anderson, director of content strategy for Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods advertising agency in Little Rock, has been on the ground at South-by-Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas. He and his team filed regular reports throughout the week on what’s hot at this influential annual conference. You can see previous posts here, here, here, here and here.)
Another South-by-Southwest Interactive Festival has come to an end, just as the South-by-Southwest Music Festival kicks off. The atmosphere shifts as a new influx of visitors arrive in Austin and rock bands replace the rock stars of tech. Or, as the cab driver who took us to the airport explained, “This place is about to get weird.”
The constant rush between panels and auditoriums may have concluded, but the processing of information has just begun. As you have seen in our posts throughout the event, our team picked up some interesting new ideas, concepts and data from some of the best and brightest in technology, marketing and communications.
For our final post, we’d like to share some of the best tidbits on a variety of different topics:
Design
David Birnbaum of Immersion said, “the digital experience is broken.” In the digital world, he explained, you simply push the button and it’s done. But in the physical world, when approaching a door handle, you gain more control and it allows you to make the decisions that determine approach, speed and experience of opening the door. Birnbaum said he believes we need more “digital handles.”
Labeled as “interaction design” or “tactile design,” this is the method of letting people feel or understand what they are experiencing through touch. These concepts of a “true experience” are seen in the resurgence of the vinyl LP. It may be inconvenient, but it’s an experience.
People crave the analog experience with digital convenience. “Post digital analog” is finding a way to make your digital design create an analog experience. When you engage the sense of touch, you incite feeling and emotion.
Content
In a session called “Use Your Words: Optimizing Content for Growth,” Evany Thomas, Brand Writer for Pinterest, said, “great solutions are the lovechild of data and intuition.” She discussed how her team at Pinterest uses both research and creativity to address the issue of driving people to sign up for Pinterest and spread the word about the service. She shared what she called Pinterest’s “Virtuous Cycle of Growth,” which begins with awareness and deciding whether the service is “for me,” and wraps around to “sign-up” and “telling others.”
She also shared the team’s philosophy that “great writing is GUTSI,” meaning that it:
G – gets the job done
U – understands its audience
T – tells a coherent story
S – sounds like the brand (personal, down-to-earth, honest)
I – is well written (clear, concise, simple)
She concluded by pointing out that good writing remains important, because “even the best designed products can use a little explaining.”
Word-of-Mouth (WOM)
During her presentation, Pinterest’s Thomas said that word-of-mouth (WOM) is the primary driver of Pinterest sign-ups.
In a presentation called “Do You Know the ROI of WOM? Do You Want To?,” representatives of major brands like PepsiCo, AT&T and Discovery Communications discussed how to measure the power of word-of-mouth.
During the session, they discussed some of the key findings of a study commissioned by The Word of Mouth Marketing Association and several brands that examined the return on investment of WOM.
The study found the following:
- On average, WOM drives 13 percent of sales. All paid marketing drives 20-30 percent on average.
- 2/3 of WOM’s impact is from offline and 1/3 is from online communication. Most happens offline.
- 2/3 of WOM’s impact is direct, and 1/3 is an “amplifier” of paid media
- WOM has more immediate impact than traditional media.
- A WOM impression drives at least 5 times more sales than paid impressions and as much as 200 times more for higher-consideration categories.
The full study can be found at womma.org/returnonWOM.
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