Panel Discussion Participants:
- Lane Becker (Get Satisfaction & Adaptive Path)
- Christina Halvorson (Brain Traffic)
- Byron (Bike Hugger & Texterior Design)
- Omet Gupta (Photojojo & Jelly)
“Being interesting isn’t about being uniquely interesting for uniqueness’ sake.”
From Randy’s series “I Like Your Face”: Do Epic Shit
This is an interactive panel, as they are using Twitter to get the crowd to ask the panel questions—kind of neat in theory.
The host—who comes off as a smooth-talking marketing choch—is basically jacking Threadless’ presentation from SEED, talking about how they use the words “awesome” and “cool” in their graphs rather than marketing speak.
- Apprentice yourself to great work (meaning: get to know people’s work and learn what you can from it).
- Go long. We have no attention span with what we are doing. We make no long term provision for what happens when we want to end our projects—what happens to the data? All of the coolest things have usually come from.
- Share. Share your work, take care of the people that are involved in your projects: users, people that work with/for you.
Growth is all about doing the small things right. What are the little things that you can do that have huge benefits? “Delicious details” in creative writing.
Celebrate what you do—aggregate all of your content (Flickr, YouTube, Blogs, etc) into one place maybe. Not necessarily asking for the world’s spotlight, but it helps to build your brand—who you are, what you are doing, that you are having a damn good time doing it, etc. This helps you find like-minded people and getting everyone together to geek out about your common interests.
Get Satisfaction is a site that connects customers to employees of the company.
Lane mentioned a really rad term “shared cultural objects”—we connect with our friends about objects (Dude, what do you think of your iPhone?, How about the new [enter xbox360 game here]?). People are happy to spend time online connecting and communicating about these shared cultural objects, leaving reviews etc.
Photojojo is an experiment that creates a photo newsletter twice a week. Then it turned into them seeing cool things out somewhere, and then selling them on their site. Then it turned into urban photo safaris, where a ton of people just got together and went around taking pictures of things.
(This panel so far is mostly marketing plug after marketing plug… *yawnnnnnnnnn*) Okay, I’m going to just forget about the play-by-plays for the duration of this panel because a lot of these ideas seem kind of irrelevant and self-promoting—let’s just pull out the good snippets:
The Recipe of sustained awesomeness: “do epic shit regularly”
Christina Halvorson: “Stay focused on why you started this, remember what you love about it, and this will help you keep it going, it will give you the courage to keep doing it and keep being awesome”
Goddamn, the host just keeps bringing up Jeffrey from Threadless EVERY SINGLE TIME HE SPEAKS. Could they not afford to bring Jeffrey in, was he booked? I’ve seen him present—which was awesome—but I feel like I’m listening to someone tell me the plot of a movie I’ve already seen.
Christina Halvorson: “Talk to people like they are human beings. No one wants to read a pile of crappy over-written content. This brings the human to what has been traditionally dominated by robots.”
Lane Becker: “Treating a person as a transaction dehumanizes people into numbers, whereas it should be viewed as more of a long-term relationship.”
Christina Halvorson: “Brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer. The time of ‘one-way communication’ of brands is over’, you cannot tell a customer what you want them to think anymore—it is now more of a two-way communication.”
Byron: “We’ve become our own client—we answer to ourselves.”
(They keep talking about some Tide thing in Cincinnati that I’m not privvy to—must read up on it so that I can make sense of all of the references.)
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