I attended the Seattle Interactive Conference today (#sic2011) and wanted to share my notes. There were lots of great sessions, but I could only attend four. Best session I attended was the first – Sean O’Driscoll from Ant’s Eye View and his stages of social media program – “the journey”. I really liked how he laid out the five steps of the journey to a fully engaged social media program.

Conference thoughts: The place was packed with people but the space is not laid out very well – especially the registration. Before 9am there was an hour long wait for passes – the ops team blew that piece. I was there a bit early so missed the mass lines, but many folks missed the opening sessions.

I really enjoyed the range of topics: SEO, Social (lots), Mobile, Design, UX, Cloud – very cool

Sessions I attended with notes below:

• Sean O’Driscoll – Ant’s Eye View – Practitioner’s Guide to the Social Engagement Journey
• Vanessa Fox – Getting Out of the SEO Silo
• Dan Gerber – Pop – Camping Out – Setting the Foundation for Interactive Design
• Panel – Beyond the Hype: Social Media and Business 101 > social features to the enterprise
• Ben Elowitz – Wet Paint –  The Social Operating System

Sean O’Driscoll – Ant’s Eye View – Practitioner’s Guide to the Social Engagement Journey

• Educate large brands on how to integrate conversations into their workflow > how to be nice to your customers

• Where should you post your status graph – find

• Business strategy vs a twitter strategy or social media strategy or facebook strategy
• It’s not about being “on” or “off” the social web
• Are you a “fully engaged” enterprise > it is a journey defined by stages of operational maturity

• Five stages of the journey
• Traditional – listening to what people are saying, not engaged, conversation passing you by
• Experimental “the arrival of the mavericks” – someone reaches out to do something, entrepreneurial ins spirit
• Operational – someone is given budget and authority to create strategy, materials, hire > more in an influence role as a lot of contacts happen outside of the “marketing” group. Frustration about metrics starts to bubble up, what does an engagement metric look like? What does it look like?
• Measurable – start to track business impact, broken through functional silo’s, defined success/influencers identification/engagement strategy and approach. Strong orchestration.
• Fully Engaged – Everybody has the opportunity to take action in a clear way, with process and clear roles

• Pathways to the Engaged Enterprise
• People and Process – what is the strategy? Is it written down? Clear business objectives? Measurable goals against timeline, set initiatives, tactics – costs, timeline (one page – plan on page)
• Education – policy and guidelines are necessary, but not sufficient. Need to know and share the “how” and not just the “what”. Use a series of playbooks “how to do a Facebook contest” At Dell > only one way to do a Facebook contest and here are the two vendors –  prescriptive guidance is important as you pass education through the organization.
• Channels & Technology – balance the needs of the business, resourcing realities, and platform independencies. Do your tools just take a pulse (listening and monitoring) or are you effectively distributing the use and competency across the organization. Do you want more data or more insight. Insight > connect information to outcomes and routing to people that can do something about it.
• Insights and Analytics – How are your metrics comparative? I’ve got 200 likes – is that good? Contextualize your outputs based on your business, size, industry and competitors
• Activation and  Execution –  Start with an  insight, not an idea. Businesses that win build relationships Begin with advocates. Using the Agile Marketing Approach process to identify customer stories, tech/activities to solve, sprints to get there.  Working across teams in scrums.

• Tips from Sean
• Start with a customer need
• Executive buy-in is key
• Real results lie “between the seams” – between operational and organizational functions
• Look for early wins, set expectations
• Measure for impact
• Kotter: look for a case for urgency + create a coalition of resources that can support and execute
• Google+ is like a third sock. It may be a great sock, but I only have two legs. Kick ass on the legs you have.

Vanessa Fox – Getting Out of the SEO Silo

• Showed an example of Hasbah Tamadot website is all images > basic SEO tactics
• Getting the basics right important for big brands
• Search terms and researching happens from a lot of different angles and stages
• Who is your audience?
• What audiences search for
• What audiences talk about
• Market research, email open rates, on-site behavior, etc.

• How do you solve their problems?
• What information/content type will satisfy the general need

• The Personal Lifecyle – book for usability

• Business Objectives
• What is project goal?  What does success look like?
• What is brand objective? What lasting impression?
• What is value proposition? What makes you different?
• What are conversion events and engagement events? What makes you money?
• Who are key audiences?
• What motivates them?

• How do we solve peoples problems?
• Google correlate > correlated terms
• Discussion link > what are people talking about?

• Pick an event or audience > what are their key questions?
• What time does the SuperBowl site? Key audience in local market. Should be important text in the TV website

• Client impact ideas
• Review title tags, meta descriptions and destination pages for alignment of copy to expectations to website
• Persona’s – how can we grow this element of our services

Dan Gerber – Pop – Camping Out – Setting the Foundation for Interactive Design

• Camping is group and individual

• Camping is a process: packing, getting there, setup – camping = fun – take down, blue tarp for rain,

• Interactive designers – strive to create meaningful relationships between users and design
• More than wire frames

• IxD shoud be:
• Data-driven
• User-driven
• Goal-driven
• Idea-driven

• Step One – Embrace Discovery
• More than: order taking, check-box checking, creative brief (need more, need to dig in deep)
• Should explore: User motivations, behaviors + context, user empathy
• Is best with: success goals, experience KPIs, strategic concept + direction

