Music Conference Begins

Call me a glutton for punishment...the Interactive Conference concluded on Tuesday, but I was back at the Convention Center on Wed. for the opening of the Music portion. Two panels peaked my interest. The Best Online Resources for Musicians included a power panel of social media execs, folks from MySpace, SonicBids, YouTube, Bebo, Last.fm, and iLike. Brad King, who teaches at Northern Kentucky University was the moderator. This is fascinating to me, both from a teaching perspective, and because many of my friends are musicians looking to use these tools to advance their careers.

Brad King plays talk show host and takes questions from the audience.

The SonicBids person (Panos Panay) was particularly eloquent in saying that its not just the music business that musicians must understand, it is also the online business. In a new band, he recommended that someone in the group be designated as in charge of learning all there is to know about online options.



The panel discussed the concept of "life streaming," which is not the same as live streaming. It's about engaging the social media community to promote your band, your fans can do it for you, if you just give them the tools.



And, I thought it was quite important that the panel discussed the positive opportunities that this environment now provides, downplaying all the negativity about free music. There's more than one track that a musical act can take now. Getting signed by a giant label was very lucrative, but only available to a few. Now musicians can take their careers down a variety of tracks. It reminds me of how in Austin, people can be working musicians, because there's an infrastructure here that supports it. Some of them may never be massively famous, some of them don't even want that, but they can pursue their passion for music as a career. Now, those opportunities are broader.

The next panel featured Rob Glaser of RealNetworks, who also owns Rhapsody, the digital music service, interviewed by Tamara Conniff of Billboard. RealNetworks has been around since 1994, pioneers in the music player and streaming environment. I think the most interesting aspect of this presentation was his description of the three models for digital music and his prediction that they will coexist.

• Free Streaming with advertising
• Subscription
• Pay

My take, however, is that he missed some of the opportunity described by the previous panel. When talking about the need some people have to express themselves via their music libraries of book collections, the new way to do that will be via a social networking site, like Facebook or a music delivery site like Last.fm, that allows you to create an identity via the pop culture in which you engage. It an be fluctuating and dynamic, but all your friends can see with what you are most currently engaging. So, I think he missed the social aspect of the engagement.

Then, it was out to hear some music. I'll be moving my music experiences to my personal blog at cindyroyal.blogspot.com, so be sure to drop by if you are interested my rock adventures.

Closing Thought: Flawed McGonigal

You may want to catch up on the Dr. Jane McGonigal talk before reading this.

I want to start by saying I hold a great deal of respect for Dr. McGonigal, her passion, and her drive. However, I believe her premise as stated at SXSW contains fundamental flaws.

She believes that ARG's should exist to provide a gaming environment over our life that creates a sense of happiness (read accomplishment or self-actualization) by allowing us to 'know the rules.' We get points for doing the designed tasks and achievements. Basically, she contends that life is unfair, many of us are 'bad' at it, and that by having gaming rules overlaid upon our life all this will change. Game designers can design you into happiness.

That's great if you're a designer.

However, I hope people will think twice, three times, and more about handing over their sense of worth to any designer, no matter how talented and benevolent. No one knows what you want more than yourself. Generalized metrics can help point our way, but surrendering our sense of self to an automated construct that restricts our ability to customize individual modes and measurements of success isn't one step removed from tyranny, it is tyranny.

And dismissing corporations as only the money people that allow designers to create whatever they want is foolishness. I think we can confidently accept that the company funding the project also gets a say in the rules and thus gets to make the rules we must then play by.

So if you want to make life a game, you better first make damn sure you like the process of design that creates the game. If it isn't democratic and wholly responsive to the voice of the gamers, count me out. I can make up my own rules and live up to them just fine.

I'll be quite happy doing so.

Podcasts!

Podcasts of SXSWi panels and keynotes are now available, so y'all can hear ones you may have missed.

Wrap Up and Kudos

Pictured above, Dee and Jon chat live during Jane McGonigal's session. Read the full transcript.

Although this is likely not the final post, I'd like to do my wrap up by thanking all the students who worked so hard during this exercise. They gave up part of their Spring Break to participate, and I hope they all found it enriching. This was really the best of both worlds, a fun experience where a good bit of learning occurred. There was networking, confirmation of knowledge, introduction to new topics... good times.

I am deeply impressed with the professionalism and creativity in which this project was approached. We were able to cover the conference with unique breadth and depth, from a students' perspective. Using computer, basic digital camera, and/or handheld low-end camcorder, we have been able to create a vast amount of interesting and engaging content, over 120 posts!

I'd say it's been a success, and I hope to be able to continue again next year. Thanks to SXSW for providing the access and for being super accommodating. I'm still reeling from it all!

Student Blog Producers:
Cooper Cherry
Theresa Fore
Philip Hadley
Dee Kapila
Jac Malloy
Fazia Rizvi
Marc Speir
Anna Tauzin
Michael Trice
Chris Troutman
Sunday Udoetok
Jon Zmikly

Thanks for all your hard work! Enjoy the rest of Spring Break. Stay tuned to this blog. In a few days, I'll have Behind the Blog: The Movie.

