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Social media, mobile, bar codes vie for attention at SXSW festival

By Harald Neidhardt

AUSTIN, TX ? Coming down to Austin in the middle of March is a great break from the usual trade shows, especially given the weather lately in New York, Europe or Silicon Valley.

Greeted by a refreshing 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius), Austin was kind to its regular and newbie visitors and reveals an upbeat, young and vivid scene of creativity.

The SXSW (South-by-South-West, or ?South-by? for the regulars) festival for interactivity was started 13 years ago ? added to the foremost music and film festival founded 24 years ago.

This year, an estimated 14.000 people flocked to Austin for a long weekend with a conference program running from Friday to Tuesday in the Austin Convention Center, plus adjacent hotels and music venues.

Social media was the overarching umbrella and examined in lots of parallel tracks of panels and keynotes. Lots of online and mobile companies? CEOs and founders were present and shared their visions and new product releases on stage with their peers.

Is Twitter old school?
Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@ev) officially announced the highly anticipated Twitter ad platform in a chat on stage by with Omair Haigue (@omar), who is the head of the Havas Media Lab. That did not go well with the real-time twitter community in the ballroom and the additionally set up simulcast room ? many left early.

The @anywhere named ad platform was presented with a short video and with underwhelming features. It does make life easier for publishers and authors to set up ?follow me? buttons on Web sites that we know already from Facebook.

In addition, a keyword feature has been introduced, where Web sites can set up links to Twitter accounts of editors, brands or trending topics.

There was no involvement of any big brand marketers presented ? only some known publishers that will set these links up on their side. Those include The New York Times, CNN, Yahoo and The Huffington Post.
There was no mobile screen and no mobile marketing initiative present, other than the availability of location published with every tweet. Still, within the hour, 2,500 people signed up to follow @anywhere.

A much more energetic keynote was presented by New York Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee and author of ?Crush it?) as he emphasized heavily that brands need to open up and engage via Twitter and social media with their target group and have authentic conversations.

?Every meaningful conversation will lead to sales and a loyal brand community,? he said.

When he said ?Big brands don?t get it,? a marketing person from Procter & Gamble Co. protested heavily. But Mr. Vaynerchuk made clear that hiring agencies to do the dialogue might not be the ideal way, but sometimes necessary.

Training in-house teams to get involved on all levels will make big companies fitter for a much more educated and knowledgeable customer base, with a clear ?bull---t detector? to filter out plain marketing messages from meaningful invitations to engage and provide feedback.

Geo apps ? the cool kids on the block
As anticipated, the new rock stars of mobile location-based applications made a big splash and were working the panels and presentations: New York-based foursquare and Austin?s Gowalla. They even went head-to-head in party mode on Monday night, outdoing their rivals with bigger, better events.

The 13th annual SXSW Web Awards, sponsored by Adobe, rewarded Gowalla over Fourquare.

Foursquare founder NN spoke on a panel and emphasized that mobile advertising in geo-applications is happening and evolving into local offers and targeted values to people checking into a new location ? for example, restaurants, businesses or event venues.

Businesses can profit from the micro-feeds of the foursquare crowd through viral marketing as word of mouth is getting blended with conversational, branded messages.

A new start-up entered the fray with an official launch at SXSW: stickybits, based in New York and founded by Seth Goldstein.

@seth is a pioneer in social media in the online space and the founder and chairman of Social Media Inc., one of the fastest-growing ad platforms for the Facebook platform.

Now, Mr. Goldstein is at it in the mobile space: stickybits (http://www.stickybits.com) is a crossover of foursquare and flickr ? all around mobile bar codes.

The interesting concept got off to a great start as SXSW visitors added comments, pictures and videos to provided bar code stickers attached to nametags and products such as Coca-Cola cans and energy bars.

Big brands play with social media
In a big local presence, some big brands came out to Austin and engaged in branded conversations with their audience and the local community of the festival.

Pepsi organized a clever initiative that invited the people to vote for one of three charities, with tweeting about the selected initiative by a specific hashtag.

Refresh Pepsi (http://www.refresheverything.com) provided the ?Refresh Zeitgeist? (http://pepsicozeitgeist.com) on lots of flat screens locally and online to show what is going on locally. It included maps of happening locations, quotes and tweets that related to SXSW and the campaign.

The Pepsi Refresh Project is a groundbreaking effort to foster innovation in social good, and will award more than $20 million this year to fund great ideas that ?refresh the world.?

Other brands on-site included Miller Light, AOL, General Motors and Microsoft. The expo floor had a focus mainly on tools for creativity and was a showcase of new startups and creative agencies to display their product or service.

Telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent (http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/application_enablement/ ) featured a developer and publisher lounge to present a solution of total access open API bundles.

The set of technologies enables developers to speedily monetize services provided by wireless carriers -- including advertising, virtual goods, anonymous demographic data and text messaging ? within their application. Smaato was selected to be the mobile ad platform for the launch. Other partners included Motally for analytics and Billing Revolution for payments.

Lessons from this festival
Spending a few days in the atmosphere of this bustling college town with all the startup and social media energy, one can only wonder how fast the mobile marketing train is coming out of the gates.

This hotbed of alpha geeks, leading bloggers and influencers of old-school media is the breeding ground for a new generation of creative ideas and discerning audiences that no longer just want to be ?target groups.?

If mobile marketers want to stand out from the crowd and find engaging consumers that can spread the word about new products and services, then brands need to start digging deeper into new formats of mobile engagement and messaging.

Please click here to view more pictures from SXSW

Harald Neidhardt is cofounder and chief marketing officer of Smaato Inc., Hamburg, Germany. Reach him at .