• Step Two – Expand the Role
• Own the problem: build on data, tackle business goals with user goals, define success on and off the device > drill in to true user research and understanding
• Experience strategy: user research, behaviors + motivations + emotions +  propensities, UX discovery tools (analysis,  personas, journeys)

• Step Three – Own the Concept
• Strategy + Design: UX at core of the concept, concepting before + beyond the visual, strategy big + small

• Even some of our industry best practices ASSUME too much
• Different approaches are great, but need to dial in to project

• Example – Defining a mobile app concept – Seattle Sounders
• Challenge – design a club app, not a league app for mobile
• The team is important, but so is the experience at the game and what it means to be a sounders fan vs a specific player fan

• So how do we get to a concept?
• Concept Setup
• Adaptable research: internal brainstorming, 300 fan comments on facebook, fan survey, flickr audit, literary review, stadium shadowing, global app review, group audience interviews

• How do you know when you have enough to design something great?
• Driven by time/schedule?

• Sounders  PULSE – maintain pulse of fans throughout the engagement
• Fans wanted an app to drive engagement between the games
• Fans can follow the emotional state of the match and team – authentically
• “scarves up vs scarves down” poll result
• Contant, quick social connections to community + team
• Balance between club app v. fan app
• Use cases that play to fan contexts
• Streaming audio – stream games if not there – connect with those who can’t be there – 40 countries using streaming app
• Red card/yellow card – easter eggs, take advantage of emotion – shake app to make screen go yellow > swipe to go red

• When UX is involved in concepting, UX can guard the strategy throughout execution and delivery

• Challenges
• Multiple concept owners: some tension good/some is not, creating idea advocates – not consensus
• Keeps IxD’s away from prototyping: Builds other strengths, increases user empathy, tracks business goals
• New skills: stretches thinking from tactics to strategy, beyond comfort zone

• You comfort zone (happy place), where magic happens (outside of comfort zone)
• “setting up camp” can keep you away from wireframes but the results will be worth it!

Panel – Beyond the Hype: Social Media and Business 101 > social features to the enterprise

• Myth #1 – Build it and they will come
• If not solving a problem – won’t be adopted
• If not part of normal workflow – big effort to change behavior > facebook, email, search, webpages are current workflows
• Apply game theory to activities > I get the Outlook badge when certified on something > creates centers of expertise and is aspirational

• Myth #2 – Social Media is Facebook for the Enterprise
• You can’t just turn on a community and expect it to work
• TheLoop > slowly and selectively build communities
• Internal corporate social networks are much different than public networks like Facebook
• Colleagues vs friends > connect, collaborate, communicate
• Allow for profile creation, pictures, expertise

• Myth #3 – User Experience Does Matter
• If you have to do extensive communication on what this thing is and how to use it > it’s not useful
• SharePoint  > documents go there to die. Training for two years on how to use SharePoint, IT Learning Center at Eli Lilly is adopted much more quickly

• Myth #4 – Social Business is more efficient
• How can it be more efficient than email
• Can be more efficient under the right circumstances

• Myth #5 – Social business moves info faster
• The coming assault of activities feeds – Salesforce Chatter
• Must be relevant and not stashed into a folder

• Myth #6 – It’s all about the cloud
• Control via governance > what kind of information can be outside of firewall
• Permissions are critical > high, medium and low business impact > each level has it’s own governance impact

Ben Elowitz – Wet Paint –  The Social Operating System

• FatRain (1st startup), BlueNile (2nd startup), Wetpaint (3rd startup)

• Wetpaint – all media is becoming social – wiki service gets ~600million visitors per month (really?)

• Wetpaint  Entertainment – Fully Social
• 1.1 million fans > they see them on avg 30 times per month

• The consumer has changed
• 20% increase in media consumption
• The technology is with us all of the time
• We have changed in terms of how we
• 69% growth in time on Facebook in last year
• Rest of websites – down by 9% in last year
• Google is transactional, Facebook is long term relationship with your fans

• The big benefits of the social operating system (Social OS)/Social Networks
• For Consumers – Bring all of my data to me
• Relevance
• Personalization
• Accessibility
• Now
• For Publishers
• Audience data
• Virality
• Relationships
• Ongoing

• How to Win on the Social OS – 5 Steps to Know and Serve Your Audience
• Determine what it takes to win > what do WE get out of it
• Just having a bunch of facebook fans in and of themselves doesn’t help > we make the most money when people  come to my site and we serve advertising againt that impression.
• We get the most value when we get referrals (transfer now) and continuous relationships (transfer forever)
• We know that a comments is worth 2x to us than a Like
• Create a social laboratory
• Keep tinkering, keep testing, keep trying new things
• Co-founder lays out 100’s of ideas
• 700 data points per week on what is working or not
• Segment your audience
• 1.1 million fans > each one thinks of themselves as the most important person
• Wetpaint covers 25 different TV show channels > what content resonates with which segment the best
• Create Great Content
• Every post is part of a test: format, poll, statement, video, headlines, etc.
• How do you measure what the audience think about that?
• Test & Measure Everything
• Through testing and measuring > seeing audiences 30 times per month – up from 10 per month
• Add the wins to the playbook

• Facebook page is less powerful than the Facebook news feed

• Facebook traffic performs 1.9x better than traffic from Google
• True for content and Wetpaint

• Creation and Distribution of Content
• Editors need a ton of data to create great content
• Social media people need to be in charge of distributing it
• Separate the two functions

• Social TV
• 75% of activity happens on the 6 days outside of the show day
• Connecting to other people about the show, not to the show itself