Considerations for Scalable Web Ventures

I went to this panel, frankly, because Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, was on it. I've been a fan since his TechTV days. But, he was just the moderator of this panel. He was supported by Joe Stump, his lead architect from Digg. Other panelists were Chris Lea from Media Temple, Cal Henderson from Flickr (official title is Badass MC), and Matt Mullenweg from WordPress.

This is not really my area, but I like to attend a few of these developer/networking panels, just for the exposure to the issues. In a nutshell, they discussed what happens when your traffic explodes...how do you handle it and the new features that are being deployed in Web 2.0? They talked about things like load balances and the limits of open source. They talked about MySQL databases and storage issues. They also discussed a few organizational issues - like organize a strong team and do good documentation of code.

Cal from Flickr was particularly funny, as he frequently noted that at Flickr, they serve a good amount of photos (understatement). And, I'm going to steal his answer to the person who asked where he could find more resources on this topic....Ummm...Google.

Lunch Break on Tuesday

Dee, Jac, and Chris grab a bite before heading into the final stretch on Tuesday.

Tuesday Morning

On the last day of the Interactive, I am beginning to feel a bit wistful about the conclusion. I'm exhausted, yet sad to see it go. I must make the most of it! The first two sessions of the day, that I attended with former student and current employee Jordan Viator, were some of the best of the week.

Future of Corporate Blogs
The first session on the Future of Corporate Blogs, was fascinating in that it had panelist representation from some of the places with the most experience in this area. Mario Sundar, the Community Evangelist (yes, that's his title) at LinkedIn and Lionel Menchaca of Dell had the most interesting things to reveal. They spoke about the usage of comments and the difficulties in measuring success. The key to both was in the ways they articulate the power of the community. You need to be where they are, instead of trying to force the community to you, whether it be a blog, or Facebook, or Twitter or something else. And, they felt you needed to send employees in to these communities to engage. Wow, how different is that from a few years ago, when companies were concerned about employees wasting time in these spaces.

Menchaca from Dell said that the keys to success are listening, analyzing, and then taking action. He said a couple of times that he felt "blessed" to have the support at the top of his organization from Michael Dell, but that the culture throughout the organization must embrace the value of these activities. If you don't affect the culture, your job is only half complete. Another thing that I found interesting was his mantra "Get it off email," basically saying that these email threads are not as effective as going to a community in another forum.

LinkedIn articulated three goals: user education; product demos; and feature benefits.

Some additional resources can be found at http://del.icio.us/kamichat/sxsw2008

Peas in a Pod: Advertising, Monetization, and Social Media


I liked this one because it had the guy from Ask a Ninja on it, Kent Nichols. He keeps it real. The other panelists were Tim Kendall from Facebook, Ellen McGirt from Fast Company, and Seth Goldstein from Socialmedia Networks. There was a bit of disagreement, because the Facebook and Socialmedia guys were all about getting users to organically engage with products and services that would be displayed as advertising, a word-of-mouth strategy, just online. Ninja has short pre-rolls on their online videos, and they have mega page views, so it's working for them. But, their strategy is unique in that they can mention products in the pre-roll, usually funny, by the Ninja. It's part of the entertainment. It's not that easy for everyone, and only certain products would want to be associated like that. Ninja grosses about $100k/month in advertising, licensing, and merchandise. Not bad...

Goldstein from Socialmedia said to always provide context for users and allow them to easily invite friends to do things (in a not too spammy sort of way). The apps are the big driver on Facebook, and opening up the development and the sharing of revenue is the key to their strategy.

An example of good and bad context: feeding TechCrunch articles to your page vs. seeing how your friends were reading and commenting on specific TechCrunch articles.

One takeaway: for social media, metrics are hard. OK, they've always been hard. I'm still amazed that online advertisers are still fixated on click throughs. That is a much higher expectation than we have for any other form of advertising. And, anyway, read Convergence Culture. It's not even about exposure, it's about association and usually in The Long Tail.

Someone used the term "peerfluence," sorry I can't attribute, but that's a term to mean being influenced to do something based on what others you trust or know have done. That seems to be what these sites are banking on, and how they execute on this will define success.

An audience member asked about whether or not this was the "Amway-itization" of social media, the use of what the were calling "social ads." I had never heard it put that way before, but I think it is valid. Do I really want to be constantly barraged by what my friends are doing and how awesome it all is? Panelists agreed, and responded that these strategies work best for things like music and movies, things people already share, not so much with consumer products, like toothpaste. Those guys need to figure out something else. Try Convergence Culture... But, they said that social ads have about 2-4 times higher click through rates than regular ads.

And one final interesting comment, and this was alluded by Mark Z. Kendall said that in 2007 Facebook's strategy was about deep engagement with the platform. In 2008, it's all about seamless integration across the Web (can you say Open Social?).


Ninja at the Web Awards on Sunday night.